Tried Lightroom, but it just felt kinda restrictive in the way the modules work. Aperture has a much more open approach to workflow.

Remember, this is still a fairly new piece of software, I expect version 2 will address most people’s complaints and add a bunch of cool new features - something to look forward to!

It ran acceptably on my 1st-gen non-Pro MacBook 1.86 with 2 GB RAM, and it “scrolls like butter” on my iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16 with 3 GB RAM; your Pro is closer to the latter, with its dedicated video card.

The Aperture feature for moving high-res source photos off to an external drive while keeping low-res JPEGs to play with is fabulous. In addition to digicam shots, I am managing a bunch of 10MB+ 600dpi scanned photos going back to the 1950s. My Aperture Library is something like 750 MB on my local drive, and there are many gigs of photos on the external drive (which I mirror to Amazon S3 for backup).

My only complaint with Aperture — and it’s a doozie — is that I can’t modify the time of photos. There’s a third-party app (Timeature, http://www.tow.com/timeature), which pretty much does the job, but it’s slow and doesn’t exactly fit into the otherwise ninja-like Aperture workflow. Here’s hoping Aperture 2 learns some of iPhoto 08’s tricks.

I love the concept of Aperture, I like how it handles my file organization and allows me to work. But I too am on a MBP, 2gb of ram with 2.16Ghz, and while its rendering thumbs and previews, I might as well leave the room and go make some food, cause the computer is useless during this process. Also, it consumes a mass amount of file space, the library alone with a few weeks of my work was around 2gb, which is insane for me to want on my portable computer.

It does run fine, not great, once the previews and thumbs have been generated though. However, being on a laptop, I need to move off to another drive fairly quick, I mac out the 100gb of HD space each month, and Apertures ability to handle this easily is piss poor.

@Twist Aperture is in no way meant to replace photoshop. Nor is any other photo managing application, that is a battle no one can win.

I haven’t tried lightroom as of yet, not since the first beta, and I hated it then. Looks like its grown up a lot though.

A quick note for those who are still comparing Aperture and/or Lightroom to Photoshop: They aren’t the same thing. They (Aperture or Lightroom) were never intended to replace Photoshop. Photoshop still is, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future, an important part of a professional photographer’s workflow. That being said, I had never really considered the idea of using iPhoto for my fun snapshots and using Aperture for my professional work. I think I’ll give that a try…I’m excited about the new features in iLife ‘08!

I haven’t tried Lightroom so I can’t comment on the differences.

I also recently purchased something called Light Zone, which isn’t in the same category as Light Room or Aperture but it is a great app for doing color correction and other editing. Too bad i just picked it up and now it looks like iPhoto will do much of what LZ does

I also subscribe to a service called Phanfare where I can upload photos to their servers, create web albums, etc. The lifetime membership is $250, quite reasonable for an offsite storage of my tens of thousands of digitized 35mm slides and negs as well as eight years’ worth of digital photos.

-Tod

I haven’t tried RAW in Aperture, and I don’t plan to. Like you, I find that it kills my MBP — even if I don’t import anything from iPhoto. And, well, let’s not even mention iPhoto’s RAW support.

I did purchase iLife ‘08 yesterday, though, and I’m liking it a lot.

try it again, and let it do what it is supposed to. after that it will work great.

(the link is to my photography site (which is in the process of being updated with more material!) if you should so care to venture a look)

I tried it on an original MBP, with 2 Gig. Yes, it slowed up other things on the initial import of my iPhoto library (thumbnail and previews generation). But now it seems ok (I don’t normally import that many at a time now).

I love it now. There are a couple of issues. But nothing really show stopping. Although I probably should have tried LightRoom.

Philip

I have also tried Lightroom and just found it a little too slow - Iview is fast and allows different Libraries for different aspects of your photography or keep all the images into one folder.

We will see how iLife ‘08 will behave.

I’d be happy to use your aperture licences on my MBP though!
Before you throw it into the trashcan - just email me the serial! :-))

BTW, if you want to sell your license (if you haven’t already), shoot me an email.

What I do now is import all photos from my camera to lightroom, process them and export the highest quality jpegs I can, then import those to iPhoto, so I’ve only ever got my best photos in there. So far it seems to be going well, as I don’t really see iPhoto as much of an alternative to Lightroom as far as development is concerned. I’d say iPhoto is to photos what iTunes is to music - it’s just somewhere to keep it all together.

I have checked out Lightroom and it is decent but it is slow. The thing I like about it is that it puts almost every single piece of my standard workflow of things I do to every single photo I take into a single application (I batch process all my Canon RAW files into DNG and then export JPEG’s, I also like to create custom Finder icons for all the files but Lightroom doesn’t handle that). Problem is it does it in twice the amount of time as my previous solution.

My favorite solution has got to be the application formerly known as iView MediaPro, Microsoft Expression Media. So far Microsoft was failed to ruin it. It is tons faster than Lightroom and much more flexible than iPhoto or Aperture. It is really nice for making catalogs of images backed up on DVD’s. It can also handle more than just image files. It is great for previewing fonts without having to actually install the fonts.

I can assure you that, if you could get it up and running, it would make your heart swell! Fantastic program. I will never switch to anything else. I hardly have to use CS3 for anything except the fun stuff.