In my haste, I forgot to notice that my previous post was preceeded by Mr. Rodney.

For those who are not familiar with Mr. Rodney, he is an Adobe Certified Expert and a member of Pixel Genius and Pixel Mafia, these organizations and Mr. Rodney have very well documented, close associations with Adobe, and that makes it quite difficult for me to accept his comments as anything other than biased.

I've been using Aperture off and on, and comparing it to Lightroom. Both programs are good, and I think Ben is right about people not wanting to change their workflow - i.e. using Finder as their Digital Asset Management System.

I'm responsible for more than 40,000 images and am producing thousands more each month, and Finder is not enough for me to keep things organized. Aperture is a good start until I'm ready to put photos in Extensis Portfolio for collaboration with others in my office, and Artesia Teams for Institute-wide asset management.

For the Quad G5 on order right now, Aperture so far looking like a winner. But we'll see how Lightroom shapes up.

I am amazed by some of the reactions I have read, both here and elsewhere, about Aperture.

In my own use (fashion, glamour, nudes, portraits) Aperture has fit perfectly within my workflow and now replaces both iView and CaptureOne and a few other tools. I no longer have to use the finder or PS "Save As..." in order to create alternative versions of an image, nor do I have to worry about where they should be stored or what to name them or how to find them later, a simple Option-V and a new version is born, nestled right next to the original image, how convenient.

There is no question that Aperture has increased my productivity, especially in the editing/selecting of images. I have even started adding IPTC data on import so that all images are tagged, something I only did, in the past, when exporting an image. And now I can quickly see alternative versions - black & whites, monotones, desat. color, etc. - at the click of a few buttons without having to open PS at all, what a godsend!

Whatever your concerns about Aperture may be, you can only say for yourself if it suits your workflow or not. It's not yet a 'perfect' solution, but I agree that many people jumped on the negatives because they simply did not "get it". Some of the posts online even suggests some sort of 'Culture of Fear" surrounding the program, whatever happened to all those people who embraced the idea of 'Thinking Different"? Just because something doesn't fit within an existing "framework of thinking" does not make it wrong or less worthy of consideration, and if that were the case, how would we ever move forward (thank you Ghandi, Einstein, Steve and Woz, et al.)

I like the metaphor oof Aperture as appliance, I would go further to say it is more like a Swiss Army knife - a mulit-purpose tool useful for many, but not all situations. In my case, I would venture to say that it comes pretty close to handling 80-85% of my needs, the remainder (pixel-level retouching) is done in PS.

For those who feel Aperture is a disappointment, my first question would be, "did you actually try to use it for any length of time (i.e more than a few days), did you actually try to understand the logic of the system?" If so, kudos to you, and if you still feel it doesn't serve your neeeds, then it probably doesn't. For the rest, those who haven't really given it a fair trial, you won't know what you are missing until you actually try to put it to use in your own workflow. I did just that, and I won't be going back to juggling I was doing before.

Kind regards,

B P McCartney
www.atelier-mccartney.com

"...you should approach the program on its terms, not yours. Trust it and use the program in the way it was intended."

Sorry, but the simplest and easiest and most useful thing about the pre-OSX Macintosh was its file management capabilites. Even if you feel comfortable with the computer hiding your files who-knows-where, at some point you still need to deal with real-world file management when creating final output.

Apple's new philosophy seems much more directed toward using the computer as an entertainment center rather than as a professional work environment. When everything you make in your computer stays in your computer, you really wouldn't need a file management system at all, just a search engineâ€"and this is where Apple seems to be headed.

Apple is attempting to push-market an immature product that offers no advantage over the competition in either quality or productivity. Does the program have potential? Yes. Should I lay aside years of production experience and just "trust" that Apple's programmers have thought of every single situation I may encounter in the course of a work day? Why should I when a simple, elegant solution already exists and I have decades of work already organized under that system?

What happened to the concept of a product serving the needs of the customer as opposed to the other way around?