Aperture in combo with ACR

[Anders_HK]

Hi,

I have primarily used Adobe Camera Raw, but due to now having Mac    I see advantage of adding Aperture and in combo with iPhoto. How to combine with Camera Raw? How do most of you do?


My preference would be;

Screening and Selection of Photos - Either Bridge or Aperture, but with Aperture there is advantage of slide shows in iPhoto.

Photos Requiring Simple/Quick Adjustments - Aperture

Photos Requiring Advanced/Detailed Adjustments - Camera RAW, sometimes Photoshop


Much thanks for help!

Regards
Anders

[Desmond]

I am using aperture to organize the library and do raw conversion, photoshop for fine adjustment. Aperture is good enough most of the time, major weakness being the lacking of curves, levels can do the job usually, sometime you will want the curves. Also noise is not as good as ACR. I work mostly on BW, aperture with silver efex pro plug in is wonderful, it let me do the job in 15 min that use to take hours in CS4, and the result is better, for better I mean more close to traditional silver print that I after. Sometimes I can go straight to printing without further tweaking in CS4.

Desmond

[Phil G]

Hi Anders

I too am a newbie to Apple made the switch a couple of years ago and I since started using Aperture I rarely use Adobe except for image manipulation and occasional colour tweaks

If you can get it right in camera its a breeze the Digital Asset Management I find of greatest value just being able to find that image with search and smart folder tools make it worth the money.  Its Colour manipulation may not be as good as other applications but adequate for most jobs and is improving with each update, and plugins are available

The ability to integrate my Scanned image and Medium Format Digital files as referenced files is also a great asset saving on disc space and giving all the features of Aperture

Phil

[stevecoleccs]

THis is what I do:
Bridge
01 Import photos with ImageInjester (adds metadata, puts file where it needs to be, renames, make a backup & open images in Bridge automatically)
02 Edit images in Bridge: 1 Star to process, View only the 1 Star images, Select All & open in ACR
03 Save the images to an "Aperture Imports" folder

Aperture
01 Drag the Processed images to a Project from the "Aperture Imports" folder, from Bridge or the desktop (This will import images INTO the Aperture Library)
02 Add Keywords & organize to your hearts desire, Print, export, add to Collections etc..

Aperture - Archiving
01 When "finished" with the final images > Export images WITH METADATA to an Archive folder of your choosing ( this folder is where your images will "Live" - NEVER to be touched from the desktop
02 DELETE the Original images from Aperture
03 Import the Archive images as REFERENCE back to Aperture

Reasons:
1 ACR is simply a better Processor (for my raw files, canon 1ds MKlll)
2 Aperture is the best I have used for organizing images (I've tried them all, & I'm not talking about downloading a 30 day trial software, actually using it for months)
3 Aperture has it's faults too, one major fault is not embedding the metadata IN the file, so exporting the images with metadata & reimporting takes care of that.

I hope in the NEAR future Apple will fix the faults with Aperture & then I can narrow down this workflow. Hope this helps.

[Desmond]

Reasons:
1 ACR is simply a better Processor (for my raw files, canon 1ds MKlll)
2 Aperture is the best I have used for organizing images (I've tried them all, & I'm not talking about downloading a 30 day trial software, actually using it for months)
3 Aperture has it's faults too, one major fault is not embedding the metadata IN the file, so exporting the images with metadata & reimporting takes care of that.

I hope in the NEAR future Apple will fix the faults with Aperture & then I can narrow down this workflow. Hope this helps.

Hi steve,

Want to hear more about how ACR is better than Aperture. I heard many prefer ACR and highly recommend it for raw processing. I am using Aperture and quiet happy with it except the noise reduction, I use ACR for conversion to Tiff when the noise is really bad.

For your expectation of Aperture to fix the "fault", I think it is quiet unlikely. The philosophy of Aperture is to keep the original file unchanged. All other stuff in the library database file.

[stevecoleccs]

Hi steve,

 The philosophy of Aperture is to keep the original file unchanged. All other stuff in the library database file.

Yep - this is why I Export to embed the Keywords IN the file, then import the images back in. Can you imagine the time it takes to keyword 1000s of images, I'm talking weeks of
work - what would happen if the database goes bad...

ACR: in my test with my camera, the noise in Aperture very, very close to ACR, I can use Aperture for my RAW processing but would have to use Noise Ninja on my iso 800 images
which I shoot 80% of the time. The big thing I have about Aperture is the chromatic aberration I get with Aperture ( color of reds, blues on highlights) - at lease ACR & Lightroom
have an adjustment for that.

[Desmond]

Yep - this is why I Export to embed the Keywords IN the file, then import the images back in. Can you imagine the time it takes to keyword 1000s of images, I'm talking weeks of
work - what would happen if the database goes bad...

ACR: in my test with my camera, the noise in Aperture very, very close to ACR, I can use Aperture for my RAW processing but would have to use Noise Ninja on my iso 800 images
which I shoot 80% of the time. The big thing I have about Aperture is the chromatic aberration I get with Aperture ( color of reds, blues on highlights) - at lease ACR & Lightroom
have an adjustment for that.

Thanks, will do some trial to see.

Right, the database gone bad is a disaster. Currently I have about 20K photos in the library, I import all images as reference files. I have 2 vaults both in external HDD, regularly updated, updates could take minutes. One of the vault is backed up in Time Machine, but building the library from a vault could take a full day or more. I think this is save enough for me, I am not a pro, have the system halt a few days will not kill me.

[Jeremy Payne]

what would happen if the database goes bad

You restore it from backup!

I hope you are backing up the images ...

[HagenHohn]

ACR/Aperture Raw differences: Aprture does not have access to the same flexibility as Cannon's DPP or ACR in choosing camera settings.

I import into Aperture (instead of reference managing). I then use Aperture and Nik's suite of plug-ins for 95% of my image editing. For the remaining 5% I "export to external editor" PS CS4.

I have started to run into times when Aperture's RAW adjustments are not enough: wrong WB etc. I'll "export master" so that I get the RAW file to the desktop and open that with ACR. one pulldown and then import back into Aperture.