Lightroom vs. Aperture

LP16

I was curious what everyone though of both or either one. Im trying to decide myself and wanted to see who liked what best. I have cs2 and im am upgrading to cs3 when i get a D300. Everyone seems very knowledgeable, hoping to take mine up a few notches:bow Thanks:D

Andy

type in

lightroom aperture

in the dgrin search. You'll find a lot of threads on this

example:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47106&highlight=lightroom+aperture

welcome!

LP16

Andy wrote:

type in

lightroom aperture

in the dgrin search. You'll find a lot of threads on this

example:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47106&highlight=lightroom+aperture

welcome!

Thanks and sorry about that i didnt notice them by scrolling around Newbbie

Andy

LP16 wrote:

Thanks and sorry about that i didnt notice them by scrolling around Newbbie

No worries at all!

KED

LP16 wrote:

I was curious what everyone though of both or either one. Im trying to decide myself and wanted to see who liked what best. I have cs2 and im am upgrading to cs3 when i get a D300. Everyone seems very knowledgeable, hoping to take mine up a few notches Thanks:D

I recently abandoned Aperture in favor of Lightroom, although naturally there are some things that Aperture does better. What I primarily like about LR happens to be something that some people hate (as you may see on some of the threads here and elsewhere): a very systematic, "work your way through the boxes" approach to basic, and not-necessarily-so-basic, image editing in the Develop module. Also, since it's an Adobe product, the round-tripping with Photoshop seems more natural although I haven't used that much.

I think Aperture's file management is a bit more intuitive once you understand the difference between folders, projects, etc. It allows for a more hierarchical organizational structure with the ability to close off entire categories for a cleaner look and easier navigation. I'm afraid it won't take long for my LR library to get confusing, even to me. I don't do much with keywords and other metadata yet, so have no opinion on which is more efficient for that aspect of file management.

One pro who has given me lots of good advice loves Aperture's "Levels" controls, which he believes allow for much greater fine-tuning than either LR or CS3 offer.

One other thing that may or not matter to you: Aperture supports dual monitors, LR does not.

Finally, one thing that always drove me crazy about Apeture was that it was slow and jumpy. This may have been something that could have been fixed with more RAM, but I haven't had the problem with LR on the same computer.

It may come down on what you primarily want the app to do for you. For me it's image editing first, file management second. If you run much of your work thru CS, your priorities may be entirely different. The best advice I can offer you is this: Both offer 30-day free trials. Take advantage of those at a time when you will have lots of images to process, and try processing them in both -- from upload to editing to wherever you would normally go from there. Just be aware that no matter how many times you reset the import preference in Aperture, it always finds a way to make itself the default app that opens when you connect a camera or a card reader. It gets annoying having to wait for it to load itself just so you can shut it down.

LP16

Thanks alot KED. I appreciate the sound advise. That sounds like most of the good or bad complaints about either or and i will try the free trials for sure. I heard Aperture was slow, but i have a newly acquired MacPro that im upgrading to 5gb or ram and faster video card. So, hopefully none of that will give me any problems in the future. Thanks again KED!

KED

LP16 wrote:

Thanks alot KED. I appreciate the sound advise. That sounds like most of the good or bad complaints about either or and i will try the free trials for sure. I heard Aperture was slow, but i have a newly acquired MacPro that im upgrading to 5gb or ram and faster video card. So, hopefully none of that will give me any problems in the future. Thanks again KED!

That's funny -- they're building my MacPro right now with plentiful RAM and the ATI graphics card - hopefully I have it before Xmas, but should have it in 2007 ~for sure~.

I acquired Aperture when I switched to Mac. Then came CS3 for me (no Elements for Intel Macs) so I checked LR. Never had a chance to compare really. Your side-by-side 30 day comparison could be really instructive to tens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of people! I don't know how serious a photographer you are, but if you are at the serious end, you could do an amazing post on your findings. Please bring it!

LP16

KED wrote:

That's funny -- they're building my MacPro right now with plentiful RAM and the ATI graphics card - hopefully I have it before Xmas, but should have it in 2007 ~for sure~.

I acquired Aperture when I switched to Mac. Then came CS3 for me (no Elements for Intel Macs) so I checked LR. Never had a chance to compare really. Your side-by-side 30 day comparison could be really instructive to tens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of people! I don't know how serious a photographer you are, but if you are at the serious end, you could do an amazing post on your findings. Please bring it!

Yeah got it a few months ago and love it. Im just stepping into the new realm of digital photography myself. I've used PP an ok amount to get around in but nothing to extreme. I started of with an old Nikon F2 (remind you I am old 23) took tons of pictures and wanted to go to school for photography after that! My friends grandpa worked at the local paper (since they didn't use film anymore) he got them to donate a brand new F100 (used 2 or 3 times) to me. I also have been saving for a new digital body and the D300 came out at just the right time. So, after the holidays im going to get me one. Im excited to step into this and try everything and start school soon as well. Ill do my best to document from my experience being a newbie to the majority of it all.

Lovesong

Just a heads up- Aperture, and in fact 10.5.1 (read- iPhoto, ImageCapture) doesn't support the RAWs from either the D300 or the D3 yet. ACR (meaning Lightroom and CS3 do.

I spent some time working with both softwares. I ended up sticking with Aperture for one main reason- the way it organizes all my files. I think of it as a big safety deposit box, where I can get to copies of my pictures, edit them, and take them out, while the negatives stay in the box. Metadata control is also a bit more intuitive, and I simply loved the non-linear workflow.

Lightroom does have it's advantages. I, for one, like the curves much better than the levels sliders in Aperture. Also, though this isn't important if you are familiar with Flash, Lightroom webpages are more flexible and allow flash sites.

Do test them- but with a MacPro, speed shouldn't be the thing that keeps you from getting one or the other.

LP16

Lovesong wrote:

Just a heads up- Aperture, and in fact 10.5.1 (read- iPhoto, ImageCapture) doesn't support the RAWs from either the D300 or the D3 yet. ACR (meaning Lightroom and CS3 do.

I spent some time working with both softwares. I ended up sticking with Aperture for one main reason- the way it organizes all my files. I think of it as a big safety deposit box, where I can get to copies of my pictures, edit them, and take them out, while the negatives stay in the box. Metadata control is also a bit more intuitive, and I simply loved the non-linear workflow.

Lightroom does have it's advantages. I, for one, like the curves much better than the levels sliders in Aperture. Also, though this isn't important if you are familiar with Flash, Lightroom webpages are more flexible and allow flash sites.

Do test them- but with a MacPro, speed shouldn't be the thing that keeps you from getting one or the other.

It might be a few weeks to a month before i get the D300 so hopefully by then they might have a update. Thanks for the heads up.

W.W. Webster

KED wrote:

I recently abandoned Aperture in favor of Lightroom, although naturally there are some things that Aperture does better.

That is also my experience and view, precisely.

LP16 wrote:

I heard Aperture was slow, but i have a newly acquired MacPro that im upgrading to 5gb or ram and faster video card. So, hopefully none of that will give me any problems in the future.

Good luck, but don't count on it! From my experience, the only thing that might make Aperture usable is the rumoured complete rewrite of all the code being undertaken for version 2.0.

I'd wait for 2.0 to be released, trial it with a substantial quantity (i.e. thousands) of images under management, and look particularly carefully for performance hits that might persist from earlier versions when multiple uses of the Spot and Patch tool are applied to images.

Hindsight

I agree with others that Aperture is awesome for it's file system. It keeps everything in one place whereas LR can be messy. That said, LR the one I prefer to use. I'm much faster on it, and it's much faster on my machine.

LP16

Thats what i've been finding in my internet searches about them. They both look like great programs and I was interested in seeing what other individuals on here thought. All of the feedback has been great and alot of help.

arodney

Hindsight wrote:

I agree with others that Aperture is awesome for it's file system. It keeps everything in one place whereas LR can be messy.

LR.'s files system is only as messy as the user who is messy.

I have a very simple file system of images in specific folders on a Raid (with back-up's of course). LR has everything listed as I have the folders on disk. I don't see what makes Aperture better, in fact, that everything is kind of stored into a proprietary package makes it even more troubling to me.

KED

arodney wrote:

LR.'s files system is only as messy as the user who is messy.

I have a very simple file system of images in specific folders on a Raid (with back-up's of course). LR has everything listed as I have the folders on disk. I don't see what makes Aperture better, in fact, that everything is kind of stored into a proprietary package makes it even more troubling to me.

I'm not a defender of Aperture, but I don't see how its file management system is any more "proprietary" than LR's.

The "messy" part, to me, is the lack of hierarchical organization. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I have not found any way to group folders under broader categories in a way that's comparable to Apertures Folders => Projects hierarchy. I had 30 or 40 projects (i.e. individual shooting sessions/events) that I processed in aperture, all organized under various folders that can be closed up so that everything takes up about 2" of column space on my screen. I don't know how you avoid "folder sprawl" in LR.

arodney

KED wrote:

I'm not a defender of Aperture, but I don't see how its file management system is any more "proprietary" than LR's.

Its not putting all the images into a package any more? It used to (drove me nuts).

The "messy" part, to me, is the lack of hierarchical organization. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I have not found any way to group folders under broader categories in a way that's comparable to Apertures Folders => Projects hierarchy. I had 30 or 40 projects (i.e. individual shooting sessions/events) that I processed in aperture, all organized under various folders that can be closed up so that everything takes up about 2" of column space on my screen. I don't know how you avoid "folder sprawl" in LR.

Not sure I follow you. In LR, the folders are just that, a folder on your HD of images. I think people get too caught up in trying to locate and organize there. Its useful if you want to find images based on where they actually reside on the HD so its useful for that. But the power comes in using Collections.

For example, I have folders of images that span a fixed amount of time (a year) but of the same subject (example, Dogs). So I have two folder locations (2006 and 2007) of Dogs in different locations but all I have to do is make a collection, then drag all the images from both folders into that collection, I have access to all dog images despite where they reside in a folder or on a drive. It seems like what you're asking for could be accomplished using collections.

KED

arodney wrote:

Its not putting all the images into a package any more? It used to (drove me nuts).



Not sure I follow you. In LR, the folders are just that, a folder on your HD of images. I think people get too caught up in trying to locate and organize there. Its useful if you want to find images based on where they actually reside on the HD so its useful for that. But the power comes in using Collections.

For example, I have folders of images that span a fixed amount of time (a year) but of the same subject (example, Dogs). So I have two folder locations (2006 and 2007) of Dogs in different locations but all I have to do is make a collection, then drag all the images from both folders into that collection, I have access to all dog images despite where they reside in a folder or on a drive. It seems like what you're asking for could be accomplished using collections.

Part A: I don't know what you are referring to when you say "package", but if that is an Aperture term of art, it's not anymore.

Part B: We seem to think differently about organization, but that may be related to what we shoot. Apart from occasional "miscellaneous", I shoot sporting events, almost always involving the same (school) teams. So I name all my folders ("projects" in Aperture-speak) "YYYY-DD-M -School- -Sport- vs -Opponent-". Then in Aperture, it was nice to use the Folders to collect all the projects for a particular school. The relationship between LR Folders and Collections isn't a nested one, it's more of a parallel thing IMO.

arodney

KED wrote:

Part A: I don't know what you are referring to when you say "package", but if that is an Aperture term of art, it's not anymore.

The database (Library, Catalog) in which it stores images. In the past, it was what is known on the Mac as a package. It looked like one document, but you could option click to open it up and see all the other files within.

KED

arodney wrote:

The database (Library, Catalog) in which it stores images. In the past, it was what is known on the Mac as a package. It looked like one document, but you could option click to open it up and see all the other files within.

I did a quick search of Aperture help and user manual, and the vocabulary of Catalog and Package are not to be found. That's not necessarily dispositive, to be sure.

BUT, in the meantime, I have gone back into LR and done some experimentation that maybe I should have done before. You CAN nest folders within folders, so that's one less LR competitive disadvantage than I had previously perceived.

Learning is a good thing!

LP16

Thats all great info to know and something to look at when i get them to compare.

arodney

KED wrote:

I did a quick search of Aperture help and user manual, and the vocabulary of Catalog and Package are not to be found.

Library?

KED

arodney wrote:

Library?

Sure - the Aperture Library is contained within Pictures on a Mac. It sets itself up upon install. Both the images and the version metadata are stored there -- as opposed to LR, where metadata are in the Catalog. Maybe because I used Aperture first and was experimenting with LR, I didn't like the idea of all my images going forward being stored in Pictures, so I created a LR Library folder within Pictures. So, where the two apps differ is that in LR the images and the metadata are in two different places. I don't think that will matter to me until my hard drive blows up and I have to go to my backups to put it all back together.

You are far more experienced than I am, but to me they both have their own proprietary approaches to image and metadata storage and management, and those should be transparent to us most of the time anyway.

arodney

KED wrote:

Sure - the Aperture Library is contained within Pictures on a Mac. It sets itself up upon install. Both the images and the version metadata are stored there -- as opposed to LR, where metadata are in the Catalog.

OK, its the embedding of the images in the Library I wasn't too happy with.

As to a package, just option click on this file, it should provide an option to open (and then view) the stuff inside.

KED

arodney wrote:

OK, its the embedding of the images in the Library I wasn't too happy with.

As to a package, just option click on this file, it should provide an option to open (and then view) the stuff inside.

Doesn't matter anymore - now that I've discovered subfoldering in LR, that issue is off the table and I can focus upstream on post processing and -- oh yeah I almost forgot -- taking pictures!

LP16

Very good info to know now im glad you both debated it and found new info. Thanks!

KED

LP16 wrote:

Very good info to know now im glad you both debated it and found new info. Thanks!

If you ever need to decide between two opinions -- mine and arodney's -- go with him every time!!!! He's the real deal, published, and I am just a guy figuring it out.

LP16

KED wrote:

If you ever need to decide between two opinions -- mine and arodney's -- go with him every time!!!! He's the real deal, published, and I am just a guy figuring it out.

Thats way im glad i joined this place. Smart and knowledgeable people from all sides I was recommended this place hands down from a forum my girlfriend posts on.

Hudworks76

LP16 wrote:

I was curious what everyone though of both or either one. Im trying to decide myself and wanted to see who liked what best. I have cs2 and im am upgrading to cs3 when i get a D300. Everyone seems very knowledgeable, hoping to take mine up a few notches Thanks:D

Although a poorly self taught novice I love Aperture, primarily, like everyone has stated, because of it's organizational capabilities, although you can get a bit lost with 20 libraries spread over six hard drives. Featuring: it seemed a good idea at the time. Aperture fan or not I was forced to download Lightroom when I found out that Ap didn't like my D300's raw images. I've been working LR a bit typically with no respect for reading instructions and just trying to get done what I need to be done....so for someone like me it's not so easy to find your way around to be honest.

BUT, contrary to some opinions I think it's editing capabilities are better. My tech jargon is rudimentary at best- whatever, the point is, on discovering how LR works there were some under exposed images that I found myself importing from Aperture into LR in order to save them from the trash can by using the 'Fill Light' slider in Develop. It seemed to be more sensitve than the Aperture equivalent. That kind of pissed me off to be honest as there is nothing more annoying than finding out that your favorite app is not as good at some things as others are and at the moment I am figuratively straddled btwen the two. I beleive LR will give you better editing results but it's taking me long enough to find my way around not to be convinced to switch. Of course the solution in my case at least is easy- increase the quality of the pic at the source. Be better. Here's one I saved earlier.

LP16

Hudworks76 wrote:

Although a poorly self taught novice I love Aperture, primarily, like everyone has stated, because of it's organizational capabilities, although you can get a bit lost with 20 libraries spread over six hard drives. Featuring: it seemed a good idea at the time. Aperture fan or not I was forced to download Lightroom when I found out that Ap didn't like my D300's raw images. I've been working LR a bit typically with no respect for reading instructions and just trying to get done what I need to be done....so for someone like me it's not so easy to find your way around to be honest.

BUT, contrary to some opinions I think it's editing capabilities are better. My tech jargon is rudimentary at best- whatever, the point is, on discovering how LR works there were some under exposed images that I found myself importing from Aperture into LR in order to save them from the trash can by using the 'Fill Light' slider in Develop. It seemed to be more sensitve than the Aperture equivalent. That kind of pissed me off to be honest as there is nothing more annoying than finding out that your favorite app is not as good at some things as others are and at the moment I am figuratively straddled btwen the two. I beleive LR will give you better editing results but it's taking me long enough to find my way around not to be convinced to switch. Of course the solution in my case at least is easy- increase the quality of the pic at the source. Be better. Here's one I saved earlier.

Yeah, before i decide im going to give both a good run and see what works the best for me. Im really excited to get it going soon. Great looking picture by the way. Its a nice save. I've done decent in the past with getting as much done in camera as possible. This will be my first real jump into an all digital workflow. but thanks for the input and picture

happy-imp

My Lightroom gripe
I'm feeling a bit 'straddled', too. I like LR/ACR raw processing way better, but I like aperture file handling way better. One thing that totally monkey-wrenched my lightroom experience last time I tried it, though was that it seemed like if I moved a folder on my computer, lightroom totally lost track of it, and there was no way to 'refind' it short of 'refinding' each picture individually. Ouch! What if I want to move my pics???

colourbox

happy-imp wrote:

I'm feeling a bit 'straddled', too. I like LR/ACR raw processing way better, but I like aperture file handling way better. One thing that totally monkey-wrenched my lightroom experience last time I tried it, though was that it seemed like if I moved a folder on my computer, lightroom totally lost track of it, and there was no way to 'refind' it short of 'refinding' each picture individually. Ouch! What if I want to move my pics???

What I've found is that Lightroom has no problem with that IF (big IF) the destination folder is already imported into Lightroom. If you move it within the Lightroom Folders panel, it will not lose track of it. If you move it out on the OS desktop, it forgets and if you reimport, it will not restore all your edit history for those images - it's like they're new different images. So I've learned to move photo folders from inside Lightroom if I want their histories and links to be maintained.