Now that Aperture 3 is out, I need to update one area of my previous article.

No, Aperture 3 doesn’t support the Olympus E-P1/E-P2/E-PL1 or Panasonic GF-1 RAWs (yet).

There is a workaround, however, for doing sorting, selecting, and metadata in Aperture 3.

1. Select un-viewable RAWs in Apple Aperture 3’s thumbnail view
2. Cmd-click to get a contextual menu and choose “Set JPEG as Master.”
   

   Mouse over the image to see what happens after “Set JPEG as Master.”
3. Do work to create a select, rate images, and the like.
4. Catapult workflow with some adjustments. You’ll now need to be in 32-bit mode on Apple Aperture 3 to use it.
   

   How to open Aperture 3 in 32-bit mode (always).

   Trying to return to “Set RAW as Master’ and then Catapulting yields and “Editing Error” as the backdoor used by Catapult is now closed. 🙁

   

   Therefore, you must export masters manually to the drop folder, generate RAWs, and then Catapult. If you do so, you can’t reimport the sidecar xmps, currently.

Here is some proof:

The House
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Olympus E-P2, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 50mm f1.1
1/8sec5, ISO200, 50mm (100mm)

Image processed from ACR in Aperture. Try as you might, you can’t recover clipped highlights.

(BTW, the images were uploaded with the new built in Flickr support, so we’ll see how good sync is—it appears to be uni-directional. For instance, I just found out movies aren’t supported in Flickr sync, so videos are synced back as stills.)