Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Adobe Lightroom is directly competitive with Aperture. You should try both.

Lightbox is NOTHING whatsoever to do with Adobe - I think it was an alternative take on iPhoto, and the developer has since moved on and made a couple of Aperture plugins, and writes on O'Reilly's Aperture blog.

You are getting it confused with Adobe's LightROOM. That's the one you should try and compare with Aperture.

William, you appear to be mixing up different pieces of software.

Lightbox is a cataloguing/organising tool that has been around in different versions for five years or so. It's cheap ($25) and not enormously powerful. Great for the price, though. Nothing to do with Adobe, and as you've seen on their page they are moving over to extras for Aperture rather than updating Lightbox. So far this is limited to an export plug-in.

LightRoom is Adobe's equivalent to Aperture, an 'all-in-one' cataloguing, RAW conversion and image adjustment app.

In theory, Aperture and LightRoom are direct competitors, in practice they cover a lot of the same ground and appear similar but have a quite different emphasis.
LightRoom will usually perform better on old/low-end hardware, supports more cameras and has more image adjustments. If you have to have vignetting or chromatic abberation correction then Aperture 1.5 is likely to be frustrating.
Aperture has fewer and potentially less powerful image adjustments, but much more sophisticated organisational tools, more support for moving organisational structures between computers and (to my taste, as a part-time programmer) a better-designed interface. It is also scriptable to a relatively high level, while LightRoom can't be scripted at all.

Ian

Think numbers. Programs like Aperture and Lightroom can make those adjustments to many pictures at a time (eg to a whole wedding shoot), and then send them all to the printer, web, contact sheet etc. Photoshop processes one picture at a time, though images can be sent to it in a batch, but it can make precise adjustments to selected areas of the image.

Lightroom's perfectly good with removable media, and it shows you which folders contain your images, while Aperture hides the locations behind the project concept. On the other hand, LR really misses the smart album feature that's in Aperture.

Try the DAM Forum I recommended, and the Adobe equivalent of this forum is equally good (and strongly critical comments are not censored).

William Ritchie wrote:
...Since I use Photoshop to do all of my image manipulation/correction, I wonder why I'd use another program to do the same sort of corrections in Light Room and or Aperture or am I missing something?

The reason is speed. Post-processing a large shoot might take 10 hours in Bridge/PSCS3, 6 hours in Lightroom and 4 hours in Aperture.

I used both apps, now use Aperture only, but will be further evaluating all apps in the genre at Mac Expo in 2 weeks. I shoot a Nikon D2x professionally, and 98% of my captured RAW images are fully dealt with in Aperture, quite fast. PSCS3 is used for the 2% that need some major image editing work like removal of distracting objects in the scene.

-Allen Wicks

Bill-

Upgrade; PSCS3 is a great app, better than PSCS2 by a lot in addition to being much faster than PSCS2 under Rosetta.

Aperture works fine with CS3, but I will not at this point further evaluate CS3/Aperture/Lightroom until after Mac Expo, which may change things.

If the Luna/Long book is out of print that lends credence to the speculation that an Aperture upgrade may be imminent.

Note that personally I do not use Aperture to do wholesale edits to batches of images and do not consider that to be Aperture's major benefit. I find workflow improvements in stacking, reviewing, ranking, keywording, building projects, using the Vault concept.

-Allen Wicks

Message was edited by: SierraDragon

Right now there's little or nothing to choose between how Aperture or Lightroom works with Photoshop. Right now, the link is little more than marketing, though in the future you'd have to expect that Adobe would add more and slicker integration. On the other hand, the need for Photoshop may decrease as Lightroom/Aperture add features, and many third party apps work well with Photoshop. So I wouldn't let Photoshop integration swing a decision on Aperture or Lightroom.

One big reason you may want to upgrade is the enormously-improved panorama feature within CS3 (the code is also used in other registration tasks such as HDR and image stacks). The new black and white adjustment is also really well thought out.

You questioned what I meant by "Lightroom's perfectly good with removable media, and it shows you which folders contain your images, while Aperture hides the locations behind the project concept." I assume it's the second part that's less clear (they both handle removable media well enough). When you import files into Aperture, you set up a project and that is how you see the images within the application - belonging to a project. You don't see which folders contain your files, and would have to go into Finder to see them (they are either managed or copied into a vault file, or referenced - ie left in a conventional folder). That's not hard, but this concept means you can't readily check that all files are in the library. You'd need to import the folders again. Lightroom started off this way but Adobe responded to user demand and shows images' folders in the library interface. You can use a Sync command to update folders (eg if you save new files into those folders outside Lightroom) and can move files between folders. There's a greater degree of certainty, but a less abstract organisational structure. You'll have to try the apps to really see what I mean.

Message was edited by: culcheth