I am interested to see how aperture could help me with my photography work-flow.
At the moment i am use a windows PC
and hopefully soon will be switching to mac 
as i think it better suites my photography needs.
I recently redesigned my photography workflow to suite a laptop with less storage (500GB) as hopefully i will be getting a high-spec macbook pro to use for photography. Before a few month ago when i was using my desktop i would store all photos archived on an external hard drive - no problem for a desktop.
Here is what i do now - and i was wondering how aperture and iPhoto would handle this, and the best way to go about producing a work flow which suites my needs.
I have 3 drives, 1, 2 & 3. 1 is my internal drive (500GB, same as Macbook Pro), 2 & 3 are external drives.
Photos are imported into a folder stored on drive 1 called "live". The live folder contains all the photos which i am currently working on (recent projects etc).
The photos are all imported into a sub-folder in the project folder called RAW.
I use Adobe Bridge to sort through all the photos tagging them with colours depending on what i want to do with them (e.g. red for "use"). I also add metadata. I know you can do this with Aperture.
All the tagged photos are non-destructively edited using Adobe Camera RAW the exported to another subfolder (as rendered JPEGs).
Here i can open a few in photoshop and edit them as i please, then i save them replacing the file (as the original is still preserved in the RAW folder).
Once i am satisfied with the results of the project I "finish" the project.
This involves splitting the folder in two.
All the good edited files go into an Archived folder on drive 1 (sorted in folders e.g. Events>Weddings>Jill and John Something meaningful, NOT a date, e.g. 2010>August>12)
Then all the original RAW files are put in a folder (which has the same folder structure as the drive 1, so they can be found easily) on drive 2. This means that they are no longer taking up precious room on my internal drive. A shortcut (or alias as i should start calling it) is placed in the folder of drive 1 to link to the raw files on drive 2 (so i can quickly find them when looking through the good photos).
Drive 3 is for backup. Drive 1 is backed up onto drive 2, and drive 2 is backed up on to drive 3. This gives me 3 copies of all my good photos and 2 for the rest.
This system allows me to always have with me my current editing photos, and all of my good photos, with easy access to my archived raw photos with an external hard drive. I dont want to carry en external hard drive around just to see my good photos. Also the internal drive is faster.
I was wondering how you would go about your photography workflow in my situation using aperture. I do not want aperture to replace photoshop, it will aid photoshop. Most photos just need a bit of tweaking which can easily be done in aperture without the need to run each photo in photoshop. Also Adobe creative suite doesn't offer any sort of program which offers the capability of iPhoto or aperture. Also, for my iPhoto library, i only want my good archived files to appear (i.e. only ones which i have picked, not all the raw files in either "live" or "archived RAW")
Regarding backup, i am aware that aperture has its own backup system, but time machine should handle that instead (backing up drive 1 and 2 onto drive 3).
So what would you do?
Sorry if this was a bit tl;dr
P.s. anyone know if apple are eminently about to release aperture 4?
THANKS
At the moment i am use a windows PC
and hopefully soon will be switching to mac as i think it better suites my photography needs.I recently redesigned my photography workflow to suite a laptop with less storage (500GB) as hopefully i will be getting a high-spec macbook pro to use for photography. Before a few month ago when i was using my desktop i would store all photos archived on an external hard drive - no problem for a desktop.
Here is what i do now - and i was wondering how aperture and iPhoto would handle this, and the best way to go about producing a work flow which suites my needs.
I have 3 drives, 1, 2 & 3. 1 is my internal drive (500GB, same as Macbook Pro), 2 & 3 are external drives.
Photos are imported into a folder stored on drive 1 called "live". The live folder contains all the photos which i am currently working on (recent projects etc).
The photos are all imported into a sub-folder in the project folder called RAW.
I use Adobe Bridge to sort through all the photos tagging them with colours depending on what i want to do with them (e.g. red for "use"). I also add metadata. I know you can do this with Aperture.
All the tagged photos are non-destructively edited using Adobe Camera RAW the exported to another subfolder (as rendered JPEGs).
Here i can open a few in photoshop and edit them as i please, then i save them replacing the file (as the original is still preserved in the RAW folder).
Once i am satisfied with the results of the project I "finish" the project.
This involves splitting the folder in two.
All the good edited files go into an Archived folder on drive 1 (sorted in folders e.g. Events>Weddings>Jill and John Something meaningful, NOT a date, e.g. 2010>August>12)
Then all the original RAW files are put in a folder (which has the same folder structure as the drive 1, so they can be found easily) on drive 2. This means that they are no longer taking up precious room on my internal drive. A shortcut (or alias as i should start calling it) is placed in the folder of drive 1 to link to the raw files on drive 2 (so i can quickly find them when looking through the good photos).
Drive 3 is for backup. Drive 1 is backed up onto drive 2, and drive 2 is backed up on to drive 3. This gives me 3 copies of all my good photos and 2 for the rest.
This system allows me to always have with me my current editing photos, and all of my good photos, with easy access to my archived raw photos with an external hard drive. I dont want to carry en external hard drive around just to see my good photos. Also the internal drive is faster.
I was wondering how you would go about your photography workflow in my situation using aperture. I do not want aperture to replace photoshop, it will aid photoshop. Most photos just need a bit of tweaking which can easily be done in aperture without the need to run each photo in photoshop. Also Adobe creative suite doesn't offer any sort of program which offers the capability of iPhoto or aperture. Also, for my iPhoto library, i only want my good archived files to appear (i.e. only ones which i have picked, not all the raw files in either "live" or "archived RAW")
Regarding backup, i am aware that aperture has its own backup system, but time machine should handle that instead (backing up drive 1 and 2 onto drive 3).
So what would you do?
Sorry if this was a bit tl;dr
P.s. anyone know if apple are eminently about to release aperture 4?
THANKS