As noted in this forum, Aperture's printing capability doesn't appear to be of the highest quality. That said, finding alternative printing software is limited for a Mac.
One option is ImageNest. I recently compared exact prints and found one significant difference. The yellows with Imagenest are quite obviously superior and more true to the actual image. Aperture's yellows had more of a orangish tinge to them. Additionally, image brightness and detail were marginally better with ImageNest. Although i have Parallels and Qimage available, I didn't test Qimage against both Aperture and ImageNest since I really want to stay on the Mac platform.
I am not trying to slam Aperture, since its printing ability is still quite good for many images, but if one wants the best quality for a fine art image, it may be worth the effort to conduct comparisons.
I would be curious if anyone has compared Photoshop to Aperture printing?
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Printing comparison
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Just for kicks I did print out a comparison between Aperture, ImageNest, and Qimage. Once again Qimage is the king. The detail and crispness of the image was noticeably better. The yellows still were not quite on par with ImageNest, but a tab bit better than Aperture. But the overall color rendition of all colors and overall print crispness was better with Qimage. Considering the options, I already have Qimage and ImageNest would be a $199 investment. Thus, I will probably stick with Qimage, but may try Fusion to get a better visualization software experience. I also need to try tweaking some Qimage settings to get the yellows more accurate. If anyone has any suggestions on tweaking settings, let me know.
Again I do want to emphasize that Aperture’s print quality on this last test was quite good and would satisfy most folks. But when one is printing a large fine art print, subtle difference really make the difference.