Aperture is getting hammered with bad reviews. I think everyone is forgetting— Aperture is not a replacement for Photoshop. It’s not for image creation or photo retouching. Aperture is a workflow tool to quickly assess images and catalog them. It’s basic image adjustment tools are not trying to be photo editing tools.

It’s summed up perfectly in the comments on Slashdot:

Photoshop is the darkroom. Aperture is the light table.
If you don’t understand this, you’re not the target market.

That being said, aside from my few hickups- like ordering a book- I’m blown away. It’s 100x faster at opening and viewing RAW images than Nikon Capture and iView Multimedia. The speed I can flip through RAW files, delete the bad, tag and rate the good is worth every penny. Time is money.

I’ve yet to see the RAW rendering problems others are complaining about. Photoshop’s RAW support and the DNG converter have always done a crap job at rendering my camera images. Even after calibration with a Greta Megbeth card— I get consistently better results from Nikon Capture.

My current workflow goes like this:

• Download the images from the Camera
• Open and catalog the images in iView Multimedia. iView takes forever to open a RAW image, so all my image selection is done with thumbnails at 640x480. The originals are never viewed at 100%
• Open the selected images from iView in Nikon Capture.
• Tweak the RAW settings.
• Open in Photoshop

This process can take hours to deal with a 2GB compact flash card. On a dual 2.0ghz G5. It’s ridiculous.

With Aperture harnessing the power of the GPU instead of the CPU, I’ve been able to fly through a full compact flash card worth of images in seconds. One click and I have the RAW at 100%. Tweak the exposure and open in Photoshop in a blink of the eye.

Aperture’s default rendering of my D100 RAWs is under exposed, but dead on with color. A far better result then I have ever had with opening RAWs in Photoshop or converting them with DNG Converter. Aperture is not as good as Nikon Capture at rendering the RAW exactly as I intend it… but Nikon Capture takes 15 secs+ to open an image, has a horrific UI and is prone to crashes working with multiple files. Hand tweaking the exposure on all the images can still done faster in Aperture than the iView -> Nikon Capture -> Photoshop dance I was doing up until last week.

Without waiting Aperture queues up commands and multitasks. While the images are importing from multiple locations at once (directories, cameras, cards, iphoto) you can start immediately reviewing the results, dumping the bad, meta tagging the good. No matter what Aperture is doing, you can continue working-the-workflow.

It’s version 1.0. It’s going to get better. It’s going to get even faster. It’s going to probably one day get the Photoshop tools everyone is bitching about. It’s pretty damn fantastic for what it does right now— ease the workflow, tag and catalog RAW images in realtime.

It’s not a Photoshop replacement.

Note: You can be sure I’ll be singing a different tune if it can’t read the RAWs from my D200 when it gets here in a few weeks.