Aperture vs Photoshop

Hi,
My wife is new to digital photography and I bought her Aperture as a present. She is enjoying using, but when she speaks to other people on different forums, at the printers and on her course all she hears is, she should use Photoshop. I really don't want her to have to learn photoshop when Aperture seems so easy.
From what I have seen of Aperture I think it is great and as a version 1 you can see it has all the potential the Final Cut become. What do others think?
Will all these Photoshop people jump at Lightroom and then understand what an Aperture type application brings. I like the way Aperture protects my wife from messing up her original by making versions.
I am interested in what others have to say.
Best wishes
Michael

I totally understand your position. The reasons to use one product over another in this case might not always be because you need different levels of complexity or control in fixing your photos.
If you're shooting digital and you're shooting RAW, you need to convert that RAW data into an image. Aperture will do this for you. Photoshop will do this for you. You will probably also need to adjust things like sharpness and white balance, due to the nature of the file format. This has nothing to do with the quality or composition of your shot -- it's just a part of dealing with the digital format of your image.
You might find Aperture has completely satisfying results. If so, great. No need to worry about Photoshop.
You might find that Photoshop's RAW image converter has more desirable results for you, or that the level of control you have in Photoshop means that you feel you preserve the look/quality of your original image better than with Aperture.
You can download a trial version of Photoshop CS2 and see how you feel about it. You might find that it just isn't worth the learning curve. The great thing about using a versioning system is that your original image remains untouched, which means that down the road, if better products come out to accomplish what you need to accomplish, you can take those original images with you and update your library. There is no harm in waiting.
But the purpose of Photoshop cannot be summed up as "a repair tool for lousy photos". It does much more or much less than that, depending on how it's used.

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