Why I like Aperture

Question

I need to preface this by saying that no application is perfect for everyone. Different people have different workflows, different post-processing needs, and different priorities. I'm not saying Aperture is perfect for everyone. Nor should anyone else say Aperture is useless. It may be useless to them, but not to everyone.
I shoot mostly fashion and advertising type work. I'm a pretty serious amateur, in that I have good gear, and I'm very serious about photography, but I have a day job doing something else (security architecture, which I also love). I shoot only RAW as it gives me way more latitude if I want to adjust the exposure after the fact to change or increase a look (i.e. I want to make things darker and moodier, or I want to blow things out a little). My post-processing requirements are usually the following (in order of frequency): Exposure, white point, saturation, sharpening, levels, blemish fixing. On very rare occasion I'll need to do something beyond that.
My pre-Aperture workflow looked a lot like this:
Copy files from CF card. Due to my camera putting them in different folders based on the sequence, I had to write an automator script to pull out just the image files from all the folders and put them in a new folder on my desktop. This works, but takes a little while, and is something I had to write myself.
Create a folder for my project "Sarah-DarkWear hoodie".
Create the following folders inside that: "raws", "all-jpeg", "best-psd", "best-jpeg". Move all the RAWs from my automator action's results folder into the raws folder.
Open up Adobe CS2 Bridge. View the files. Try to pick the best ones. I can't emphasize enough how laborious and time consuming this task is. Out of 200 shots, about 20 are really good, and about 5 are worth using (in a portfolio or ad or whatever). Bridge has no way to compare two pictures other than switching back and forth between them. You also can't see the pictures at 100% so figuring out sharpness or focus is pretty impossible unless you open them up in Photoshop. Which requires a multi-dialog process and a conversion time.
Once I get my 20 good ones, batch convert them all to PSDs using an action I wrote. This takes a while. The PSDs go into the "best-psds" folder. They each take up about 40-70 MB of space vs. 3-6 MB for each RAW file.
Make the levels, saturation, sharpness adjustments as needed with each file. Using another action I wrote, batch convert the best PSDs to full rez jpegs with my copyright notice on them. As this action involves opening a 70 MB file, creating a new layer for my copyright, setting it up, converting to srgb, converting to 8bit, saving as jpeg, this takes a while. Several seconds each file on my dual 2.5 with 2.5 GB ram.
Using another action I wrote, batch covert all the RAWs to small rez jpegs with my copyright notice on them. These are for the model if it's a tfcd shoot, or for my records, or whatever. This takes a good long while. Now my 1 GB of raws are about 2.3 GB of raws, jpegs, psds.
Open up iView Media pro and update it's index so that all my new files are in it.
Done.
With Aperture, I put my card in the reader.
Aperture pops up and asks if I'd like to import these images. I pick a destination, specify the metadata and keywords for this shoot, and it loads them all in.
I turn on auto-stack. I make a few manual stacking adjustments. I start picking the best shoots. Aperture has excellent compare modes, including 2-up, 3-up, more-up, full rez zoom, a loupe tool for instantly checking focus at full resolution, a 0-5 star rating system, a quick-select key for picking an image as five star, a quick-reject key for an image I know is junk. Within in a stack I can promote, demote, and pick the stack "pick" very quickly and easily. I can do this with just the keyboard. I can easily compare any pictures next to each other. I can go full screen with drops off all the unneeded junk and keeps the various window and toolbar colors for interfering with my vision on my color calibrated display. Picking the best shots is amazingly faster and less frustrating due to the features mentioned above.
I can now make my adjustments (exposure, levels, brightness, saturation, shadows, highlights, spot and patch blemish fixing, red eye, etc...., and then can apply them to all the other similar condition pictures. (In Photoshop/Bridge you can batch apply things like white point and exposure changes, but you can't do saturation, sharpness, etc...). My adjustments go into a 24kb xml file, instead of a 70 MB psd. Each adjustment can be turned on or off, removed, modified, etc... I can instantly create different version of an image. I might want a crop to zoom in on the model's face, or I might want a black and white version, etc... The versions are just a tiny amount of data in the xml file. In photoshop I'd need a new 70 MB psd for each version I wanted.
Once I'm all done getting the images rated and adjusted the way I want them, I can at any time use the export function to generate the jpegs. Since the copyright is a watermark layer and is rendered by Core Image in my video card, the export is about 10X faster than the Photoshop batch action processing. I haven't timed the two side by side, but I will. It's about 10X or so faster though. For me.
Done.
I just converted my 70 GB working library into Aperture over the weekend. I was able to duplicate my photoshop adjustments in Aperture and drop my psds. This took my 70 GB lib to 35.5 GB. That's about half the size.
So for me, and my workflow, and my post-processing requirements, Aperture is faster, uses less hard drive space, is easier to use, and does a great job. It will pay for itself during the first shoot's sorting and post-processing.
There have been reports of the RAW conversion not doing as good a job as Adobe's. It turns out many of those people bringing that up left the default sharpening turned on in Adobe. Since raw files, at least Canon raws, pretty much always need sharpening and a small saturation boots, comparing a converted raw to a converted raw with sharpening will clearly show the one with sharpening looks better. So most of them aren't valid tests. There may be some real issues with Apple's image handling vs. Adobe's. Hopefully if there are, Apple will fix them. My personal experience is that the raw conversion looks pretty much the same to me as Adobe's non-sharpened conversion. I've found that Apple's noise-reduction looks better than Adobe's or Fred Miranda's action. I've found that it takes me less time to get a look I like in Aperture than in Adobe. I've found that my workflow is vastly quicker. To me it is an amazing program that will only get better with each revision.
Devon
2X2.5 GHz w/2.5 GB + 2X2.3 GHz w/4.5 GB + 17"pb   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

I have used Aperture quite extensively over the weekend and I also see a lot of potential. I also see the typical amount of bugs for a first release of a software of this complexity and I also see a few software architecture problems.
What did I do with Aperture so far?
First I have imported a few 70MB Tiff scans. Probably less than hundred and played around with it. Rated them, defined some searches, added some keyword hierarchies, tried some image manipulations, created a light table, printed the light table to pdf, created a book and created some example web pages. I played also with the fullscreen mode.
There were a few user interface glitches: The light table sometimes has problems with selections. Creating a query takes too long since it tries to update live. I can't seem to create a book with a light table visible at the same time. While entering a query I clicked on a triangle to open a folder - Aperture didn't like that. And some more.
Lots of stuff worked fine. Some (like the book designer) didn't have enough features. Some features I did understand after some time.
Now I copied my Aperture library to an external firewire disk. The disk is a fast RAID 0 disk connected via firewire 800.
Next I loaded my iPhoto library into Aperture. Something like 17000 photos. This took a few (five?) hours and went without any problem. I got a few hundred projects - I would like to join some of them. I created a query to get the iPhoto edited photos (1900 photos) and removed them. This took about ten minutes. Next I created some queries. No problems with that. Speed is okay on the Powermac.
Next I did some film scans with Nikon Scan and imported them (hundred maybe) large TIFFs into Aperture in small batches.
Then I imported probably hundred RAW images from my Canon EOS 350d. I tried the raw import patch mentioned somewhere else to get Mac OS X 10.4.3 to recognize. This worked fine. (I later tried another method which I cannot mention here, but that worked also fine.)
So currently my Aperture library is about 55 GB.
I never like the rendering of iPhoto too much. Often I used Graphicconverter to view, scale, batch convert, ... Graphicconverter also has quite a good (IMHO) rendering of images. So I was a bit sceptical about Aperture's rendering, but actually I don't have a problem with its on-screen rendering. I kind of like it. I haven't tried to print yet, though.
I also have Photoshop Elements, though I don't use it very much. GraphicConverter is used though. I also have the Canon tools which I also don't use much. I use the scan application sometimes. For the Filmscanner I use Nikon Scan which is okay. For my taste the Aperture application looks & feels better than those - though I'm not a big fan of an all-grey interface (which may have some advantages with being more neutral).
So I had a few crashes (two maybe) and had to force Aperture to quit (three times maybe). But I didn't seem to have lost any data and Aperture started quickly again. Sometimes I restarted Aperture when it acted strangely (like didn't want to provide a working crop tool - maybe four times).
So, would I buy it again? Yes, without a doubt. It's lots of fun... Can't wait to show my friends Aperture loaded with some of the scans I did over the weekend.
Regards,
Rainer Joswig
PowerMac Dual G5, 2.5Ghz, 4GB RAM, 22" Cinema Display, Canon 350d + Canon s80 + Nikon Coolscan IV ED   Mac OS X (10.4.3)