Thanks useful information: 
Daz,
Short answer - no. Long answer - that's not what it's designed for. Aperture is intended for digital asset management (DAM) and processing of photos, not for manipulation.
If you come from an Adobe background it can be a bit of a shock, because you have to unlearn some Adobe bad habits. As it does DAM properly, keywording and management of projects is the means of managing your collection, not the folders on the hard drive - and this is a conceptual leap that some people can't make.
It does very good processing of raw (better than ACR imho) and all the expected adjustments are there (sharpening, noise, white balance, highlights, shadows, flip, rotate, crop. straighten, saturation, colour adjustments), but not spot adjustments except for dodge and burn, unless you buy plugins.
Aperture has an "edit with..." option that allows you to round-trip your photo as a tiff to your favorite editor for the more advanced photo manipulation. Mine is set up for using PSE6, but only use it around 1% of the time. Your usage may vary depending on how often you cheat with your photos...(philosophical sore point - I'd rather take the photo than create the photo).
Anyhow, here's a pikkie of my working with some coastal shots I took recently, where I'm comparing 4 shots side-by-side. (BTW, this is the 4th project structure I have used, as I become better at using Aperture. I've been renaming albums, creating and deleting albums, splitting and consolidating projects to my heart's content until it has arrived at current iteration - which seems to be working pretty well.)
Feel free to ask more questions - it took me some time and some reading to really start using Aperture properly and leveraging the power of it.
Regards,
Calx
Reply With Quote
