Aperture vs Lightroom

davidar75 wrote:
Although I won't lie... I would really have liked to have heard the opinion of someone who prefers light room too... which may be a bit too much to ask on the apple website I guess! 😉

I have been an Aperture user for several years now, and have recently decided to switch to Lightroom for many reasons. I finally downloaded the trial version of Lightroom and was amazed at what I was able to accomplish in Lightroom that I cannot accomplish in Aperture. I post processed several portraits for a client, where I brightened and saturated the eyes, whitened the teeth, and smoothed the skin, all nondestructively without ever leaving Lightroom. This is impossible to do in Aperture without resorting to a plug-in and creating an intermediate TIFF file that bakes in your edits.

Aperture seems fine for those who shoot thousands of images and do very little post processing. Those who use it primarily as a tool for sorting and cataloging, but do very little post processing and image editing. But for those of us who need some basic darkroom editing techniques without wanting to resort to Photoshop, Lightroom shines.

I have also found that the majority of the pro market appears to be embracing Lightroom. This results in a much broader array of resources available for Lightroom vs. Aperture. If you search the web, you will find ten times the number of resources for Lightroom than Aperture. Whether it is dedicated websites, training tutorials, books, forums, etc., there are just many more resources available for Lightroom. Lightroom forums are much more active than Aperture forums, too. All of this adds up to product momentum for Lightroom that I just don't see with Aperture. I have no faith in Apple's determination to continue to develop Aperture given Lightroom's domination of the market.

Aperture has a nice interface and some great features. But I still feel that Apple has dropped the ball by not including nondestructive local editing in version 2. They have fallen way behind Adobe and I don't think they will ever catch up. And it is frustrating how silent they are about the future direction of their software. At least Adobe gives us some idea of the direction they are heading.

If I were you, I would be very sure that Aperture is the program you want to use, because it will be a lot more work to make the switch after you have thousands of images processed in Aperture than before. The editing changes to your Raw images don't carry over when you switch programs.

From what I've seen, I do like the photo editing features of Lightroom better than those in Aperture. I can make a photo pop in Lightroom using tools like the adjustment brush, graduated filters, masks that allow you to apply your changes to selected elements of the photo, instead of making global changes. From that perspective, Lightroom beats Aperture without question in my opinion.

However, I still prefer Aperture. Those are features that I can (and do) accomplish in Photoshop, NIK or OnOne plugins, etc. I'm pleased with Aperture's features for managing my image library, and I like the fact that it doesn't force me into the same workflow that LR does. Given my purpose for Aperture, the additional cost for Lightroom doesn't convince me to switch. I also noted that a lot of the plug-ins I wanted were available for Aperture long before LR.

One of the things that I find annoying is Apple's silence on product updates. Sometimes the lack of information about how Apple intends to improve Aperture makes folks wonder IF it will improve Aperture. Adobe, on the other hand, is much more open with its customers. There is a thriving community of Adobe product fans and Adobe employees participate in that community. Adobe has a Labs website (where we first saw Lightroom) to give us an impression of what's coming down the pike. The last Aperture update was February of last year. Other than the rumor sites, has anyone heard a peep out of Apple as to what (or when) we can expect from the next version?

Is Adobe really being more open, or are they announcing betas with long trial periods (which change very little in terms of features over the course of the beta, at least in version 2), that are responses to Aperture releases? The latter seems to be more what has happened to me -- they're really early pre-releases to avoid Aperture getting too much market share while they respond.

Could be a jaded view though 🙂

I think Lightroom was a response to Aperture, but I'm still waiting for Apple to respond to the photo editing features of LR 2.0. In any case, at least I know what's up Adobe's sleeve. With Apple, there just isn't any indication of future releases to the general public regarding most products.

The exception seems to be the operating systems. If they can preview Mac OS X or iPhone OS, why can't we at least get a feature set preview of Aperture?

Jade,

I totally concur. I have used Aperture for several years, and purchased all versions of Lightroom. I like the editing capabilities and presets of Lightroom but the user interface is sloooooow going, and feels bloated compared to Aperture. Switching between modules in LR is a drag, I feel like I'm spending too much time pressing keys to get things done. Even the crop tool is a big fat p.i.a. compared to Apertures slick little, intuitive crop tool. All in all, Aperture is almost a metaphor for Apple. Clean design, and productive. I'm still working on getting used to Lightroom. I feel that for the low volume wedding shooter, or the high end hobbiest, Lightroom would be very nice, but in our business, we need to process images, crop them, and move on and Aperture is just better at that in my opinion. Oh, I forgot to mention we use the book tool every week, something that is non existent at this time in LR.

I initially started with Aperture but returned it and now use Lightroom, which can handle the larger file sizes I work with (300+ mb, from scanned 4X5 negs). The folks at my local Apple store swore up and down that Aperture could import and edit those files, but it couldn't, at least not last fall. Does the current version work with large 16-bit files? If so, I'm interested in taking another look.

The other Lightroom command that has proved useful is the Library > Synchronize folder command, since I'm constantly updating multiple image folders on the hard disk. There is probably a way to do the same thing in Aperture, though.

Still not sure Aperture will handle the 4x5 scans with aplomb. There have been posts here over the years about issues with files in the "several hundred MB" range, and 500 seems too big; 300 may be there as well. I don't think that's necessarily Aperture's forte, which is really high speed selection and editing of RAW files.

There is no real equivalent to the Synchronize folder command, because Aperture cannot read XMP sidecar files and add that info to its database at this time. So there's no synchronize. You could import files in a central location, but in general if you're storing your master RAW files somewhere and trying to keep a couple Aperture copies in sync, that's a painful road. It's much better to use a "master/slave" type of setup with Aperture where you sync projects one way, and usually one time.

Jan B. wrote:
...the larger file sizes I work with (300+ mb, from scanned 4X5 negs).

Aperture is about speedy workflow with a volume of images. Any film workflow (especially medium format scans) is by definition very, very slow. IMO such extremely slow workflows obviate much of Aperture's modern digital capture strength and tend to better fall into the slow, film-evolved Adobe CS workflow.

-Allen Wicks

Aperture is about speedy workflow with a volume of images. Any film workflow (especially medium format scans) is by definition very, very slow. IMO such extremely slow workflows obviate much of Aperture's modern digital capture strength and tend to better fall into the slow, film-evolved Adobe CS workflow.

Once a negative's scanned, it's digital. The only difference is that the file size is way larger, at least if the neg is a 4X5 scanned at hi res. Lightroom handles larger file sizes and Aperture, apparently, doesn't.

I teach Aperture at work in a school photography photo lab and use Lightroom at home for my own negative scans. Both function at about the same speed for large volumes of images and seem about as intuitive in their respective workflow/interfaces. Any differences in that respect seem minor. For both, it's a learning curve issue, not a software/speed issue.

William Lloyd wrote:
Still not sure Aperture will handle the 4x5 scans with aplomb. There have been posts here over the years about issues with files in the "several hundred MB" range, and 500 seems too big; 300 may be there as well. I don't think that's necessarily Aperture's forte, which is really high speed selection and editing of RAW files.

There is no real equivalent to the Synchronize folder command, because Aperture cannot read XMP sidecar files and add that info to its database at this time. So there's no synchronize. You could import files in a central location, but in general if you're storing your master RAW files somewhere and trying to keep a couple Aperture copies in sync, that's a painful road. It's much better to use a "master/slave" type of setup with Aperture where you sync projects one way, and usually one time.

Thanks for the info and confirmation, William. It's a great program - I hope Apple adds the sync option at some point.

{quote:title=Jan B. wrote:}
Once a negative's scanned, it's digital. The only difference is that the file size is way larger...{quote}

With scans, you've selected the images before you ever sit down at the computer. You're making your decisions about what images to use on a light table, and presumably you're only scanning your best images. That workflow is vastly different from the fully digital workflow that Allen is referring to and at which Aperture really shines.

DLS

MacDLS wrote:

{quote:title=Jan B. wrote:}
Once a negative's scanned, it's digital. The only difference is that the file size is way larger...{quote}

With scans, you've selected the images before you ever sit down at the computer. You're making your decisions about what images to use on a light table, and presumably you're only scanning your best images. That workflow is vastly different from the fully digital workflow that Allen is referring to and at which Aperture really shines.

DLS

Ooookayyy. My last attempt was a "non-constructive rant or complaint." So let me word it differently.

Scanned-film workflow is a lot more like all-digital workflow than you're giving it credit for. Even if Apple doesn't want to fix the large-file-size issue because so few film users use Aperture, they're going to have to address it eventually, when full-frame digital SLR sensors start putting out files big enough to show up the bug. That day is not too far off, I believe!

Duncan

Duncan,

Do you really believe that full-frame digital SLR sensors will be spitting out 300MB files in the near future? That will surely be out of my price range!

Aperture was designed for a digital workflow, it does that quite well and I have no reason to believe that it won't continue to do that well as the technology evolves.

I have 25 years worth of negs to scan, but I expect that to be a CS workflow. However, I still plan to catalog them in Aperture.

I'm not an Aperture apologist, and I really don't care which Application, Platform or Camera someone else chooses. I judge photography on the work not the workflow.

BTW: I did see you previous post.

DLS

I have to revise my last post, in favor of Aperture. I've been working non stop with Lightroom for the past week and frankly, the tool set in Lightroom is amazing. I can create images in Lightroom that would require a trip to Photoshop in Aperture, and I can create them w/o adding a 25mb file to my drive (as Aperture seems to do). Aperture is now, except for it's book module a lean mean machine, but not up to snuff when used for real image manipulation. The soften skin in Lightroom tool alone is worth switching. And to think I just paid 200.00 for this tool as a plugin for Aperture.