Aperture looks great, I am really excited about this app. I am a graphic designer and also semi-professional photographer. iPhoto has been great to organise my non work kind of snaps but is lacking in professional features.
It is going to be great to at least to be able to REALLY organise my photos for work, i think i will also use it to organise graphic images too. I send out tons of look and feel images (normally jpegs / tiffs ) to clients and it will be nice to at last keep track of everything. It looks like it works with all the major image formats.
For me Aperture is more about file management than anything else, but with the ability to do colour correction and balance images at the same time is perfect. In fact i am shooting a fair bit on black and white film, so image balance becomes more important.
Aperture is not Photoshop .. i think at last people are getting that into their heads. They are two quite different apps. I use Photoshop on a daily basis but mainly for graphics work and compositing, it is perfect for that. It is ideal for preparing graphics for motion work and online work BUT it is bloated for most professional photographers. In many ways Photoshop has out done itself, originally yes it was ideal for a photographer but has evolved into more of a graphics tool. IMHO
My only concern ( well, not really a concern but a thought ) is that there seems to be little support for scanning images directly into Aperture. Not everyone has switched to shooting digital. I still regularly use a film SLR camera hope to scan / import my images into Aperture, then i can add the meta data for exposure, shutter etc. I write down in a note book all this information every shot i take. ( Many amateur / professional photographers do this too ). Some kind of direct support for scanning negatives / positives would be great.
can see myself switching to digital SLR in the next year. There is something about developing and printing your own film, many of you will understand this.
