Aperture

Do any of you guys use it? I am just a casual photographer and do a bit of messing around in PSE 8.0 on my iMac. I do like the simplicity of using iPhoto as an organizational tool, but it's a bit of a pain to do RAW adjustments outside of iPhoto and then have to report back in the revised versions. I was hoping to find a software that could be a one stop shop and do it all while retaining the work my wife and I have done in organizing our events in iPhoto. I know Aperture will allow you to copy over your iPhoto library and keep everything the same with Projects, Faces, etc. Also, now that it's only $80 from the Mac App store it is much more appealing!

Thoughts?

That's my program of choice. It does about 95% of what I need, photoshop for the rest.

This is Aperture 3? A3 is very good. Most importantly to me, it allows you to use plug-ins for editing which iPhoto doesn't really do well. I use all of Nik's stuff as a plug-in to Aperture 3. You can the basic editing with A3 but it can't do Photoshop or Gimp stuff if you plan to swap out skies, remove elements from a picture, change backgrounds, etc... I do all of my basic editing in A3 w/Nik Plug-ins and then use Gimp (still too cheap to buy CS5 although I did recently do a 30 day trial) if I need more drastic editing!

A3 will allow you to easily:
- touch up portraits (clone, blur, etc...)
- darken skies (using brush tools)
- selectively sharpen, soften, etc...