Aperture and Pentax istDL

Question

I am disappointed that aperture does not support Pentax istDL raw images. There are no warnings regarding raw images support on the box. After purchasing the camera, I was looking forward to working with raw images and aperture was the recommended program. Since aperture does not support Pentax raw images, how can I continue to use aperture program, since the program cannot be returned? Is there an upgrade available to allow me to use this EXPENSIVE program with my camera?? I someone has a solution to my problem, please let me know.

Answer 1

Björn,
congratulations on your G5 (I hope you didn't buy one with the dreaded nVidia 6600 graphics card - from what I read here in the forum, that card makes Aperture real slow).
As Aperture costs money while iPhoto comes free, you might think about not using Aperture but rather iPhoto. Here's my 2 cents on this subject.
iPhoto is great if:
you want to maintain your JPGs, sort them into various albums, print books, view slide shows, and perform some basic image editing on them.
Aperture is great if:
you want to maintain your JPGs and RAWs, sort them into various projects (and within those, into Albums), need to quickly and comfortably assign various keywords (from different keyword sets!) to them so you can easily find them later, and perform some basic image editing on them.
Frankly, if you work with JPGs only, the only advantage (albeit it can be a huge one) is that Aperture allows you projects and albums, and makes keyword assignment and photo finding and evaluation real easy.
I'm certainly not a pro, but I do prefer the accuracy of the Pentax' RAWfiles over its JPGs, and I always shoot RAW, even though it takes up a lot more space in the camera's card (and my hard disk). Best is if you try this out yourself, using the provided software (I hope that Samsung actually does provide Mac software; if not, there are various RAW converters out there, most of which come with a trial version, and some of which are free).
Here's how to try:
Take a long shot of the street you live in, preferably including the pavement. Do this once with the camera set to JPG and once with the camera set to RAW.
Process the RAW file and then compare it side-by-side with the JPG. Note at which distance from the point where the photo was taken the street pavement will become blurred. This will be way closer to you in the JPG than in the RAW file.
Somebody somewhere compared digital photos and film. He (or she) said that taking shots in JPG is similar to working with slide film - once the picture was taken, you can't change that much of it to correct for color calibration, low or high light, etc. With RAW files, you have a lot more room for post processing.
Kind regards,
Karl