Photoshop or Aperture?

BriggieBriggie Registered Users Posts: 303 Major grins
edited June 21, 2007 in Finishing School
I'm a mac user, and would like to know what other macheads think about these two products... not sure which one to get: Aperture 1.5 or Photoshop Elements 4.0. I have a G4 iBook, with a 60GB HD (currently about 27GB free) and 512MB of ram. I am currently trying to convince the hubby that we need an 20in 250GB Intel iMac, but i'm a little ways from that happening;-). I mainly want more control over post processing than iPhoto affords, to tweak skin tones and the likes. Not really into FX, but vingetting might be nice in some applications. My gut says Aperture would work better on the Mac PPC platform, but, i don't necessarily know what i'm talking about :dunno...

Any advice would be welcome!!

Cheers

p.s. - i use a Nikon D50, if that has any bearing on the issue...
"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away..."

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Comments

  • colourboxcolourbox Registered Users Posts: 2,095 Major grins
    edited June 21, 2007
    Aperture and Photoshop don't really compete. Photoshop can edit individual pixels, while Aperture makes overall adjustments. Elements is a good place to start.

    Aperture is not even an option for you. It will not run on a G4 iBook. The lowest-end machine Aperture runs on is a PowerBook - check the system requirements. Even if it did, everyone talks about how slow Aperture is on low-end hardware. If you have to have a program like Aperture, you might want to try Adobe Lightroom, the direct competitor to Aperture which is much the same idea and will actually run on your iBook, if your iBook had 768MB RAM and a 1GHz CPU (see system requirements).

    However, I have used Lightroom on a G4 PowerBook and it was on the slow side. On your machine, with 512MB RAM, you may become frustrated with Lightroom. All of these apps like fast computers with tons of RAM, and on top of that Aperture demands a monster video card. If you don't have these things they don't run well.

    Ultimately, I think you should get Elements now and then get Aperture or Lightroom after you buy your next up-to-date Mac with over 1GB RAM. Elements will run great on your iBook. The only thing I don't know is if Elements currently supports D50 raw files, but it can certainly work with the JPEGs.
  • DavidTODavidTO Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 19,160 Major grins
    edited June 21, 2007
    15524779-Ti.gif

    PSE is the answer.
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  • BriggieBriggie Registered Users Posts: 303 Major grins
    edited June 21, 2007
    Silly me... i was even on that Apperture page earlier!! Thanks for the great advice!! i rarely shoot raw anyway, so i suppose Elements wouldn't have a problem with my D50's jpegs... nice thing is, Elements is a little cheaper!clap.gif

    Cheers!
    Brige
    "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away..."

    My Smug Gallery
  • kini62kini62 Registered Users Posts: 441 Major grins
    edited June 21, 2007
    PSE 4.01 for the Mac supports the latest ACR versions, 4.1 now I think. So you can edit RAW files from any currently shipping camera.

    Gene
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