LarJgrip Loc: The Fraser Valley

We're looking to purchase a Mac and I was wondering how the "Aperature" program stacks up with other programs out there?

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions those of you with experience in this area could offer and thanking you in advance.

amehta Loc: Boston

Apple is discontinuing Aperture (Macworld article), so you should consider other options.

Racmanaz Loc: Sunny Tucson!

If you are looking for something free yet very good, check out Lightzones software program.

Rongnongno Loc: FL

Or gimp for mac

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

Yes, Apple is discontinuing support for Aperture, but apparently because it (as well as iPhoto) will be replaced with what looks to be a similar program called simply "Photos". Of course, we'll have to wait and see what that looks like when Yosemite is released.

That said, the program that is most similar to Aperture is Adobe's Lightroom. While Photoshop and its ilk are designed to enable amazing alterations and editing one image at a time, the purpose of Aperture and LR was for pros who shoot scads of images at an event and need to cull through them, rate them, do quick edits (like color corrections and straightening, red eye removal, cropping, etc.) en masse. That is, if you inadvertently set the color balance in the camera to daylight and ended up shooting in tungsten light, thus getting that warm color cast on all the images, using these filing/editing programs you can change all 50 or 5000 shots to the proper color temperature at once. There are a lot of things LR and Aperture can do, but image editors like Photoshop have even more capabilities.

That Lightzone program looks almost like a hybrid (and it's free - may be worth checking into) - from the screenshots it seems you can file and rank images, but the other samples shown on their website hew to doing individual image edits along the lines of what Photoshop et al do, rather than enabling you to "lift" a set of alterations from one image (crop+level+change saturation+bring down highlights or whatever) and then "stamp" those same edits across any number of other images. Also, Aperture (and, I believe, LR, though I haven't used that in years) are non-destructive editors - when you make any changes (like those described above) the original RAW or JPEG file is not altered itself; rather, the program encodes those alterations as a set of instructions to apply when you view or print or export that image. So you could do a severe crop and change the image to B+W and turn it upside down, and then create another "version" from the original file and start all over again. I can't tell offhand if Lightzone does that as well, or, if like Photoshop, it saves the newly edited image as the file (unless you do a "save as").

Ergo, if you want an image filing and editing package and are afraid of Aperture and don't trust whatever Apple is cooking up to replace it, you should try Lightroom. There are plenty of LR advocates on the Hog here so you can get tons of assistance. As for Lightzones - well, the price is right; you can certainly play with that as well.

Racmanaz Loc: Sunny Tucson!

When I downloaded Gimp a last year I ended up with 5 trojan programs unrelated to Gimp and kept getting pop ups and drastically slowed my computer down. Did you happen to experience this?

Newsbob Loc: SF Bay Area

There's a big difference in price between Photoshop and Lightroom, as well as their different functionality. You can subscribe to them both combined for about $10/month directly from Adobe. Lightroom can be purchased on its own (no subscription) for about $100. The non-subscription version Photoshop has been discontinued and will cost a lot more, if you can find a copy.

I use Lighroom a lot. It works really well if you shoot RAW, although it can fix JPG files as well.

I travel a lot, and organize my RAW files by date, then process one day's photos (up to 300). It's amazing how you can improve your pictures by lightening shadows, darkening the blacks and whites, decreasing noise, improving clarity and saturation, and more, all done easily with sliders. And since it's non-destructive, you won't mess up any of your shots.

I find that most of my shots benefit from Lightroom and don't need any assistance from Photoshop. Generally speaking, LR is best to fix the overall image, while PS is excellent at fixing smaller portions of the image.

There are many excellent tutorials, both text and video, on using Lightroom. And a bazillion Photoshop tutorials.

If you don't want to go the subscription route, buy LR, and take a look at Photoshop Elements. It's only about $70, and has much of its older sibling's capabilities.

Or you can try some of the PS wanna-bes. There are numerous programs that help edit photos that are much cheaper, albeit not quite as capable. Just Google "photo editing software".