Aperture Unable to handle large scans

Question

I am feeling quite frustrated by Apple on this program, Aperture. I have many large scans of my negatives, between 230 megs to 500 megs. When I bought Aperture I was assured by the Apple representative that I would be able to work with these images without a problem. It turns out that Aperture is unable to open any of them, and is unable to let me open these files with an external editor such as Adobe Photoshop.
Has anyone else had this problem? Does anyone have any advice on how to solve this? Thanks.
G5 imac   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

Given that it's a CMYK scan I think that's your whole problem. Aperture really cannot take that well.
The way to tell Aperture not to make a copy on external edit is a little complex right now, but here goes...
Go into the Aperture library with Finder - right click on the library itself, and select "Show package contents".
You'll see your projects in here as files. Do the same thing (show package contents) to the project your file is in.
Now you'll see some files and some import directories. Find the import directory that has a directory with the name of the master file and go in there, find a file ending with the extension ".apfile" that should start with the name of your master.
Double click on that, and "Property List Editor" opens. Open the "Root" triangle and then look for an option called "isExternallyEditable". Click on the "No" and you can change it to "Yes". Save and exit.
You are not quite done yet though! Now, re-open Aperture and have it rebuild the library - hold down "Alt-Cmd" when you click on Aperture in the dock and say "yes I want to rebuild my library". It will rebuild the whole thing.
Now if you go to your image and say "Open in external editor" it will not create a new version. However any use of the adjustments in Aperture itself (like color or cropping or rotation) WILL create a new copied version, where they would not have before. That is because Aperture refuses to permanently store Aperture changes in any kind of master file so it has to make a new version to hold them in order to keep your master editable.
If you want an easier approach consider this - if you want to Photoshop an Aperture TIFF version without Aperture making a new copy, you can also go into the library as described above, and simply open the stored master file directly in Photoshop, saving changes when you are done. This gives you the best of both worlds as you can adjust color or do crops and rotation in Aperture where you get that for "free" (no copies taking up space), while you can do any substantial clone or other more complex work in Photoshop to spruce up the master, as it were. You may have to restart Aperture to see the change take effect once you have saved over the old master, but then all versions you have created based on that master instantly hold Photoshop alterations. If you find yourself doing this often you can create a shortcut for that import group or other folders in a project either in the finder sidebar or the desktop. Or, you can also create a smart folder that holds all TIFF's in a project to work on directly.
I have to import 16-bit TIFF's into Aperture today because my RAW format is not supported, and I sometimes take this route if an image needs clone work the Spot/Patch tool cannot handle (or is too cumbersome to perform as you can actually do very complex clone work in Aperture if you are patient and careful).