Last year, I abandoned Apple‘s Aperture after it crashed while I was editing a client’s images. I couldn’t restart it no matter what I tried and I spent the better part of a day trying to make it work to no avail. As a last ditch effort, I installed the copy of Adobe‘s Lightroom that shipped with my Leica M9 and it worked like a charm. Despite some of the operational differences I had to get accustomed to, I haven’t looked back.
Well, today while evaluating Lightroom‘s slideshow abilities for a client’s needs, I realized that there is only one image transition feature available. Besides being limiting, it’s boring too because all it does is transition from one image to another in a static fashion (I guess they’re not lying when they refer to it as a slideshow — it’s simply just that).
So, off I want to the App Store to find the latest copy of Aperture (CAN$79.99) and — sure enough — it was there. However, my iMac‘s older operating system didn’t support it! I had to update the OS to Mountain Lion (CAN$19.99) which took me a few hours (it’s over 4GB in size and then there’s the installation time on top of that).
Don’t you just love computers?
When all was said and done, however, my beloved Aperture (with all its enhance slideshow features!) was back.
And, it’s working perfectly with my Nik plug-ins. As an added bonus, the new OS runs quickly despite my aged iMac. Finally, the enhanced features Mountain Lion brings to the desktop are a welcome addition.
The only thing I have to get used to is the “opposite direction” mouse scrolling for navigating page content.
—Peter.
Prosophos 
You should become accustomed to the scrolling pretty quickly. I know older systems now feel weird to me. 😉
I use Lightroom and Aperture, doing most of the heavy lifting in Lightroom and then importing exported TIFF or JPEG files into Aperture for slide show and book use. I’ve done it a lot less since Lightroom 4 included a book module, and use Keynote to create slide shows more of the time now. But Aperture has some neat tricks in the slide show module that are hard to do elsewhere.
Whatever works is good. 🙂
Indeed, as I’ve gotten older I’ve embraced the “whatever works” philosophy. My processing with LR is now better than what I was doing with Aperture a year ago (probably because my “eye” for post-processing has improved), but as you write, Aperture has some “neat tricks” in the slideshow module that are indispensable once you’ve had a taste of them.
You can change how your mouse/track scrolls in either of their system prefs by deselecting the “When using gestures to scroll or navigate….
Yes, but doing that makes some other thing operate oddly.
True.
Under System preferences > Mouse > Gestures, uncheck “Scroll direction: Natural” and it should be back to the more natural way that you are likely used to.
M.
I use CaptureOne since ever and love this software. Maybe would worth a try…
Definitely recommend trying CaptureOne 7 if for nothing else than just opening RAW files. Not nearly as intuitive as LR to use as far as post processing goes but worth it (IMHO) even if you just open your files with it then transfer them elsewhere for further work…. That’s of course if you have run out of film and have to shoot digital 🙂
Thanks for all the tips guys…