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The Great Aperture vs. Lightroom Thread
Andy
Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
OK Boys and Girls. You have your chance, now, to demo BOTH of these tools. Free.
Adobe Lightroom Beta
Apple Aperture Trial
I'd like to foster a discussion here in this thread, with comments from only people who have used both products. If you are a proponent of one or the other, that's cool. But please be prepared to backup your claims - we don't want copy/paste from other web sources - we want first hand experience and knowledge!
I'll start, with a few comments, and these are in no particular order:
Lightroom seems faster. Importing, working with the images, etc - it feels faster.
The Loupe in Aperture is cool, improved over v1, but I seem to like the "click once and zoom" loupe feature of Lightroom. EDIT: okay, I just found plenty more options in the Aperture Loupe. Nice. Good job, Apple. But it sure seems overkill, to me.
The grey-dropper tool in Lightroom, seems so much more usable. I find it really really easy to read, and instantly understand where my neutral grey is. With Aperture, I see the confusing loupe, and the RGB #s inside it are really tiny.
More thoughts to come. What are yours? I'm especially interested in your thoughts about these tools in your workflow. Frankly, one of the things I'm struggling with, is, "do I need either?" I've spent the past couple years becoming very proficient in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. Whenever I sit at length with Lightroom or Aperture, I'm wondering how my workflow will be faster, easier, etc with these new tools. So I'd like to hear first hand your experiences with first views, culling, rating, grouping, keywording, and more.
Discuss.
Adobe Lightroom Beta
Apple Aperture Trial
I'd like to foster a discussion here in this thread, with comments from only people who have used both products. If you are a proponent of one or the other, that's cool. But please be prepared to backup your claims - we don't want copy/paste from other web sources - we want first hand experience and knowledge!
I'll start, with a few comments, and these are in no particular order:
Lightroom seems faster. Importing, working with the images, etc - it feels faster.
The Loupe in Aperture is cool, improved over v1, but I seem to like the "click once and zoom" loupe feature of Lightroom. EDIT: okay, I just found plenty more options in the Aperture Loupe. Nice. Good job, Apple. But it sure seems overkill, to me.
The grey-dropper tool in Lightroom, seems so much more usable. I find it really really easy to read, and instantly understand where my neutral grey is. With Aperture, I see the confusing loupe, and the RGB #s inside it are really tiny.
More thoughts to come. What are yours? I'm especially interested in your thoughts about these tools in your workflow. Frankly, one of the things I'm struggling with, is, "do I need either?" I've spent the past couple years becoming very proficient in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. Whenever I sit at length with Lightroom or Aperture, I'm wondering how my workflow will be faster, easier, etc with these new tools. So I'd like to hear first hand your experiences with first views, culling, rating, grouping, keywording, and more.
Discuss.
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Lightroom on the other hand seems intuitive, fast and the workflow just seems to suit me. It disappoints me that there's no support for dual displays or any sort of healing tool. If the noise reduction and sharpening were improved and the other features mentioned included I wouldn't need to use PS at all for many images.
For now I'm sticking with Lightroom.
Charlie
As demonstrated in Beta 5 at Photo Plus Expo, spotting and redeye tools may be on the way. According to this thread at the Lightroom forums at labs.adobe.com, Beta 5 might not be publicly distributed. That could be taken to mean that the next public version might either be Beta 6 or release 1.0. The thread also says that some kind of soft proofing is on the way, and that dual display support is said to be unlikely to make it in.
(Sorry, I broke the rules of this thread...I haven't used Aperture for more than a few minutes. But I thought current info might be useful for Lightroom since it is changing rapidly.)
My Mac can't run Aperture, it's not a G5 so that was my first bummer!
I'm still trying to play in Lightroom, but for my style of shooting it's easier to use iView to catalog, and then drag my selected photo directly onto Photoshop.
I think if I were shooting portraits, or a lot of photos at the same location then I would find Lightroom handy -- altho once I had my adjustments made in Photoshop it's easy to save the setting and load it to the new photos.
http://www.twitter.com/deegolden
Thanks for the info Colourbox, it strikes me that sensor dust is an inescapable part of digital photography, therefore any lack of healing brush or clone tool seems remiss to me.
With the continual and rapid fall in the price of monitors I'm quite bemused that they choose not to support dual monitors.
Charlie
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I have no idea why, and I doubt it's my PC (Conroe @ 3.15ghz, 2gb DDR2, etc)
I know it's beta, but i'll be sticking with CS2 for now
I posted a bit of a poll HERE but have since started to lean towards Lightroom.
I have used Aperture since November of last year and despite running it on a MacBook Pro, I'm really dissappointed with the performance. I have since learned that CoreImage (the underlying imaging technology of Aperture) relies heavily on the GPU on the video card, which makes me think that laptop users are always going to suffer. I certainly do.
LR had that $199 deal and I bit. After months of neglect and suffering a slow Aperture experience, I decided to make my Aperture library "referenced masters" and have imported them into Lightroom as well so I can compare. I have made myself promise to not delete anything for a while to not cause me some major headaches.
Pros for Aperture:
1. File mgmt and structure are solid. The app can really keep track of all your media wherever you choose to put it. It's easy to consolidate or migrate masters from place to place, and in different and new folder structures.
2. You can do anything whenever you want. This is a pro and a con. I'm easily sidetracked and perhaps a little structure is good for me.
3. The interface is flexible. You can move the browser wherever and resize almost anything.
4. Decent backup
5. Metadata and keywording is very good. Good support for presets.
6. 2 monitor support.
Cons for Aperture:
1. SLOW. SLOW. PAINFULLY SO. On modern machines even.
2. The order of image adjustment tools is illogical and slows me down. Why do I have to scroll way down to make a WB adjustment? Shouldn't that be up towards the top? I also don't like that certain things are optional, like sharpening, monochrome, etc.
3. I still after nearly a year, don't find the levels tool to be intuitive other than for setting white and black points. Curves rules—full stop. Making constrast and tonal adjustments with this tool is no fun.
4. I'm not crazy about the saturation slider. It's useful between 0.00 and 0.10 then you have this horrible range of ugly over-saturation that comprises of 90% of the positive range.
5. You can do anything whenever you want. Is this better than the last one? should I give it 4 or 5 stars? Hmm, will a WB adjustment save this pic? Maybe if I crop it... the contrast could use some help... I wonder what it would look like in B&W. What if I lift & stamped this to all these shots? (20 minutes later) Now, what the hell was I doing?
6. Apple themselves—they are, in some ways, their own worst enemy when it comes to the Pro Apps. You have months, sometimes years of silence (do you hear me, Logic Pro team?) then they blurt out a release without me ever feeling like they listened to what I want in the apps. Sure they usually impress with some great technology. But they never tell you what they're working on. They won't divulge anything about the internal working space. As slick and functional as most of the Pro Apps are, some of them leave me wanting less (Final Cut Pro!). Aperture's interface, for me, kind of gets in the way of the thing that matters most: the photo.
Lightroom Cons:
1. The file mgmt is rudimentary at this point. I want more than simply "these photos are offline. Where are they? Wanna drill for them?" Could do better here for sure. You can set it to backup your catalog file and your imported files, but no real Vaults-type functionality. They could go the extra mile and make a consolidated backup of everything possible.
2. The modal thing. I spend 100% of my time in the Library or the Develop modules. It doesn't seem like too much to ask to be able to see more info about the ratings and metadata in the develop module so I don't have to keep switching back and forth. The View Options for Library are GREAT, but imprtant stuff like ratings are absent from the Develop module's View Options. I'm happy to try to focus on the task at hand, but there should be some wiggle room.
3. Stacks are crippled. You can't stack things when viewing photos in a collection or from a found set. Also, Aperture does a better job at showing you that there's a stack. LR only differentiates by having a single, small, square overlaid on the first photo.
4. Collections aren't as cool as Aperture's brown/blue folders and Projects. Not as hard to grasp either, OTOH. At least Projects and Catalogs can both be exported.
5. No smart folders. This is my fave feature in Aperture, organisation-wise.
6. no multi-monitor support.
Lightroom Pros:
1. Much better performance overall.
2. Develop module just rules. Everything is in the right order. The option/alt key provides valuable, fast visual feedback when making vital adjustments, such as in the exposure (lets you find your white point kinda like PS's Threshold tool), Blacks (black point, same thing) as well as the Split Toning, Sharpening, Recovery, and the entire Detail section. This has pretty much made me write off Aperture's adjustment tools. LR feels like it was made by people who adjust the #&$@ out of photos all day. I simply feel like I can get better looking photos because LR encourages experimentation and the tools work better. I am generally happy with what I can do in Aperture, but it isn't as fun or gratifying. Or fast.
3. Targeted Adjustment Tool.
4. I like colors as well as stars for rating. I like the picks flags better than Aperture's method.
5. LR's metadata browsers are cooler. I like being able to sort by camera or lens.
6. I find George Jardine's lightroom podcasts (thanks Andrew Rodney for the link) a breath of fresh air compared to Apple's tight-lipped policy on software development. I like hearing these guys talk philosophy, of the application's "personality" and of much of the inner workings of the app, from the Raw Shooter developer's input to the UI. This doesn't have anything to do with the usefulness of the app itself but it lets you know where they are doing the right thing. I like that they can talk freely about why they chose the color space and gamma they did. Not that any of this really matters, but I like to be IN THE LOOP.
So... I think I'm coming to the conclusion that the image editing in LR trumps all else that Aperture does better. The trouble is, I know that when Aperture 2.0 is released, it's gonna kick some ass and this torture will begin anew. LR 2.0 is also the version where they "get it right" and so it goes. They both play well with Photoshop in terms of round-trips, so there's no clear advantage there.
Indeed! Its useful for doing more exotic WB adjustments where you have a really odd color cast (think mixed lighting).
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
..actually you can enable ratings, color picker, as well as the pick flag thingy in the developer module. Look for the little drop down looking arrow in the left corner in the same area as the crop, red eye and spot tool. There are a series of little option checks you can enable for each of the features. It disappears for a time if in crop or spot removal, but clicking back on loupe tool (or hit D) will pop them all back on.
...perhaps I shouldn't post this as I am already a devote LR user, but wanted you to know there is some cool stuff hidden!
Scott Kelby has a really nice book on LR as well.. helped me to realize what was not quite obvious to me.
Thanks for that.
I wonder about all the books. The Adventure book looks interesting too, but I really want to learn something if I spend the money.