Aperture Vs Lightroom 4

((( I'll start by getting one thing out of my chest, I'm dissappointed with Apple and their treatment of Aperture 3. There, I said it. Now back to business. )))

I decided to stick with Aperture 3, but I've some opinions on Lr4 after having tried it a few months. I tried Lightroom 4 out of curiosity, and I was not dissapointed by its performance when it came to image process, RAW or JPEG, Lr4 is ahead.

1. Lr4 has the power to pull EXTREME detail out of shadows and highlights, I mean, things that I didn't even know my camera was capable off. If anything Lr4 empowers your camera's strengths. A3 doesn't come close.

2. Lr4 noise reduction is controlled and fixes pixels so your image retains is real look. It's not a MUSH MULTIPLIER like in A3. A3 will make your images look cartoonish and even fake after a certain point, and if anything it makes your noise look worse than without intervention.

3. Lr4 lens profiles enable you to correct lens issues with one click. I'm a Nikon Dx format shooter, so this stuff doesn't affect me badly in either A3 or Lr4. In fact, sometimes I like the distortion in my images (I know that's rare).

4. Lr4 has the camera profiles for most Nikon/Canon, but they're only ok without things like Active D-lighting or the such. They're close, but not perfect. No matter what, you'll appreciate it.

5. Lr4 has More presets support, but I never buy presets

My complaints about Lr4:

1. healing BRUSH? more like a clumsy spot healer (but Lr5 is fixing that issue really good). A3's retouch brush is still superior to Lr4 and Lr5 healing brush.

2. MODULES, I hate the module approach to image handling and editing. Sometimes I like comparing images and edit them while I compare them together. Lr4 will not let you do that, in DEVELOP module you can only see one image and work on one image at a time and then synch. If you want to compare 2 images, you've to switch back to LIBRARY module. Inconventient, slow. A3 let's me edit, organize, and move about as I please.

3. This is a personal beef against Adobe, they tend to complicate their softwares. Lr4 is not intuitive like A3. It will make you sad to edit in Lr4 or Lr5 after experiencing the freedom of A3.

Bottom line with Lr4 is that it is MUCH MORE powerful than A3, A3 doesn't come near, but A3 is in tune with my vision of photographic workflow and artistic approach. It makes me happy to edit in Aperture 3. Lightroom feels like homework.

Why I decided to stay with A3?

1. Better workflow (but this is subjective, because it's dependent on each photographer. Workflow is in your head, not on a software, though the software helps deliniate what you have in mind.)

2. Auto edits are MUCH MUCH superior in Aperture than in any version of Lightroom. Adobe has simply messed up and can't get it right (NEVER USE AUTOTONE IN Lr4)

3. Image organization within the application and freedom to go from file movement to edit to comparisons

My solution to the A3 issues? (Noise reduction, Lens correction, Camera picture profiles). Easy, but it depends on Lr4. I use a referenced library workflow, in this way both A3 and Lr4 have access to the same RAW files in order.

If I need lightroom to do something that A3 can't do as above mentioned:

1. Open Lr4 and go to the image you need to do NR, lens correction, etc. on.

2. Perform the corrections you need.

3. Export the image as a TIFF file to the same folder where the original RAW is. (I usually don't rename it, because I want A3 to place it exactly where the RAW file is. I usually export it at 300 ppi, TIFF, same size. (yes, the file will be a little bigger, but we're talking about Art so it's worth it.)

4. Open Aperture 3, hit import, go to the folder where the new TIFF is and A3 will find it immediately if you have the "do not import duplicates" checked.

5. Voila! you have a TIFF with all the RAW power you need. You have no noise, lens correction done, camera profiles applied, and best of all, you can change the White Balance and all the same things you would with a RAW file.

In other words, Lr4 has just become your new plug-in. It's 2 extra steps, but well worth it if Aperture 3 is your software of choice and you're happy with it.

Very helpful comparison, Arigla.

Thank you!.

Not that anyone cares or that I will change anyone's mind, but I just feel like sharing..

I still believe that Aperture 3 has the best file management, workflow, and approach to editing images. HOWEVER, competitors are doing a much better job on image editing performance for quiet some times and Apple has done practically nothing to update or to add a new more powerful version of the software. (i.e. mainly the unforgivable ones are Highlights and Shadows, real Noise Reduction).

Sure, there are plug-ins that deal with this, but when one software (cough LIGHTROOM) offers all the tools in one package for what would cost a lot less than Aperture 3 and the plug-ins, and which performs so well, we really have to ask ourselves one question.

What do I care about the most, my images or my file management?

If I care about workflow more than images, then the decision is simple — Aperture 3

If I care more about image editing, then I have to give it to Lightroom.

And frankly, it pains me to say this because I still lke some things about Aperture better than Lightroom, but the cons of image editing outweigh the pros if I stay with Aperture 3.

I've my beefs against Lightroom 4 and even Lightroom 5 editing tools that Aperture grants me so nicely. Among them, Skin Smoothen, Polarize, & Retouch brushes, and the Levels adjustment in Aperture. I believe Aperture is superior to Lightroom in these editing tools. But what's the point in having these tools when it lacks on the most basic thing, which is how it renders the RAW files and controls the extraneous elements of my photos such as noise and mush pixels?

I have decided that Lightroom 4 and now 5 are a better overall solution to almost all photographers. Apple has abandoned Aperture and it's giving those that remain bread crumbs. That said, if you're a great photographer who shoots JPEG only, then Aperture is THE BEST software for you without exceptions. But if you're a RAW shooter, my best suggestion is either Lightroom or Adobe Bridge with Photoshop CS6. Other than this, the other combo is Aperture for file management and Photoshop for image editing.

Lightroom 5 placed the last nail in the Aperture 3 coffin in terms of image editing. The only reason to stay with Aperture 3 when it comes to image editing is the Skin Smoothing brush (I'm not kidding).

I'm switching permanently to Lightroom 5 unless Adobe gets cocky and decides to put Lightroom as an in-the-cloud-only service.

I understand your pain, as well. I can't use Lightroom as my primary host because it's weaknesses in input, management/organization and output become too great for my situation (needing to import, grade, and manage 50-70K photos per year). So I use the solution provided by The Aperture Blog to make Lightroom act like a plugin. I am using Lightroom 5 beta quite successfully as a plugin to Aperture. This has been very satisfying, as the Lightroom 5 darkroom/editing experience is very powerful, and I can still bring the finished product back to aperture for mangement and output features that I feel are much more robusts than LR. LR5 is really more like LR4.5, IMO, but it's the first version of LR that, for me, anyway, will allow me to edit large projects without having to resort to PS+actions. To summarize, for my needs, importing hundreds of photos per day into LR to grade and stack is too tedious compared to Aperture. So I import to an Aperture Grading Library and then those that pass muster are brought into LR5 for retouching and roundtripped back to Aperture and exported as a project library for further work depending on the intended outcome.

One thing you mention that I have not personally experienced is Aperture being fine for JPEG but LR being better for RAW. I find LR5 is more powerful as a photo editor, period. As far as batch editing and management, Aperture still is better in my opinion. And neither of them are a hands-down better RAW interpreter than ACR or Capture One or PhotoNinja. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and depending on the dynamic range, color gamut, and camera used, it's likely there isn't a RAW interpreter that can be the best in every case.

AlterEgo wrote:

As far as batch editing and management, Aperture still is better in my opinion.

I'm curious why you feel batch editing in Aperture is better than Lightroom.

Having used LR for years prior to switching to Aperture, I find Aperture's batch editing features--Lift & Stamp and Batch Change--inferior to LR and the one area in Aperture that continues to be a PITA and troublesome to use efficiently. Both of these features are clumsy, error-prone, and take far too many steps to batch edit images when compared to LR's auto-sync.

I'm an Aperture user, and not defending LR here. Just wondering if I'm missing something regarding batch editing.

phosgraphis wrote:

I'm an Aperture user, and not defending LR here. Just wondering if I'm missing something regarding batch editing.

I agree ... there are a few items in workflow tasks where I think Lr has an edge. Syncing and batch processing is one of those. In the end, though, I think users may have preferences as to what is "better" are based upon familiarity with a certain app ... Auto-sync for quickly preparing images on deadline is VERY handy and effortless. if I had started out with Aperture, instead of Lightroom, I likely would have a different view on some aspects when comparing the two apps.

Neither app is perfect, both sets of engineers could learn something by comparing notes ...

I think we're in agreement in practice. My terminology needs further explanation. As I noted, with large projects, I prefer to do the editing workflow with Aperture wrapping around Lightroom as if Lightroom were a plugin. As for batch-retouching, yes, Lightroom, in my opinion, and I think yours as well, has several advantages which become pretty compelling in LR 5 beta. (Again, LR5 isn't as big an upgrade to v4 as v4 was to v3). So I use batch-editing as the overall workflow in bringing a photo shoot into the editing workflow, while batch-retouching is the term I use to refer to making a sort of action-oriented retouching of multiple images from a sequence of shots. I've used both Aperture and Lightroom consistentlly since Aperture 1.2 and LR 1b, and I never really warmed up to Adobe's idea of media management in the whole history I've had with them, which goes back twenty years.

I'm not surprised that Lightroom has some retouching advantages to Aperture's, and even though I routinely try and take an image from RAW to 'adequate' in both Aperture alone and Lightroom alone, it seems LR5 has serious advantages that I cannot ignore. But when working with large amounts of files, over the years, across multiple Macs, I still need the speed in importing/grading/meta adustments I can make in the initial stages as well as the finer controls in output printing and slideshows that Aperture afords me. If I were somehow committed to using only Photoshop to do heavy editing work in photos, or only a plug-in environment such as OnOne or TopazLabs, then I'd probably try and use Lightroom for overall management features and not use Aperture at all, despite my prejudice/opinion that asset management controls are what I consider to be Lightroom's main weakness. It's not like I don't manage lots of other data in a traditional folder structure.

Thanks...that certainly explains your statement re "batch editing".

I'm definitely in the camp of Aperture having to upgrade their image processing feature set, as many have detailed in these discussions. But at the same time I am surprised by the lack of comments regarding some of Aperture's workflow tools, which are still in the dark-ages of UI design. In spite of all Aperture has going for it regarding asset management and DAM capabilities, if they don't seriously improve the workflow for handling large volumes of images they will have an even harder time regaining a competitive edge.

I depend upon that autosync for my workflow with LR as a plugin. And I've used Automator since its inception to manage a lot of my workflow methods. Actions, scripting, anything the developers and engineers can give us to speed work along and limit the amount of standby time to initiate the next steps is a help to me.

I started out with both. I wish they would "steal" from each other's strong points more than they do.

We're all creatures of habit and preferences that give us reason to praise the engineers one minute and curse them the next. I'm just glad that both apps together are not that expensive or difficult to learn to use compared with Photoshop. I also have a long history with Capture One Pro and have yet to find the perfect RAW converter, expecially since the cameras themselves continue to evolve and change rapidly. I still think there will be an Aperture 4 aftrer Maverics is available, to go with the new Mac Pro systems. (I don't think it was an accident that a lot of the screen demonstrations for the new OS at WWDC were using photo editing as a primary activity. I think the improvements from 3.0 to 3.4 are pretty significant compared with LR 4 to 5, which I have to pay for. On the other hand, I will use all of the enhancements LR added to v5 whereas most of the improvement from Aperture 3.0 to 3.4 don't help me as much, except for the unified database between Aperture and iPhoto - that's a big help.

Final note: I think I need to remind myself often that Apple is very happy to have Adobe as a major developer and if they learned anything from the dark years, it was that for any platform to thrive, it has to have a very healthy 3rd party development atmosphere. Just as Microsoft was lifted to it's position by the success of the 3rd party developers, so Apple has had to create a much more developer-friendly business model which has played a huge part in it's revival and current dominance in the recent years.

I can relate with you 100% arigla.

Last year, my concern over the lack of 'new' Aperture updates (new processing engine etc) made me look at Lightroom 4.

I've been using Aperture since version 1, bought it the day it launched, through version 2 and onto 3 (the boxed version) and was very happy with the capabilities Aperture offered. It fitted my workflow nicely.

I downloaded the trial of Lightroom 4 and set about importing all my files. The learning curve wasn't that great and fairly quickly had all my images in my Lightroom 4 library.

I ran both applications for a while, editing my images and comparing the output quality, until it dawned on me I was using Lightroom 4 more than Aperture 3. Nikon D800 images look great in Lightroom.

There are differences. Aperture does some things better than Lightroom 4, but Lightroom 4 does more things better than Aperture 3. Lightroom 5 does even better tha Lightroom 4.

Now, I'm no fan of Adobe's 'cloud only' model (and I don't use pirated software), but going forward with the release of Lightroom 5, which I have purchased and am now running - upgrade from LR4 went without a glitch, it is clear Adobe are still commited to the Photographers out there (I'm skirting over Photoshop CC here, as a buyer of every version of Photoshop since CS was released). Apple have ignored their Pro App using Photographers for too long.

We need consistancy in our workflow. Changing from one software vendor to another is a major pain, not to mention a time hog, learning a new method for optimum workflow.

With Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CS6, I'm pretty much sorted for the foreseeable future. Adobe are commited to Lightroom, with no plans to make Lightroom a subscription only model for the foreseeable future (but that could change).

I prefer the Aperture UI, but Lightroom allows me to get things done quickly, and now I'm running Lightroom 5, I'm spending even less time in Photoshop CS6.

I don't work for Adobe or Apple. I just like to get my work done and Adobe are currently offering the better solution to that. Check out Adobe TV, they have lessons online from various experts, Julieanne Kost does a lot of CS6 and Lightroom 5 tutorials and is very good (just ignore her hair length changes between sequential episodes).

I agree that Light Room might be best for some and Aperture for others. The important thing is to find out which product has the features and capabilities that YOU need. With software like this, it makes no sense to buy something more complex and cumbersome than required. I really liked the reading reviews that were unbiased and raw. I find that gathering enough unique perspectives on products is more effective that reading one guru's opinion. Great discussion everyone!

BoSoxMe1 wrote:

I had the same question and ended up going with LR. There is no RIGHT answer to this question....it's really depends on a lot of individual usage factors. As I read LR product reviews that really clinched it for me.

LR Rreviews vs Aperture

this is a very basic question but......

I am looking for the best managment software for my photos. I am a professional sculptor and have thousands of photos to organize. I do need an editing tool as well and have Adobe CS 5.5 I am learning photoshop slowly.

I only have I photo or bridge as an managment option - bridge has its own set of problems.....

Many of you seem to use either LR4-5 or Apeture for editing and sorting - are these better for editing than CS5?

based on what I have read here it seems apeture is a much better manager and with CS 5 I dont need LR?

thank you for you comments

BT Glassworks wrote:

this is a very basic question but......

I am looking for the best managment software for my photos. I am a professional sculptor and have thousands of photos to organize. I do need an editing tool as well and have Adobe CS 5.5 I am learning photoshop slowly.

I only have I photo or bridge as an managment option - bridge has its own set of problems.....

Many of you seem to use either LR4-5 or Apeture for editing and sorting - are these better for editing than CS5?

based on what I have read here it seems apeture is a much better manager and with CS 5 I dont need LR?

thank you for you comments

First, Bridge is not an "Organizer" ... it is just a browser that allows you add, edit or modify image/file metadata ... and allows you to invoke Adobe applications ... Bridge can also only work with images and files that are currently available on your system or network.

A true organizer or DAM (Digital Asset Manager) actually builds a searchable database that can track, sort and store your infomation about your images independantly from other applications ... in some cases, even if your images may be currently offline you can still add or modify metadata.

Both Aperture and Lightroom offer very good options for cataloging your images. There are differences in UI, nomenclature jargon and options on how they store the database ... but I would call it a dead heat in overall capabilities. Though, both Aperture and Lightroom are much more than asset managers ... they have many other components that are quite useful tools. I personally think that Aperture offers a more refined complete package as the Book and Slideshow modules in Lightroom are abysmal by comparison.

I would recommend that you get a copy of Peter Krogh's book: The DAM book (available at the usual sources) make sure you get the latest edition. Krogh not only covers the how of DAM ... but more importantly the why of DAM and how the foundation you set for your library or archive should be set up properly so it can stand the test of time and serve you well for decades to come.

After you have mastered the concept ... and even modify Krogh's approach for your own needs ... then you will have a better idea on which application could serve you better.

Thank you for that very helpful answer regarding DAM.

How do you feel regarding the editing capacities of apeture/LR vs cs5.5?

Well ... some folks would consider me a salmon swimming upstream against the current ... it seems we see more than a few Aperture users opting for Lr, I seem to be the exception ... After having used Lightroom since the very first puplic beta of v1 ... in April, I moved my entire workflow to Aperture 3.

There are some things that the Lightroom Develop module (which is the same thing as ACR in Ps) that I wish Aperture could do ... but I create a lot of book/albums and slideshows in the course of a year and I was being crushed by a mountain of derivative files that needed to be exported for use in other apps becuase, as I said, the slideshow and book capabilities of Lr leave a lot to be desired.

In the end, for pure RAW processing, using Lightroom and ACR is the same result ... only a different UI. Though the beauty of working in Lr and Aperture vs using Ps for each and every image, batch processing is much easier, and any adjustments you make are completely non destructive and are not applied until you export the images. Adjustments made to images in ACR are also non-destructive until you "open" the image into Ps proper ...

Since I was already doing two-thirds of my work in Aperture already, back in March I decided to do a six week test working solely in Aperture from import to final client export (though I do use Ps for images that require that level of attention) ... by mid-April, I made my decision ... with the announcement by Adobe in May for the CC subscription model only ... it confirmed my decision to move to Aperture was sound ... I still use PsCS6 ... but there will be no CC in my future ...