Raw in Bridge and Aperture

[Duffy Pratt]

Suppose I have both Bridge and Aperture on my machine.

If I have a raw file, I can make adjustments to it in either Aperture or ACR, and as I understand it, the changes are kept in a sidecar file. Here are my questions: If I make some ACR adjustments, I can see those adjustments when I go back to bridge. But will Aperture be able to read those instructions? Similarly, if I make some adjustments in Aperture, will Bridge be able to interpret them?

And what happens if I make adjustments to a raw picture in both ACR and Aperture. Will the last adjustments prevail? Or will the adjustments exist side by side, one visible to Bridge and the other visible to Aperture? Or will something else happen.

I'm trying to decide on how I am going to organize things now that I'm switching to Mac. I'd like to keep things as simple as possible. There are some things I find very attractive about aperture, but I don't know if it will overly complicate things for me.

Duffy

[jeffkohn]

I would guess that Aperture has its own settings for Raw conversion, I don't think you can expect it to pick of camera raw settings because it has its own converter. Same thing going the other way, ACR isn't going to know anything about Aperture settings.

Isn't Aperture one of those "database"-driven apps where you have to import your files? It may not even use sidecars at all but just internal metadata within the database.

Now if you substitute Lightroom for Aperture, I think you should be able to share settings since Lightroom uses the same conversion engine as Bridge?ACR under the hood.

[Duffy Pratt]

Interesting point about Aperture possibly not even creating a sidecar file. I'll have to look into that. It definitely writes data instructions somewhere for interpreting raw changes, but I don't have any idea where it would put the instructions.

Aperture is a database driven app, and to a certain extent that worries me. I loved the database aspect of PS Elements -- until something went wrong. Whenever there was some kind of ODBC problem, it would cause all kinds of headaches. The attractive thing for me about Aperture is the ease of doing some basic things -- like packaging up resized jpgs for an e-mail. On the PC side, I had already decided not to get lightroom, because Bridge was working well enough for my purposes. Maybe I should just stick with bridge for the Mac as well.

Duffy