Gee, it's great to read all these sensible, even-handed responses.... >:-0
There was one group of thoughts that particularly caught my eye, which I'll summarize as follows:
"Aperture (or Lightroom, or iPhoto, or whatever) isn't a real editing program, because you can't do the same sort of manipulation that you can with Photoshop."
I don't disagree with that, but there's something peculiar about it. To see what, let's wind the clock back 30 years or so. Back then, what would you have thought if you'd read a review like this?...
"The new Beseler 45MCRX enlarger is solidly made, but its capabilities are very limited. All you can do with it are enlarge your images, crop them, change their light/dark balance and tonal range, and maybe correct for perspective distortion a bit. For any really serious editing, you need an X-acto knife, rubber cement, illustration boards, frisket paper, a double-action airbrush, and a compressor."
Factually that would have been a true statement -- but back then, what
photographer (as opposed to collagist or retoucher) would have thought of slicing, dicing and painting as things you'd
routinely want to do to photographs?
The "image-management" programs (as I like to refer to Aperture and Lightroom) let you do just about everything to photographic images that you'd have done in the past in a darkroom (except localized burning and dodging, which were less practical in color printing than black-and-white anyway.)
The fact that many people no longer consider this an acceptable level of control shows how much change there's been in our concept of what a "photograph" is.
Yes, being a graphic designer, I'm a professional Photoshop user. I need its capabilities in my daily work. But I very seldom need them in my personal photography, in which (possibly as a backlash) I'm more inclined toward a "leave-it-alone" approach to image integrity. For others with the same perspective, an image-management program might be all they'll need the vast majority of the time.
