How is Aperture 2?

Hi, sorry but I did a search on this and nothing much came up.

Anyways, I was wondering how good Aperture 2 is for photo editing? Is it comparable to Photoshop?

Thanks

 

It's not designed as a competitor to photoshop.

Why don't you d/l the demo and try it out?

 

Have you tried Adobe Lightroom. I'm lovin it. You can get the beta of LR 2 here if you wanna try it.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

 

Yea, I agree. Photoshop and Aperture are in a completely different league.

 

aperture is more for like simple final touch ups and photo collection organization. its sort of like the itunes of photos.

itunes can technically do some editing, and so can aperture. but neither one is really cut out for much in that respect. photoshop is the editor. aperture is the organizer. you can also use aperture to do some basic final touch lighting and touch ups, but nothing serious.

 

Yeah, its more about organization, final edits and such. masterchef made a nice explanation, Aperture organizes, Photoshop does the heavy editing.

 

Actually I would say that Aperture/LightRoom are for picture editing as a whole, i.e. changing contrast/hues/white balance etc, whereas Photoshop is more for the pixel work.

 

Aperture is not really just for organization if you use it as it should be used, Apertures adjustments are actually must more usable than an photoshop workflow, just due to Aperture automatically creating versions and all that.

don't think you need photoshop if you are just taking photographs, if you can't fix what you need to in Aperture, you aren't taking very good photos.

that said I use photoshop probably every single day for so many different reasons, but I try to keep most photography based adventures in Aperture.

 

the advice is correct that you can't compare aperture with photoshop, but I don't know about the analogy with iTunes!

Aperture (and, as pointed out by WilliamG, Lightroom) are both tools aimed at professional/serious amateur photographers. They offer a high level of photo management (metadata, folders, albums and so on) but the *main* attraction for many photographers is the image editing tools.

The key difference between Aperture/Lightroom and Photoshop is that the former only allow you (with some exceptions) to make adjustments to the whole image, rather than the pixel/layer options offer by photoshop.

The idea is to give the digital photographer more or less the same tools as were available/used in a chemical lightroom with film, combined with advanced storage and photo management.

ARSTechnica recently posted a review of Aperture 2.0, which had some major improvements over 1.5. And there are tons and tons and tons of reviews and blog entries about aperture, lightroom and photoshop, so the OP can't have looked very hard

I use Aperture for 99% of my photoediting, but occasionally go to PS if I want to do something with layers or very 'heavy' post-processing.

Hope that helps, and I recommend you check out the ARS review

 

ps. I should add that, IMO, the main benefits of using Aperture/Lightroom are only realised if you shoot RAW... those are where some of the most effective adjustments arise.

If I was shooting jpeg, it would be very hard to justify the price tag of either Aperture/Lightroom, altough some people do use them that way

 

I would highly recommend Aperture over photoshop for photographers depending on how they shoot and what they shoot. I think someone who has a large amount of knowledge on traditional photography techniques, I don't just mean film vs. digital, but actual general traditional skills, could find a lot more use with Aperture just because it is so much simpler and made more for the way a photographer actually works.

photoshop can be used for so many things nowadays, but for me Aperture is almost always my first stop if I am dealing with actual photographs.

how is Aperture? wicked. buy it.

 

Ars review.

Enjoy.

 

(Off Topic comment) I love Ars Technica's reviews! On every and anything. Great pictures, great reviews!