Moving to Mac. Lightroom to Aperture

ding76uk

ding76uk

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Carl
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I have just bought of these very forums and am picking up this weekend an IMac for my main photo machine. I currently use Mac books for work and home, but am finally replacing the PC. It is sold with aperture 2, so will be using that instead of lightroom. Plenty of research has told me about these what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts with it. So...

Anyone else made the same switch? I have a backup drive, which I am sure I have formatted to Mac compatible. Will be using as backup and to import across.

How easy is it to put folders into Aperture. and has anyone else made the switch form lightroom and has any helpful tips or hints for me? Anything to watch out for?

Finally it comes with 250 gig HDD. I have looked on some forums but has anyone replaced a hard drive? How difficult is it? Also anyone in Lincolnshire who may be willing to do it for me in exchange for some beer tokens?? let me know.

Thanks and I think the most questions I have asked in one post.

Carl
 
First of all, if you have a Lightroom license that can be moved across from PC to Mac. I tried Aperture, but didn't get on with it after using Lightroom.
 
I tried Lightroom and convinced myself to go to Aperture (I love Apple products) and used this for a while. However, as workload increased, I realised Lightroom is THE software to use so have gone back.

Downsides for me of this are losing Aperture's superior organisation and their clone and heal tools, which I find to be much better than LR. However, as far as editing goes, LR blows it away, especially with the presets.

However, this doesn't answer your question.

Transferring over is as easy as the size of your catalogue allows. I'd say it's easier going from LR to Aperture than vice versa and should be as simple as just importing all the folders from your LR folder, depending how you have them set up. It didn't take me long, but then again I only had around 8000 images.
 
Changing a HDD in an iMac can be a serious thing but if you are a bit handy with a screwdriver then you may enjoy it. There are many tutorials online on how Mr average has pulled his iMac apart to fix it.

The screen cover is held in place by magnets so you need 2 rubber sucker pads at either end and then pull, under the cover are a set of screws to open up the iMac the fron pulls off and you will see the HDD and logically deduce how to change it.

I never got along with aperture I found it slower that LR
 
I thought I would give aperture a go and see how I get on with it. If all else fails I can sell it on and move to lightroom for mac.

Had a quick play with a Aperture Demo, and seemed to be quite good when I got the hang. 4gig of ram in new machine so hopefully has power to process it through.

With regards to HDD I have built a cpl PCs before, just looks a little scary. Probably a case of have a go and see what happens. If all else fails call someone in. To those who have changed a HDD what do you use to reattach the sensor to the HDD?

As said before if anyone in Lincs/Peterborough way/Notts way want to help me out will be a few beers in it for you. Just hit me up on PM, or if anyone knows of someone reasonably priced for upgrades in this area also let me know.

Cheers.
 
My Lightroom can load onto PC and Mac. I went from PC (had to give up photoshop 7 :() to mac and it's been great. The iMac screen is the best quality i have ever seen.
 
Converted from PC to Mac last December and moved Lightroom no problem.

the LR database can be read by either Mac or PC so no problem there. Suggest you move the Database and images to an external drive. Best way is to move the images first, using LR then move the DB. Best to copy it rather than move, and tell LR to use a new DB, and point it to the one on the external drive.

Now load LR onto your Mac. The CD is cross platform compatible. When you start LR tell it to look on the external drive and you're away. If you want you can transfer the DB onto the Mac but you may be better off keeping your images on an external drive, rather than trying to put a new drive on your machine.
 
Defo a vote for using LR on the mac, lot more natural in use for me over aperature!
 
I like Aperture, but may be the only one! The organisation is great but I do use lightzone or CS4 for further editing. I think I'd still do this if I had LR but I've not tried LR2. Increasing numbers of plugins for Aperture means you get some pretty good editing tools these days. We're probably due an update at some point in the next few months. Don't know what that might entail though.
 
I like Aperture too !

I find I can do most of the editing I need within Aperture, but do also make use of some of the plugins as well (Silver Efex Pro etc).

Would be nice if Aperture could use the plugins directly, rather than exporting a copy out to be edited, but that might come in the next version ?
 
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