Im so friggin Mad.. Nikon D80 not supported

Question

Well i just got back from the Apple Store.. laid out $300 for aperture... i rarely buy software, but felt like it was worth it.
Got home, pluggin in my D80, and found out that the NIKON D80 is not supported.
Im so furious right now.. does anyone know if i can return it and get a refund? I dont see how Aperture cant support a Nikon DSLR's raw format....
Hello mr. Lightroom.

Answer 1

I found a way to fool Mac OSX into “supporting” raw photo data from a camera which Aperture does not understand. My understanding is that OS X and Aperture will normally only work with DNG files which originate in cameras for which Apple has written its own system-level defaults. These defaults are stored in a file called Raw.plist deep in your System folder. But many of the unsupported cameras have data which match the supported cameras very closely, or exactly. So the trick is to tell OS X how to interpret a DNG from an unsupported camera in terms of how it does it for a supported one.
Don’t worry, it’s not very hard. Here is the process I went through:
1. I offloaded the raw images from the camera, and then converted them to .dng files using Adobe’s DNG Converter (free from the Adobe website).
2. I imported one .dng file into Aperture, and then looked at the Metadata View: EXIF - Expanded. The file has the entries “Camera Make: LEICA” and “Camera Model: D-LUX 3”, which I wrote down. Then I closed Aperture
3. I found a .plist editor on VersionTracker called PlistEdit Pro, which is shareware. If you have the developers tools installed, I believe, you can use the app called Property List Editor. I made a backup copy of the file System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/I mageIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Raw.plist, put it in a safe place, and then opened the original file in its original location with the .plist editor.
4. I found an entry which looked similar to my camera. There was a Property List called LEICA-DIGILUX 2, which was just a string, whose value was Panasonic-DMC-LC1. My guess is that this tells the system that if the metadata on the .dng file says that it came from a Leica Digilux, treat that file exactly as if it came from that Panasonic, for which there is a more detailed recipe later in the .plist file.
5. I duplicated the Digilux entry, and then edited the Property List name to be LEICA-D-LUX 3 (following the syntax of the original entries in Raw.plist, i.e. MAKE-MODEL, all caps, and a hyphen between make and model), and I left it as a string referring to that Panasonic camera. (You have a backup of Raw.plist, right? So you can try lots of things without worry.)
6. After saving the .plist file, I opened Aperture up, and discovered that the .dng file I had imported earlier was now displayed more or less properly. I have bad color vision, so I can’t make any judgments about whether the profile for the Panasonic works well. It seems fine to my color-sighted wife.
The applicability of this fix to other unsupported cameras is for you to discover.
A side note here is that I had some screwy behavior in Preview and iPhoto after messing with this stuff until I repaired permissions on my hard drive and restarted the computer. Then everything was back to normal and the fix still worked. I can’t say that I know what caused the strange behavior, but I recommend doing both of those things immediately after applying the fix just to be safe.
PowerMac Dual 2.5 G5   Mac OS X (10.4.4)