Photoshop VS Aperture...

Now let me start off by saying that if this has been endlessly asked, I'm sorry and I'll go and search more thouroughly. Also, if this is on the entirely wrong forum, I'm sorry. Now with that out of the way, let me ask:

If money was taken out of the equation, which program is better overall for digital post processing?

Thanks.

Capture One Pro + Photoshop CS2 with PlugIns

I would suggest that you might want to compare Adobe's Lightroom with Aperture -- they are more competitive in what they are designed to do, IMO. Dennis

photoshop should not be compared to aperture - they are two different types of programs.

aperture is more of a professional photo management software with minimal editing capabilities, whereas photoshop is a full fledge manipulation system.

they are, however, in the process of creating plug ins for aperture, which will be wonderful as i am an aperture user.

they are two totally different peices of software. You actually need both =)

StealthLude wrote in post #2339151
they are two totally different peices of software. You actually need both =)

Yes, this is accurate.

I have both. I have also the Lightroom beta and iView MediaPro.

Aperture is really wonderful and is, I think, a better RAW converter than is Adobe's. You can also do about 70% of what you need to do to the image in Aperture much faster than you can with Photoshop. Aperture, will literally turbocharge your workflow - you will greatly increase your productivity.

However, when you do need to go to Photoshop, Aperture creates a copy and sends that up to Photoshop leaving your original untouched - Aperture puts a lock on your RAW capture so that you can ALWAYS go back to the original.

Aperture will also back up your library, help you do volume printing faster (in Photoshop it is one at a time). There are a bunch of other things that it does as well to speed you up.

So, they work together. I'd get both. You will spend less time in post processing and more time shooting.

J.

JohnJ80 wrote in post #2340437
Aperture puts a lock on your RAW capture so that you can ALWAYS go back to the original.

Quite honestly, I don't know of any RAW converter that actually makes changes to the RAW image so this would be true of the others as well.

With the current release of Aperture, Apple's introduced APIs that will allow 3rd parties to build plug-ins for it. Once it get's real noise reduction abilities, I may use it more than I am right now.

Photoshop will always be needed by those that need to do a lot of manipulation to photos. But for most of my work I could get by with Aperture, once a few plug-ins arrive.

rfreschner wrote in post #2340478
Quite honestly, I don't know of any RAW converter that actually makes changes to the RAW image so this would be true of the others as well.

Photoshop will allow you to save a file over the top of the RAW file or any file for that matter. Photoshop does not care where it saves anything and it will overwrite any file you tell it to and be perfectly happy about it.

Aperture will not allow that to happen. Same goes for originals in JPG, TIFF, or any other format that Aperture supports. Once you suck it into the library, it will create versions (as xml instruction files) but it will not touch the original in any way, shape or form. Everything is contained in an xml sidecar file.

Even when a file is edited in photoshop passed from Aperture, it gets a copy created from the last edits done in photoshop . The edited file when saved by Photoshop is then added to the Aperture library as a version. Original still untouched.

In point of fact, Aperture takes this to such an extreme, that one cannot even write or edit metadata and store it back in the original file. I like to do this because then I can easily move original between libraries or recreate libraries in the event of a crash (not that this is a problem with Aperture - it isn't). So, I import with IVMP, set up the metadata that matters (keywords, dates, places, etc...) sync that back to the file and then import with Aperture where the metadata is read.

J.

J.

Never knew that about Aperture, intresting indeed...

JohnJ80 wrote in post #2341269
Photoshop will allow you to save a file over the top of the RAW file or any file for that matter.

Photoshop saves changes you make to a RAW file in either an XMP sidecar file or in central cache, not in the RAW file itself.

rfreschner wrote in post #2342470
Photoshop saves changes you make to a RAW file in either an XMP sidecar file or in central cache, not in the RAW file itself.

one can force photoshop to write over a file of any type.

Aperture will not do that.

J.

JohnJ80 wrote in post #2344659
one can force photoshop to write over a file of any type.

Please let me know how you can write over a .CR2 file using PS. I'd love to know so I don't inadvertantly do it.

rfreschner wrote in post #2347217
Please let me know how you can write over a .CR2 file using PS. I'd love to know so I don't inadvertantly do it.

open your original file. edit it (make a change).

go to file->save

enter filename into the filename box or change extension (.psd to .cr2, for example).

click save.

file is overwritten.

For jpg, it is even easier.

open jpg file.

do edit

select save

file is overwritten.

that won't happen at all, it is not possible in Aperture.

j.

JohnJ80 wrote in post #2349794
enter filename into the filename box or change extension (.psd to .cr2, for example).

In the scenario you describe, it is the operator not the software that is overriding settings and deliberately ignoring warnings that allows a CR2 file to be overwritten with another file type, which is completely different from implying that the software allows the data to be overwritten. If the operator chooses to do this then they get what they deserve.