Contact Sheets / Proofing and useful Aperture RAW Conversion

Question

All,
I wanted to appeal to all of you pro photographers out there to share about how you handle the proofing stage (contact sheets) with your clients. I'm curious about how you all make this process as efficient as possible.
Ok, say you have taken 1000 pictures for a wedding or some other event (forget the accuracy of that number, its just a round number for discussion sake). You need to present your photos to your client, but you need to present a subset of the 1000 photos for a few reasons:
1) Not all photos you are going to take are going to be great. I've heard a general quote by some pro photographers that their "keeper ratios" (the percentage of pics that are really good from a shoot) run around 10%-20%. Fair enough, I don't want to debate this percentage, but it gives us a target number of 100 photos to present to a client from a 1000 picture shoot.
2) Your client is probably not going to be happy if they have to sift through 1000 photos. I recently had a friend who paid several thousand dollars for a wedding photographer who sent them 1000 photos to choose from. They weren't particularly happy with this, and told the guy there was just too many to choose from. Personally, I felt that this was putting part of the photographer's responsibility on the client, but whatever.
Ok...so for the sake of the example here, we have to get 1000 photos down to 100 photos, so the client can choose what 50 (for example) they want to purchase and have printed, put in their photo book, slide presentation, etc.
Sorry for the long intro, but here is the issue at hand: we want to work quickly for the client, and get them their 100 photos as soon as possible. We also want to put our best foot forward, and give them high-quality photos. But at the same time, we want to work efficiently, and if possible not spend time doing final retouching on photos that the customer doesn't want, but rather focus this time directly on the photos the customer does want.
I have two questions from this which pertain to Aperture's RAW conversion and workflow:
1) Do you do any significant adjustments on photos for the contact sheets you present to clients (the 100 photos now)? Is it just a quick exposure adjustment, or are you retouching all 100?
2) Despite Aperture's RAW conversion problems and other adjustment glitches, is it sufficient quality in your opinion for a contact sheet?
My purpose in asking these questions is that perhaps the Aperture RAW conversion issue can be mitigated if we can get to the point of customer contact and review using Aperture-only conversion and adjustment tools, and then isolate photoshop use for only the final, significant edits. The problems with Aperture's RAW conversion are well-documented, but the question is, could it still be sufficient for small-scale proofs, understanding that for large-scale, high-res images, it won't be suffcient.
Your opinons are valued!
Brad
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Answer 1

">-DELETE project from Aperture because I can't use the app for the delivery
of finals:
Forgive me if I've forgotten the detail you may have posted elsewhere about this. I have seen you mention this several times, but I am really interested in the specifics behind the problems you have encountered. I have some needs in finishing that are beyond just regurgitating a photo. I'll be basically augmenting my photo with text, borders, special effects, etc. for more professional presentation, and the ability to market a photo in different ways. This is one reason I cannot discard Photoshop from my workflow. Anyway, let's assume for a moment I'm able to do all my editing in Photoshop, and those PSD files are sitting within Aperture. From there, what problems am I going to encounter? I'm tapping your brain here, as the time I have spent in Aperture has been primarily oriented toward everything prior to the finishing stage. "
Hi Brad,
If I've imported images into Aperture that have previously been worked over in Photoshop, none of the layers I may have created in those files will be available to me from within Aperture. This does not break but severely sprains the functionality of Photoshop. I'm keeping the images around because I think I or my clients will need them later, so what might I do with them?:
1) If I'd like to do more work on them I either have to abandon access to the previously created layers and their magic, or export the file from Aperture, work on it outside, import it back into Aperture. Every time I want to work with those layers I have to do the same dance.
2) If I'd like to send jpg or tif versions of those files anywhere I can choose to use the tools within Aperture or Photoshop to do so. Aperture's tools for these conversions are simply not of professional utility: no compressed tifs, no layered tif support, no quality choices for jpgs and no jpg previews. And in either case, using Aperture or Photoshop, the conversions are created OUTSIDE of Aperture and not managed by it.
3) When I decide to archive my older projects I'm faced with the incredible limitation that Aperture will not allow me any remote search of any archive that is not "live" within Aperture. Not even Spotlight will search Aperture libraries!!!!!
So moving already created projects into Aperture has absolutely no advantages and a number of problems, any one of which might be a deal-killer by itself.
If I'd like to use Aperture to manage work that I create going forward I've got those limitations already listed above, but I CAN access layers in PSD that are created from within Aperture. I cannot make layered duplicates of those files in order to work on versions of those images so once again the Photoshop workflow is hobbled.
All of this makes it a bad idea for my projects to make anything but a brief trip in and out of Aperture for sorting/proofing.
Regards,
fp