Aperture vs Lightroom

Well, here's where I'm coming from. We edit hundreds of weddings a year. Aperture has been my favorite for the shooter who does not need much other than cropping improvments, a few exposure adjustments, etc. A job that I can edit in 1 hour can be done in either application equally well. The advantage that I'm finding with Lightroom is that I can use a myrid of tools that will turn an average job into an awesome job - even if the photographer has not delivered it to us as such. I am simply too limited inside of Aperture for the process that suits our needs at this point in time. I am now editing about 80% of the images taken of a 1000 shot wedding (800 edits) in a manner that would require Aperture to generate 20mb files for -most- edits. I can do this in LR w/o going to specialized 3rd party tools. I don't care about disk space having about 5TB hooked up to the machine that I'm on, so you are correct there, it is not really important, it is just that the tools are built in to Lightroom and not into Aperture. I can try to be more specific about the tools that we use in LR if you would like me to document a typical workflow.

My bottom line is: using Lightroom2 - no beachball. Aperture? Beachball heaven.

Aperture? Wait for just about every adjustment while watching the beachball spin. Lightroom? Instant adjustment.

Lightroom is SO MUCH faster on every Mac I own than Apple owned Aperture.

As of now I keep two libraries. Aperture and Lightroom. HD space being so cheap.

You want speed? Lightroom. You want to be Apple? Aperture.

Final product of your basic photo? Same.

Goodbye Aperture. Leaving you for Lightroom. Liked you better, but Lightroom is much easier to live with for me and my Leica D-Lux 4 that I have patiently waited for you to support for 8 months now. Bit the bullet and paid for the full license for Lightroom 2 today.

So long, it's been nice, I knew you since the first day 1.0 came out on 2005(?) though all the ups and downs along the way. Woke up and finally realized that I shouldn't have to adapt my workflow to a program. It should be the other way around. Expensive lesson.

Well said.

I've read about the beach ball in Aperture, but it's not a problem here. I do get a slowdown at times with Lightroom so I've gone to higher res previews in LR.

You know Rich, to be fair most if not all of my hero images get processing outside of Aperture - either from Photoshop or added plug-ins like Nik, OnOne etc...
So I understand what you're saying. It's not that Aperture can't give me good images but there's an extra something I can only get from other sources.

I guess I haven't seen this need being eliminated by Lightroom from playing around with it. Yes, localized editing helps in this respect but the tools aren't taking me all the way. And since I have quite a lot invested in the Aperture ecosystem on top of all the other things I prefer about its workflow and interface, I'm staying put for now. It's not out of blind loyalty mind you - I just prefer the digs over here.

But... I'm looking forward to the next step in development with a lot of anticipation. I really do believe this is probably the most important release yet for Aperture and it'll need to address many issues to stay in the game. I can't help but hope they come through. I have nothing against change but switching to LR would not be an enjoyable move.

You may well be right - the RAW Fine Tune controls (which AFAIK do not exist as such in LR) may be matched by LR's tone curve. In this specific example I'd argue they're easier to grasp, but it's no big deal. It's a bit like LR targetted adjustments, which are very, very nice, but which can, to a reasonable extent, be emulated using Aperture's color brick.

My point really is that the pain of migrating DAM metadata (not to mention adjustment metadata) from one app to the other really outweighs any momentary advantage one may gain over the other in detailed functionality.

I really find it hard to believe that serious photographers are constantly switching between one and the other - they'd ahve no time left to do any photography, let alone get a life. Of course one could maintain fragmentary libraries in both apps, but that hardly seems the point - better to stay with a standalone DAM and Photoshop in that case.

David Mantripp1 wrote:
You may well be right - the RAW Fine Tune controls (which AFAIK do not exist as such in LR) may be matched by LR's tone curve.

Looking at it closer, it looks like the Lightroom equivalent to Raw Fine Tune is really the Calibrate tab, along with the DNG Profile Editor so that you can make a personalized default raw development profile for any supported camera. These are where you control the fundamental interpretation of the data even before hitting the main adjustment tools.

My point really is that the pain of migrating DAM metadata (not to mention adjustment metadata) from one app to the other really outweighs any momentary advantage one may gain over the other in detailed functionality.
I really find it hard to believe that serious photographers are constantly switching between one and the other - they'd ahve no time left to do any photography, let alone get a life.

I totally agree with you here. Both apps are so young that if you hang on for the upgrades, you'll eventually get what you want, whichever one you use.

Ditto!!! I mention this in other forums and I get a bunch of "you must be doing something wrong, or there is something wrong with your machine" etc....

My computer is just over 2 weeks old, all software up to date, I repaired, rebuilt, did everything I think I needed to and still after about 20 edits (in jpeg noless) I start getting black screens, beachballs on every crop or straightening.

I really want to like Aperture (I'm using the trial, luckily) but the slowness is WAY beyond acceptable. I think the program is riddled with bugs.

I'm demoing LR and yes it flies. Everything is fast. Granted I pretty much only work in jpegs, but LR is superfast compared to Aperture with much better photo editing.

Thing is the DAM features of Aperture are more to my liking and the photo editing is more than good enough. Unfortunetly they don't work together.

I can do basic edits far faster using iPhoto and PSE6 which shouldn't be the case.

LR is expensive but may be worth the extra.

Gene

I really want to like Aperture (I'm using the trial, luckily) but the slowness is WAY beyond acceptable.

Reading through this thread is interesting. I reviewed Live Picture in the Nordic countries and the UK in 1996 as it was the first colour correction software to support ColorSync 2 and the ICC drawing model, following LinoColor for colour capture. The arguments I hear here parallel the arguments I heard then for and against Live Picture. Photoshop's approach was destructive editing of the pixels in RAM, Live Picture's approach was non-destructive editing with deferred rendering. But photographers in fact preferred destructive editing because it was faster per photograph. Not that there is a precise parallel to Apple Aperture and Adobe LightRoom, but it seems that speed in working with shoots is in and of itself the critical criterion of commercial success.

/hh

Aperture has a vastly superior interface to Lightroom, but I'm in your boat. I have asked Apple a dozen times to support my Sigma cameras, but they haven't, and they never respond. I fear the best we can hope for is that Apple will at least, eventually, support linear DNGs, which is what Foveon X3Fs are converted to by DNG converter. But frankly, even that's not good enough.

So Apple has forced my hand. I use Lightroom now. Completely. It's modal and clunky but it works, has some great tools, is in many ways more direct, and it's better than Sigma Photo Pro.

Apple's strategy of silence in this matter is an utter failure because once you've committed to one of these photo workflow apps, it's totally impractical to transition to a different one since the adjustments you've made are not transferrable. It's a shame, but there it is.

Wow

I'm running Aperture on an almost 3 year old iMac, processing thousands of 13MB RAW files, making some enormous multi-layer 16 bit files in round trips to Photoshop and I just don't have any of these speed issues.

What am I doing right?

DLS