There are tons of information about Apple Aperture out there. O’Reilly Media runs an “Inside Aperture” blog and a podcast with wonderful tips and interviews (Joe Schorr does a fine job highlighting why a particular feature is useful without coming off as an obnoxious marketing honcho), and Apple’s own Aperture discussion forums are highly frequented and apparently uncensored, with much criticism accessible as well. Finally, the long series of training screencasts, while sometimes a little too newbie-friendly for my taste (if you show me where to click, you don’t need to tell me in addition), have shown me plenty of things I otherwise wouldn’t have discovered.

Besides that, I’ve also gradually learnt many things on my own; you can use the application’s basics just fine without any prior reading of documentation, but you’ll only be scratching the surface that way. The more time you spend with the app, however, the more you’ll discover its deeper aspects. Afterwards, things will be perfectly obvious. Once you discover how well the white balance eyedropper tool works, for example, you’re tempted to adjust the white balance a lot more frequently than you otherwise would have, and thanks to lift and stamp, applying such a change to all images in an album is no hassle.

But sometimes, I just wonder how others solve certain issues; i.e., how their workflow matches up with Aperture (or vice versa).

I’m on the verge of buying a Panasonic DMC-FZ8. It’s a fine camera, and will likely serve me great for many years to come. One big issue in the eyes of many reviewers is the high noise, which is somewhat worsened by the camera processor’s overzealous noise reduction. However, due to the availability of a RAW mode, this can be customized with an included software.

With its extremely limited list of RAW-supported cameras (I think the “wide support” claim must be sarcasm…), it’s no surprise that FZ8 isn’t on there; it isn’t on the much more complete list of competitor Adobe either. This hurts particularly because Aperture’s (and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’s) strength is a fully integrated workflow, starting from import and going all the way to export. External applications, by design, are possible, but always to be avoided. This means either resorting to JPEG or TIFF (which, of course, would still be nicer than JPEG and therefore a useful feature the Canon PowerShot S3 IS – which I used to be eyeing – lacks), or using an external app (likely Panasonic’s bundled one, SILKYPIX) for the RAW processing, then importing the resulting image (likely as a TIFF) into Aperture. Not great.

In that case, I would have a ~/Pictures/RAWs folder to work off in SILKYPIX. For any future changes to the RAW file, I would have to reimport to Aperture, thus removing all of Aperture’s customizations. You can see where this would effectively make me either spend way too much time fine-tuning the RAW as early as possible, or make me forget about it altogether. In that latter case, I might ironically be better off with the Canon model instead, which while lacking RAW (or even TIFF) has a better sensor to begin with. On the other hand, the Canon is also about a sixth more expensive (roughly 350 vs. 300 Euros), which I’d rather avoid; more importantly, I really don’t feel like supporting Canon’s apparently policy of only updating their products when they really have to. They dropped the ball on the Sx IS series with the S3 update having been a really minor one, and the S4 one not being in sight; meanwhile, the competition has moved on to add such valuable or wonderful features as RAW or 720p video. So on that note, I’ll likely end up with the FZ8, but with the sour taste that Apple might never support its RAW format.

One can in part blame manufacturers for not working towards standardizing such formats at least in-house, but one can also point the finger at Apple for not allowing third parties (such as camera manufacturers) to provide import plug-ins in Aperture – something a future version might bring who-knows-when.

Certainly, the part I like the very least about a purchasing decision is that it’s invariably a 90% solution – the remaining 10% are missing, unsatisfactory or completely in the way.