Your very best bet to approximate and replace Aperture is the Adobe Photography Plan. For ten bucks a month, you get the FULL versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CLASSIC (that's what you want), plus Lightroom (Adobe Cloud sharing version for Macs, Windows PCs, iPads...), and Adobe Bridge. I use it daily, with Lightroom CLASSIC as the hub of my entire workflow.

ALTERNATIVELY, for about $125, you can use Apple Photos and combine it with both Gentlemen Coders' Raw Power,* and Serif Affinity Photo 2.

*Raw Power is the raw developing engine from Apple Aperture, enhanced and advanced, but without the digital asset management features. It is written by the same core people who wrote Aperture.

Both Raw Power and Affinity Photo 2 can be used as plug-ins to Apple Photos, or as stand-alone applications.

NOTE: Just about any software you buy today is going to require very recent hardware and an up-to-date MacOS to run. If your computer cannot run MacOS Ventura 13.2.1, which is current, I urge you to upgrade to a more recent model that can support it. Frankly, the new Apple Silicon M1 and M2 series SOCs are phenomenal. Any of them outrun all the old Intel Macs at most tasks, while using about 1/3 the power. Apple has made a clean break with the past.

If you have ANY 32-bit software, or software with 32-bit installers, it WILL NOT run on any version after MacOS 10.14 Mojave. With MacOS 10.15 Catalina and all later versions, only 64-bit software is supported. MacOS 11.x is the first version that runs on Apple Silicon Macs (M1, M2, etc.).

Years ago I purchased the large and regretted it. I now own the small(for three years). Not only do I own the small I only use 1/4 of the surface of that. You can remap any Wacom surface area to as much of the screen as you want. I have the upper left 1/4 of the Wacom tablet mapped to my entire computer screen. Anyone who is a professional retoucher(that I know) remaps the small Wacom to use only a portion of the Wacom surface area. Why anyone would want to do full arm movements when wrist movements are much more accurate is beyond me. You can zoom on your image to make a wrist movement go over the entire image or just a tiny area. It's just more accurate to do provided that you know what you are doing. Full arm movements cause fatigue and inaccuracy's in image edits. My workflow is highly dependent on a Wacom. I literally could not do what I do without it. One other advantage of the small is it's size. I have to do edits in the field and it's sure nice to have something that fits easily in my Laptop case.

Best of luck
Russ Elkins

So this is how it went down. I'm laying on my belly along the shore of a lake in the everglades. My 500mm lens is aimed at a green heron fishing. My focus is spot on when all of a sudden everything went blurry. Assuming I must have bumped something on the lens barrel I touched the focus button and this is what I saw looking back at me. This is the eye of about a 12-14 foot gator who happened to surface directly in front of my lens at a distance of about 7 feet. This is a full frame shot, I just did a bit of straightening (and a bit of hustling to get out of there as quick as possible.

Glad I'm still around to post this one.



Larry