Adobe creates Lightroom Plugin for Aperture

Yes.

But “converting” an image from RAW is just easier and has become the colloquial terminology.

While the RAW remains untouched, the image itself - irrespective of the origin of the data - is, in a sense, converted, altered, built, composed, etc.

BTW: all that conversion is nothing new. Photographers did a lot of conversion in the darkroom from a negative while printing and later with retouching tools on prints. The film negative or positive was eventually stored in a mine for preservation of the untouched original image “data”.

Choosing what paper to print on was the first conversion step from the negative. Then it was anything goes after that.

Thanks for the history lesson, but I did darkroom for 25 years before ever touching a digital camera. Nothing you said supports the notion that using the plug-in will in anyway alter the work that you've done in Aperture. It's true that your adjustments will not be imported, but they will remain just as you left them in your Aperture library for as long as the application is supported.

DLS

I was not trying to counter argue with the facts you presented. 😁

Rather, qualifying the social and cultural adaptation and changes that happen with English language and new technology.
Again, you are right but, people, humans, are going to call it or that process or production, whatever they want.
Plus the idea that the image (not the data, what our brains see and what we imagine it to be) is what is converted. In a sense, this “image” (or Object) does not actually exist. Which is in line with your technical RAW contention (the invisible and unalterable Representamen). But, we artists think (the Interpretant) of the image, not of the technical RAW data which, as you said, is not actually converted at all.

😁

Sorry to ruffle your feathers, all I was trying to get across on this thread is that when you use the Adobe Lightroom plug-in to move your RAW images from an Aperture managed or referenced library, the image edits you have made and all the processing work and time you have put into the Aperture image edits will be lost from that raw image original when you open that original in Lightroom after your Adobe plug-in move. You will need to re-edit 🙂
Editing adjustments made in Aperture do not convert into Lightroom adjustments when you use the Lightroom plug-in. Of course this is obvious to the power users on these forums, but many who visit this site do not have your expertise 🙂

If you want to continue to output pictures precisely as they are in the current version of Aperture, you have only two alternatives:
- Keep the latest version of Aperture on your computer platform(s) and open Aperture whenever you need to reprint old edited images

- Export your original versions in TIFF or JPEG from Aperture to Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.

And here is a useful tutorial link to all the preparatory work and pitfalls that await for those who are ready to use the Adobe Lightroom plug-in:

http://lightroomsolutions.com/articles/migrating-from-aperture-to-lightroom-wher e-do-i-begin/

It was implied, if not stated, earlier in the thread that using the plugin was too great a risk to one's Aperture library and to one's RAW files which is simply incorrect. That's what I was addressing. Don't worry about may feathers; I have thick skin underneath them 😉

There's actually a third way to get your edits over to LR5: Choose the option to import full-size previews. (Of course, you have to have generated full-size previews in Aperture.)

I don't choose this option because I don't want the bloat, but it would have been interesting to see A3 edits next to LR5 edits. I think it's better to export selected versions- if one is going to do it at all- rather than have an extra jpeg of every image that's been adjusted in Aperture. However, in most cases, if I have to use more than one or two brushes the image is going to Photoshop where I can reuse masks. If I'm color correcting for print, the image is going to Photoshop too, so most of my most important images already have PSD or Tiff versions.

Yes it's a huge pain to redo adjustments on images that you've already worked on in another application. (I try to think of it as taking a negative back into the darkroom to print again after some time has passed. That's basically the same thing as staring over with a RAW file.) Yes it's a huge pain to migrate from one DAM application to another. However, the plugin saves hundreds of hours of tedious metadata work that I don't care to repeat, and that beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

I have eight years- and a few certification exams- invested in Aperture, and I didn't ask the company to kill it. However, I saw the writing on the wall, and I've been trying to make the move for a couple of years now. The plugin is making that a little less painful.

DLS

I have no doubt your bona fides are top-notch. Keep up the great work here in the forums!

As I stated earlier in this thread, I run duplicate Lightroom and Aperture libraries on different platforms and different external drives. When I import clients' images my camera nef/raw images are imported BOTH to Lightroom and Aperture on separate iMac platforms. Following these extra-steps in workflow, I also edit the same imported raw images in both Lightroom and in Aperture for clients. And of course the resulting processed and edited Lightroom and Aperture images are always different. This workflow demands not quite double the work, but it definitely does require the extra "bloated" storage you have astutely noted.

But it works for me. Clients seem to like the ability to choose between the different Lightroom/Aperture versions. And different platforms and extra storage are very cheap compared to my eyeball editing time. But the real benefit for me and for others here in southern california that follow this same workflow is that we can keep all Lightroom ACR raw import/edits completely separate from all Aperture raw import edits. We do not need to worry about any Aperture plug in conversions for Lightroom because we are already running and using both Aperture and Lightroom software versions to edit the same camera nef/raw image and at the same time producing different successful output versions🙂

Well pretty soon your workload will be cut in half.

DLS

Great sense of humor - I will keep running parallel Lightroom and Aperture software platforms until "Photos" appears - and then I will probably need to run three different platforms for three different software versions 🙂

torreypines wrote:

But the real benefit for me and for others here in southern california that follow this same workflow is that we can keep all Lightroom ACR raw import/edits completely separate from all Aperture raw import edits.

🙂

Lightroom and Aperture do that for you, and you don't need two sets of masters to accomplish this. You just need a well organized finder.

DLS