Aperture

mgdoc · January 30, 2010

Is there a way to bring aperture to life. I want to get my hands around it's neck, but it has no neck.
It is the only thing on my mac that reminds me of being a windows user. The only reason i ever even had to learn about the terminal on a mac. What is the best under 200 bucks program that you all on here are using. and that you feel is working well?:scratch

DeeCajun · January 30, 2010

mgdoc wrote:

Is there a way to bring aperture to life. I want to get my hands around it's neck, but it has no neck.
It is the only thing on my mac that reminds me of being a windows user. The only reason i ever even had to learn about the terminal on a mac. What is the best under 200 bucks program that you all on here are using. and that you feel is working well?

I am truly disappointed in the Aperture program on my Mac.. I'll be looking to see what others post.. I still use Picasa which is a shame!

ziggy53 · January 30, 2010

I suggest starting with the Aperture tutorials on the Apple site:

http://www.apple.com/aperture/tutorials/

If you truly want to change, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop are the de facto standard tools of digital photography. Lightroom began as an organizational tool but wound up great for general color work as well. Photoshop is the hard-core software for fine art and commercial photography, as well as advanced amateur use. Photoshop is ultimately more challenging to learn just because of the depth of its capabilities, but it also has some of the best support of any software, mostly through third party users like us.

ojn · January 30, 2010

mgdoc wrote:

Is there a way to bring aperture to life. I want to get my hands around it's neck, but it has no neck.
It is the only thing on my mac that reminds me of being a windows user. The only reason i ever even had to learn about the terminal on a mac. What is the best under 200 bucks program that you all on here are using. and that you feel is working well?

I never had to touch the Terminal on my mac to run Aperture (but I use it for other purposes).

I use it as my main software, and there are some things i miss from Lightroom but overall it does most of what I need it to.

I recommend going through some of the tutorials to get started.

MarkR · January 30, 2010

You might also want to check out Bibble Pro, which now includes a DAM component, as well as LightZone (no DAM, but a very nice raw converter and editor.)

Snowgirl · January 31, 2010

I've had Aperture for over a year now and have had no problems whatsoever - either as a file management / raw converter or for doing a lot of editing. I only go to Photoshop for fine tuning on specific images.

In the beginning (and even now, sometimes) I found the on-line tutorials very helpful to get a feel for the flow.

michswiss · January 31, 2010

I'm curious what the OP and the second commenter's issues are. I've been using Aperture 2 since it's release and have had no problems with it at all. I use it for 98% of my image work and 100% of my DAM. By all accounts, Lightroom is a good package as well and there will almost certainly be a refresh of both packages in the near future.

carmel6942 · January 31, 2010

Some basic questions

What is Aperture not doing that you want it to do?

what are your mac specs how much ram, cpu speed, how full is the hard drive you are using is it internal or external, if external is it usb or firewire?

where is the Aperture library stored?

My set up is as follows.
Mac Pro G5 Duel 2.7 system 10.5.8
4GB ram
My system is on my internal 250GB Hard Drive. I store my Aperture library on an external firewire 250GB. I tried to use an external USB drive but it was simply too slow. Not a real current system but it still does all I need for the moment. I use Aperture 2 for all my storage, imports, and exports. There are a lot of plugins that will help you do almost anything you want/need. When I need more I use photoshop. I have tried Lightroom and my preference is still Aperture.

chrisjohnson · January 31, 2010

mgdoc wrote:

Is there a way to bring aperture to life. I want to get my hands around it's neck, but it has no neck.
It is the only thing on my mac that reminds me of being a windows user. The only reason i ever even had to learn about the terminal on a mac. What is the best under 200 bucks program that you all on here are using. and that you feel is working well?

I, too, don't get your point.

Aperture works really well for me - delivers everything I expected.

tenoverthenose · February 2, 2010

As a Lightroom user I really love Aperture. I like the speed, controls, and quality. I'm really not too fond of Lightroom's different modules. But at the end of the day, I can edit weddings much faster by making use of Lightroom's presets, so it's Lightroom for me.

mgdoc · February 2, 2010

carmel6942 wrote:

Some basic questions

What is Aperture not doing that you want it to do?

what are your mac specs how much ram, cpu speed, how full is the hard drive you are using is it internal or external, if external is it usb or firewire?

where is the Aperture library stored?

My set up is as follows.
Mac Pro G5 Duel 2.7 system 10.5.8
4GB ram
My system is on my internal 250GB Hard Drive. I store my Aperture library on an external firewire 250GB. I tried to use an external USB drive but it was simply too slow. Not a real current system but it still does all I need for the moment. I use Aperture 2 for all my storage, imports, and exports. There are a lot of plugins that will help you do almost anything you want/need. When I need more I use photoshop. I have tried Lightroom and my preference is still Aperture.

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

C imac:
Capacity: 297.77 GB
Available: 124.92 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+

It seems to hang up, or freeze up. It creates the spinning wheel of rainbow death til i either force quit, or restart the hard way, cause the easy way wont happen.
I got an ext hard drive because I initially thought the problem was the C drive got too full. But the problem still exists.
I have referenced files to an ext HDD, but i do use USB, perhaps that may be the eureka I need!!!

I will try a FW and see if it helps stops the freeze ups

michswiss · February 2, 2010

It's interesting that you're using "PC" type terminology referring to the C Drive. Are you new to OS X? I'm not a technical wonk, but it sounds like the initial installation didn't go well for some reason. Have you ever been able to launch the App successfully? Adding or moving drives won't necessarily help the situation unless you know where your AP Library and/or referenced images are located.

I've installed Aperture on three machines (MBA, MBP and White iMac), but I'm not that great at remote troubleshooting. Maybe someone in the "Digital Darkroom" forum has some ideas?

carmel6942 · February 3, 2010

mgdoc wrote:

It seems to hang up, or freeze up. It creates the spinning wheel of rainbow death til i either force quit, or restart the hard way, cause the easy way wont happen.
I got an ext hard drive because I initially thought the problem was the C drive got too full. But the problem still exists.
I have referenced files to an ext HDD, but i do use USB, perhaps that may be the eureka I need!!!

I will try a FW and see if it helps stops the freeze ups

I have to agree with michswiss above, you do need to know where all your images are located before doing anything else with them. Have you tried to do any maintenance on your hard drive? Some times repairing permissions fixes a lot of problems. Go to your applications folder and open the utilities folder and run apples disk utility. when it opens up select your system disk and click on the button that says repair disk permissions. this can take a long time if you have not done it before. There is another program that is free that is a very good maintenance program it is called Onyx. With it you can do a lot of different maintenance tasks that you can't do with out going to terminal. Here is a link that gives you a walk through discription. http://www.switchingtomac.com/tutorials/keep-your-mac-running-smoothly-with-onyx/
I would recommend this to anyone who owns a mac especially since it is free.

DeeCajun · February 3, 2010

mgdoc wrote:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

C imac:
Capacity: 297.77 GB
Available: 124.92 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+

It seems to hang up, or freeze up. It creates the spinning wheel of rainbow death til i either force quit, or restart the hard way, cause the easy way wont happen.
I got an ext hard drive because I initially thought the problem was the C drive got too full. But the problem still exists.
I have referenced files to an ext HDD, but i do use USB, perhaps that may be the eureka I need!!!

I will try a FW and see if it helps stops the freeze ups

I recently bought a Mac and Aperture would not work, no thumbnails and the infinity wheel ( ugh) were issues.. I called them immediately and was told there are several updates to Aperture (mostly to do with Canon ) which I needed to download.. I did and everything works fine now. Just a thought.. I assume you know where the software update tab is.

Hope you get it resolved that wheel is so frustrating!

forsooth · February 6, 2010

Another satisfied Aperture user here too. My wife is the Photoshop wizard but I use Aperture for just about everything.

I work on a dual 2.5 Ghz Power PC G5, 6.5 GB DDR SDRAM running Mac OSX 10.5.8. Aperture is on main machine and Aperture vault is on a separate Glyph 500 GB drive backed up on a daily basis by Super Duper.

I love the way Aperture helps me organize my stuff. Would not work without it.

As ziggy suggested some tutorials are a good way to start. I highly recommend the Aperture tutorials on http://www.lynda.com/

We have a membership on there and keep up to date with tutorials, no more buying textbooks that go out of date in 4 months.

good luck.

forsooth

Aperture

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