Aperture vs Lightroom

So...which part of this is in favor of Aperture?

be nice if Lightroom supported soft proofing/ICC profiles for sending out photos for printing

Sorry about that post, I did not express myself very clearly.

My post prior to the last one was pro-Aperture. But since then I have been working with Lightroom quite a lot, mostly so that I could understand the tool that so many of our photographers are using. It is my feeling currently that the tool set in the Develop Module in Lightroom is far superior for our needs, compared to the relatively limited set provided in Aperture. Aperture offers plugins but at significant cost and storage overhead. Plugins do offer a lot of options, but frankly, the Parent Company, in this case Apple, needs to incorporate 95% of the tools used, as Adobe seems to be doing. I think I've purchased my last Aperture plugin.

I've decided that I'm going to wait and see what Apple does with the next version of Aperture. If they bring the photo processing tools up to par with Lightroom, then I'm a happy camper and will stay with it. If not, then I'll give serious thought to switching to Lightroom.

The thing is...I know Adobe wants to be in this business. For Apple, it doesn't seem quite as serious to their line of business.

I am in the same boat (i have both applications so the cost to switch is a non-issue for me). Both applications have their pros and cons, however LR has really responded with a nice tool set in LR2. We will know if Apple is in this to compete with the next major version. I hope they give us something soon or else I will have a hard time justifying sticking with Aperture.

Yes, that is where we are as well. On the fence. Some of us use the book tool in Aperture (a tool that is not available in Lightroom), and the 'book' workflow is integrated into our business. Still, there are other book layout tools. Aperture, to Apple is another app, but to Adobe it is part of their reason for existing. I tend to place my bets on whomever has the most to lose, other things being equal. In this case Adobe can not afford to lose, plus they are going to have boffo marketshare with the cross platform option. Apple will have to take the high road and develop a far superior application to Lightroom to beat Adobe in this battle but they have done it before in other areas.

I still have 9 days on my LR2 demo and after reading the last posts I decided to fire it up again.

I loaded a NEF file I hadn't yet touched in Aperture and went to the Develop module. Played around with everything and there's some very nice tools indeed. Being able to do local edits with a brush without "burning" a tiff file was liberating to say the least. The Split Toning tool is nice too. I ended up with something I thought was pretty cool and my faith in AP was admittedly a little shaken.

So... I went back to Aperture and loaded the same file. Within a few minutes I had an image that was almost identical but when comparing both side by side, the Aperture version had more pop. I thought I wouldn't be able to replicate the split toning effect but playing with the individual channel levels did the trick. Whatever we use, it comes down to what works.

I have a feeling the new Aperture version is going to make full use of the upcoming APIs in Snow Leopard and might be dependent on that release. I also remember how a lot of us felt last year before AP2 was released when Joe even made a few apparitions in this forum to calm us down. I prefer to believe Apple values our business and are hard at work with something that'll blow our minds - and make our work more enjoyable. It's been a leapfrog game with LR from the beginning and I for one am ready for the next jump. Call me Mr Sunshine 😉

I hope your right. I have a feeling that Apple's silence on the next release could hurt the already small user base (compared to LR) as many are seeing a better toolset in LR and making the switch.

Jade Leary wrote:
So... I went back to Aperture and loaded the same file. Within a few minutes I had an image that was almost identical but when comparing both side by side, the Aperture version had more pop.

That's only because you know how to use Aperture.

DLS

Lightroom is far better than Aperture. Not only is Adobe the best in manipulating colors they also have the knowledge to deal with non bayer RAWs. They support my Canon 1Ds to my Sigma Foveon. They support more cameras than Aperture. Plus it's faster 🙂 I just get plan tired of asking for support for X3F RAWs. They just seem more interested in mosaic RAWs.

MacDLS wrote:
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.

That is not necessarily true, especially for negatives, and especially for film archives. I am in the middle of a large film scanning project, and I don't want to waste time squinting through a loupe trying to figure out which 35mm negatives are the ones I want to scan. It sounds like you're talking about film you just shot or are intimately familiar with. When you're unfamiliar with the image content and it's a negative, it's much more efficient to just slide all the filmstrips into the film scanner feeder, get something else done while they scan in the background, and sort 'em out later, as nice positives, on my digital light table with a very high magnification loupe (Lightroom, Aperture, or Bridge).

Even developing them digitally in bulk isn't so bad, once you get the settings right for one film frame it often works pretty close if you apply it to many other frames of the same film, then you just tweak individual frames.

That is, if your program handles big scans quickly. If one program doesn't handle big scans as quickly as another, that's not a consequence of the workflow, it means one program isn't as fast as the other.

Network 23 wrote:

MacDLS wrote:
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.

That is not necessarily true, especially for negatives, and especially for film archives. I am in the middle of a large film scanning project, and I don't want to waste time squinting through a loupe trying to figure out which 35mm negatives are the ones I want to scan. It sounds like you're talking about film you just shot or are intimately familiar with. When you're unfamiliar with the image content and it's a negative, it's much more efficient to just slide all the filmstrips into the film scanner feeder, get something else done while they scan in the background, and sort 'em out later, as nice positives, on my digital light table with a very high magnification loupe (Lightroom, Aperture, or Bridge).

Even developing them digitally in bulk isn't so bad, once you get the settings right for one film frame it often works pretty close if you apply it to many other frames of the same film, then you just tweak individual frames.

That is, if your program handles big scans quickly. If one program doesn't handle big scans as quickly as another, that's not a consequence of the workflow, it means one program isn't as fast as the other.

EXACTLY. Even for recently shot stuff, in some cases. I'll shoot a couple of rolls of slides of my son's lacrosse game and when I get them back I'll do a very rough pass of them with a loupe (actually a backwards 50mm lens!) just to weed out the grossly out of focus ones, etc. Then I'll load up the remaining 65+ slides in the auto-feeder and do other things while they're munching. Once I import those into Aperture my needs and workflow are no different than someone who shot a bunch of pictures with his DSLR. I sort, reject a few more as inferior, straighten, crop, color correct, etc. then make a web page out of them.

...and I'm quite happy with all that. I love Aperture! But when I go to do the same thing, to use tools I am familiar with and like, on stuff I shot with my 645 camera... I can't even process one image before I get the maroon warning screen of death. Very frustrating.

Duncan

MacDLS wrote:
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.

OK, I had to go look and make sure I got the data right before posting. My 35mm scans are in the 25-30MB range. The 645 scans are in the 175-200MB range. (Remember that 645 is kind of a letterboxed version of medium format, so they're not going to be as big as, say, a Hasselblad 2-1/4 square image.) So, OK, maybe FF DSLRs won't be putting out 200MB images in the near future, but I bet they'll get closer than you or I can imagine today.

The problem is not just related to the sizes of single images. It's somehow cumulative in a given work session (i.e. all the hallmarks of a memory leak.) So today, if I process hundreds of 35mm scans in a single session I eventually hit the problem. Someone processing full-frame DSLR RAW files, which are of a similar size, is also going to run into the problem after hundreds of images right now today. Processing a single 200MB image will show up the problem. So plot some curve between those and imagine that once DSLR images get to, say, 50MB then Aperture will start needing a restart every dozen images or so. That's going to cause complaints!

Just to put this on topic a bit more: I tried a demo of Lightroom 2 and while it happily brought in my 645 scans and worked on them, it had all kinds of other issues I didn't like, some of which were related to the sheer size of the image. I could get some work done on these 645 scans if I switched to LR, but instead I am holding out for an eventual fix to Aperture. I'll be much happier that way in the end.

If you use Aperture a lot and are happy with it for your digital images, I can't imagine why you wouldn't plan to use that for your 25 years of negs, once you scan them. Well I can imagine one reason: if there is a lot of fiddly damage-repair needed on them you're probably going to prefer to work on them in PhotoShop directly, instead of the cumbersome round trip out of Aperture. But that's the beauty of the ICE type feature of scanners: most of that is just magically fixed in the scan! (If your negs are B&W, for which ICE doesn't work, then yeah...)

Duncan

Apple is famously tight lipped when it comes to product development. Take Final Cut, for example, an application that is dominant in its field. Pro's are dying for word on an update yet there has been no information at all from Apple. Nothing but rumors and speculation. With few exception, that's just how Apple rolls.

As it stands, I still prefer Aperture 2 to Lightroom 2 for its overall role in my RAW workflow, but there are certainly features in both Lightoom and even iPhoto that I'd enjoy in Aperture. I can't say much because this post will disappear but word is, from a fairly good source, that Aperture 3 is pretty special. I've also heard that it, along with the other Pro app updates, are highly dependent on Snow Leopard to do their new magic. Take that FWIW and keep a little faith. Apple has been in this game a while and they know what they're doing.

I've heard the rumor from a few folks that the next version of Aperture is tied to Snow Leopard. I guess that's a good way to drive sales, but some of us have learned the hard way not to upgrade the OS as soon as the new version comes out. So what happens if we wait a few months for Snow Leopard to shake out? Are we prohibited from using the next rev of Aperture, or just shut out of some features?

I don't want to switch to Lightroom. I have managed photos. Just imagine the headache of exporting all of those photos, losing my edits and keywords, only to have to redo more than 20K of images in Lightroom. Unless there was some tool to automate the process, I'd be taking big hit on my workflow to change.

So what I need is for Apple to step up and deliver comparable features. Until then, I'm stuck mostly doing my edits as exports into Photoshop and using Aperture for management. It works, but it's slower.