Apple's Aperture OR Adobe's Photoshop?

I use both as they are well suited for different things.

I primarily use Aperture “dark room” type work (color balancing, brightness, cropping, etc.) and organization.

I primarily use Photoshop for photo compositing and preparing images for the web.

It depends 100% on what you want to do.

If you’re post-processing photos, Aperture has a lot to offer. But if you want to create totally new things, like starting with a blank canvas and creating a website mockup, Photoshop is your friend.

Seems like Aperture is more what I’m looking for. I want something to do post-production on some of my shots. Definitely won’t be creating anything from scratch. Will predominantly be using it to correct any minor (or major for that matter!) flaws in my photos…

I agree with the previous posts.

I would point also point out that Picasa is Beta and while it is functional and has some amazing tools that work well, it isn’t Aperature or Photoshop.

Also, Photoshop CS4 has some really nice new serious features for camera RAW so it depends on what you want to do and how much you want to pay.

I would compare Aperture with lightroom mor me than photoshop. I personally like lightroom better. I like the interface too.

Great, thanks for the tips. Will download a couple of trials and see which works better for me.

Aperture and Photoshop are not really comparable. They are designed to do different things. Aperture is really more for organization and tagging and simple color balance changes and things like that. For heavy editing you can use Aperture to open up images in Photoshop for full editing, then save them right back into Aperture.

Like willbrawn said, Aperture is more directly comparable to Lightroom than Photoshop.

I like photoshop better.

Photoshop is a powerful tool but it’s very different from Aperture. If you take a lot of photos and you want a program to organize these shots and edit them (White balance, contrast, saturation). Now I you wanted to do more than change the properties of the photo (add a whole new person, make a collage of photos) Than Photoshop is your friend!

I personally hate Aperture and prefer iPhoto, even though it lacks some features.

I have used Aperture. I must say, not bad. The fact that they organize photos into a single file (you can show the files contents by right control-clicking it in finder), can be problematic to many people, much why a friend stopped using it.

iPhoto: Awesome

LightRoom: Recently started using, and A LOT last night, it has a beautiful interface, and is pretty fast and stable.

I have also seen people use Adobe Bridge for this purpose, Its pretty much a Finder, but focused on photos.

As far as photo manipulation and editing:

Photoshop CS3 Extended and CS4 : Have used both of these, very great. Once you get the hang of how layers work, the whole application is just a breeze to use, and you can use pretty much any other photo editing application that has the same base. As in, layers.

Photoshop Elements 6 : Haven’t used 7, but 6 is quite amazing. Adobe is seriously closing the gap between their flagship software, and their amateur software.

And for Mac:

I use a great application called PixelMator

I really love this application, its 60 dollars, and free upgrades for life. It gets updated at a faster pace than PSE, and is coming closer to its features. It can even open PSD files. It focuses on the GPU rather than CPU. Check it out for a cheap alternative. Its really a GREAT investment.

I-Love-Lightroom

aperture was a nightmare, all the vaulting, the unvaulting, the pictures getting locked away and corrupted.

just a nightmare.

what did you end up going with? After the trials that is.