Re Photoshop Elements 10 - who can recommend reference manuals about how to work between my existing Aperture 2.1.4 and my just purchased Photoshop Elements?

Question

I shoot in Raw with a Canon G9 Compact - after rapidly ditching iPhoto in favour of Aperture, I now want to learn to use Photoshop Elements together with Aperture - I can obviously buy something like the "Dummies" or the "Missing Manual" books about Elements 10, but what can you recommend that will help me learn about the best ways to move images between the two, and how to combine the best features of Aperture and Elements? Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

I will defer to Sierra Dragon, one of the strongest advocates of Referenced Masters on this forum, but I suspect that your upgrade would only engage about 32 GB of HD space.
I have always used a Managed Library because I like the import-and-forget security.
AP2 arranges each master, thumb, and preview into a single folder. AP3 rearranges things so that all of the masters are in one folder, thumbs another, and previews in another. This has the advantage of making it easier to find your masters, should you ever have to open the Package and look for them.
AP3 is very nice and, with at least 4 GB of RAM, tends to be very speedy. Were I thee, I would force a TM back up and then turn it off while you run the upgrade. Turn it back on only when you are sure that all is well.
If you search this forum for posts around the time that AP3 first came out, you will find that there was a list of cache and pref files that sometimes had to be deleted. I believe that subsequent versions of the AP3 incorporated this into the program as I have not heard of that trick being necessary for years.
In my case, I had a 150 GB Managed Master Library, so I copied it out on an external drive and ran the upgrade there. Once I was sure that it had worked (and it did, first time), I copied it back. As you might imagine, 150 GB over FW800 took some time, but I had three copies of my Library at all times.
A final note, if you are committed to using Referenced Masters (as I now am, having sprung for a SSD) remember that they are write once/read many. That is, they are NEVER rewritten once they are out on disk. I have mine on a dedicated 250 GB and it never fragments. Your Library, on the other hand, reads and writes all the time, keep it on your largest, fastest disk.
Best wishes.