Shuttleworth,
I respect your claim and I believe I generally understand what you're saying. And I'm not trying to quarrel with you. But I do think that your claim that Aperture is "primarily" an asset manager, not an image editor, may be misleading to other, less informed users. I also think the claim is not just misleading but at least arguably mistaken.
Here's an example of a program that is (as you put it) "primarily an asset management program, not an image editor": Photo Mechanic. But comparing Photo Mechanic to Aperture tells you at a glance that they are very different types of programs. Aperture may be able to do nearly everything Photo Mechanic does but it does a lot more and those extra dimensions that Aperture possesses are not secondary, they are part of the essence of the program.
Yet I do hear people say what you said, and not that infrequently. I think this characterization (often applied to Lightroom as well as Aperture) is almost always made by people who are comparing Aperture (or LR) to Photoshop.
The problem is, this statement may be very misleading to people who do NOT compare everything to Photoshop and especially to people who are innocent of Photoshop. To say to a novice that LR or Aperture is "primarily an asset management program, not an image editor," is to suggest to them that LR or Aperture will help them organize their photos but they will need something else to edit their photos. And that is emphatically not true for the vast majority of photographers including the vast majority nowadays of professional photographers.
Now if "photo editing" is understood exclusively to involve the handful of things that Photoshop does that and LR and Aperture don't do — like layers, or cutting and pasting heads — then okay, you've defined your terms in a way that prevents you from being wrong. But most people don't understand the term "photo editor" that way. In addition to some fairly radical tools for initial raw conversion, color modification, sharpening, black and white conversion and the like, Aperture has tools that make it possible for me very effectively to
- fix red eye
- get rid of zits, mosquito bites and other blemishes
- soften skin
- blur areas of the photo
- change the tonalities or selected areas of the photo
- clone away smaller parts of a photo that I don't want
- add or remove vignetting
To name a few off the top of my head. With the help of a couple of the Nik add-ons I can do much much more. What's that leave me wanting in Photoshop? Not much. If I wanted to have a dinosaur chasing the bridal party, well, I'd reach for Photoshop. I don't want to do that every day. To be honest, I personally don't want to do that today any more than I did when I spent time in the darkroom.
So if you're simply saying, "You can't cut and paste in Aperture the way you can in Photoshop," okay, that's true. But that is hardly what photo editing is about for most people.
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And then there's the fact that both Lightroom and Aperture were designed from the get-go as replacements for Photoshop or perhaps it would be better to say as alternatives to Photoshop. The idea has always been that you will do most — if not all — of your post-processing right in Aperture or Lightroom, switching to Photoshop (or any other external program) only when you need to do some really special, something that goes beyond the ordinary or normal processing of a photo. The range of tools in Aperture and LR make it clear that they are both intended to be comprehensive tools. You ingest the images, organize them, process (edit, correct) them, and then—without leaving Aperture or Lightroom—you can print, or create a book, or publish to the Web. To say they are primarily about digital asset management simply because they do that and Photoshop doesn't (Bridge is not Photoshop) is, I think, to sell Aperture and Lightroom short and by a good bit. I can't come up with a good analogy, but maybe this would work: It's like saying that the iPad isn't "primarily" about content creation, that it's mainly a little tool that lets you carry around your vacation photos or surf the Web or read iBooks. Well that doesn't seem to be Apple's view of the iPad. It's pretty clear they're viewing it as a major content creation tool.
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Actually, I think the implied claim about Photoshop is the one that's wrong here. Photoshop from version 1 was not primarily a photo processing app. It was always a pixel-level image editing program that can do lots of stuff with photos but can also be used for creating icons, logos, buttons, drawings, etc. The "photo" application of Photoshop in the early days involved editing scanned photos, very often for publication. That was back when the photographer was shooting film in rolls and the images from a shoot were often numbered in dozens, not hundreds or thousands. Almost by definition, this kind of work was focused on individual images, one at a time, and not done in a hurry. Aperture and Lightroom, on the other hand, from the begining were not just primarily but exclusively designed for the management and processing of digital photographs — and for lots of them, as efficiently as possible. And the processing part is really the imporant one, because there were several apps around prior to Lightrooom and Aperture that were as good as they are at DAM.
Anyway, my five cents... ;-)
Will