A bit more pondering...

Question

Here's a reply from a previous post of mine that has now been locked.
"Well it does (and not so well). You can export files to any output color space meaning any CMYK profile you have installed on your Mac. Not different from Photoshop expect you have NO control over rendering intent, you don’t have half the necessary soft proof options, the sharpening isn’t very useful and you end up with a file sized at 72ppi. IOW, Aperture tries to do some prepress work (it involves itself with CMYK) but does it in a crippled way compared to Photoshop. So unless I’m misunderstanding your definition of “prepress”, Aperture is making the attempt but not in a very robust way.
If that were not the case, they would only allow rendering and encoding into a few RGB working spaces like Adobe Camera RAW (something based on the above comments they probably should have done)."
OK... here's my rant...
Leave the prepress work to Illustrator, InDesign or Quark. Have you ever delivered a Photoshop file to a professional print shop and have the technician/craftsman scream at you. I'm sure all those print pros just loved it when all the advertising agencies, magazines, graphic design firms fired or laid off their prepress/production artists and dumped all that work on to us photographers!
I can just hear those ad execs saying... "Hey look, photographers use Photoshop, let's make them do all the work! We'll save money by laying off whole departments of people, and hey... ya' know, those photographers won't charge us for the extra work we're gonna make them do! Yippee... free money!"
The print shop pros just shook their heads, broke out the bottles of whiskey and cringed every time we walked into their doors and begged them to give us an education on how to set up digital files for offset printing.
End of rant...
What Aperture should do and does, is offer us a way to print our images and by far (this is a big assumption I'm making) most of us print to ink-jet or some sort of direct digital print made at a professional photolab. These prints are made from RGB files, not CMYK files.
As far as the 72ppi export, who cares what your ppi is. As long as you don't change the pixel dimension, you can make the ppi anything you want. Why did Apple choose 72ppi, who knows, only they do and it doesn't matter.
Ranting about to begin again....
My whole point is that Photoshop is the real crippled application here. And I hope that Aperture doesn't become one also. Why does Adobe give me kerning in Photoshop? Huh... really why do I need kerning in Photoshop? Why does Photoshop allow me to choose how to set up a block of text in a paragraph and allow me to center it, justify it right or left. Why do I need to have a pen tool to allow me to make paths and cut out a portion of the image and paste it into/onto another image? A slice tool? An extract tool, swatches... oh yeah... gotta love those! All those prepress/production tools... man I tell you, they really help me run my business of taking pictures and moving them out the door to make room for the next client coming tomorrow morning. Boy and how!
Some time ago, in about 1993 or 1994 when Photoshop was a 3.0, a little company put out a nifty little Photoshop plugin called... Collage? (I think that was the name, if I'm wrong, will someone please correct me) This plugin allowed Photoshop to have layers and you could in a very real sense create excellent composites in a very easy manner. The first person who told me about this was a graphic designer, not a photographer, and he was unbelievably excited about this! Adobe soon released Photoshop 3.5 with built in layers and the entire commercial art industry went bananas! Everyone loved it, still loves it and I do too!
So Adobe started building Photoshop to play nice with art directors and graphic designers. And it still plays nice with photographers too. But don't you just wish that Adobe could've made Photoshop just for us photographers. You can't blame them, they gave us what the market asked for. And to be honest... the digital photography revolution didn't really start until just a few years ago. How could they have know this 10, 12 or ahhh... 3 years ago when we were all still shooting film.
So... again I believe that Aperture is one of the first attempts at creating a complete digital photography workflow solution and I believe that Apple has truly done their homework, paid attention to the way most of us work and given us a product that truly shines.
PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5Ghz   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   4.5GB RAM, Nvidia 7800 GT, 600GB RAID

Answer 1

Robert,
I think Aperture is pretty incredible for wedding work! It's not perfect but it's the best I've used for my workflow and my camera/shooting style are apparently well suited to its RAW processing.
Sam