So then - do most people use other programs to edit thier photos?

Question

After hours of reading on this discussion forum - which is incredibly informative and useful - and others, it seem that a lot of people use Aperture for its management abilities (I know, DAM) and not as much for its editing abilities. (Perhaps its intended function?) Is this accurate? Is it intended to be a compliment to <insert you favoite photo editor title here> rather than a replacement?
It seems to be far too powerful an editing tool to simply use to structure my files - but send them out to an editing program when I want to edit.
Again, I am a newbie and am probably missing something, but as an example using the sharpen edge tool I cannot seem to apply much sharpening at all even maxing the sliders. In PS (I am not trying to cause I debate, it just happens to be the program I have been using to this point) you can easily sharpen, over sharpen and completely distort the image beyond useful with tiny adjustments in the parameters. I have about a half a dozen presets as baselines in unsharp mask (normal, reduce haze, portraits etc) that I start with and change slightly per photo. I wanted to create the same structure in Aperture, but it does not seem to have this ability - which I find strange because just about everything else I do in Aperture seems to have abilites way beyond my own and I find I am having difficulties with simple things, such as adjusting light levels.
Any thoughts?
As always, many thanks.

Answer 1

As has been noted by those wiser and better than I, "take the picture right, then you don't have to muck with it in the darkroom." There is, of course, a lot of truth in this but the digital image is another beast compared to film. I suspect that I handle about 90%+ of my images directly in Aperture. I have a number of plug ins (SilverFX, Vevezia, Photomatix HDR, and Noise Ninja) and I link to an external editor. Most of what needs correcting, improving, focusing, etc., can be done within Aperture particularly now that the plug ins are 64 bit. Still, I have a full copy of Photoshop (actually CS5) as there are things that can be done in PS that I don't know how to do any where else. (There are also hundreds of things that PS can do that I haven't learned!)
So the answer to your question: depends on how deep you like to get into the image. I liked the dark room in the old days (dating myself here) so I have found the amazing power of a program like PS to be irresistible. YMMV.
Robert
A few years back I was able to get Adobe to switch me to the Mac version of CS2 by paying the upgrade fee difference. Won't hurt to ask. There was a bit of song and dance routine (faxes and stuff to prove I had the Win version) but it worked out. Worth a try but recommend you learn Aperture and its available plug ins first.