Is Aperture any good?

Forest

Wild calla

Water lily

After all the trouble with iPhoto I have been thinking about switching to Aperture. What is nice is that there is a free 30-day trial for see what Aperture is about. I downloaded it and experimented, by importing the iPhoto Library to Aperture.

Aperture is quite a different program, although there is a family resemblance to iPhoto. But it is clearly a much more complex program, intended for serious workflow. Compared to PSE, I think it is rather well put together.

Importing the iPhoto Library went well, although it took a long, long time. But then there are a lot of questions, such as robustness of the program. I got Aperture once already stuck in a way that only Force Quit allowed to proceed, after restarting the program.

Also, what about uploading to Flickr, does it work properly, the way I want? Have to see.

A problem may be that Aperture seems to use much more memory than iPhoto. On the other hand, Aperture allows much more automation in workflows, and that would mean savings in the time spent on computer. Hmmm... Tempting.

Anyway, as Aperture can handle LX5 RAW files, it offers interesting possibilities, such as shooting at ISO 800 (or maybe ISO 400) during the dark winter time and still getting acceptable quality. One strength of Aperture seems to be handling high-ISO files. Shooting JPEG limits the ISO that can reasonably be used.

In other words, using RAW when needed I would be close to my dream camera with the LX5. That is, I could shoot handheld in most situations. That would be excellent indeed.