Reader Question: Do you use Aperture or Lightroom?

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Over the past week I’ve received a few inquiries from readers wondering whether I use Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom. The answer… I use Lightroom. The decision is rooted back when Aperture was first released and Adobe put Lightroom out as a Beta. At the time I was about to purchase Aperture, but before I did I went to MacWorld to get a little more information on it. The 2006 MacWorld was one of the best ever because there was a huge push around photography so there were tons of organizations and software manufacturers that would have otherwise never been there. When I talked to an Apple rep about Aperture I asked questions around…

How well does Aperture integrate with Photoshop?
What color space does Aperture use?
How flexible is the “vault” for image storage?

These three questions sunk my interest in Aperture.

How well does Aperture integrate with Photoshop?
Well it turns out at the time that it didn’t very well. I don’t recall the exact details but combined with the answer to the next question I felt the two didn’t play as nicely together as I would have hoped.

What color space does Aperture use?
This is what really turned me off. At the time Apple was using a custom color space that they created. When I talked to the Apple rep about this he was telling me how it supported more colors blah blah blah. When I asked him what hardware supported this color space he couldn’t answer. It all amounted to Apple creating a color space that went to 11 (a la Spinal Tap the movie). The only thing that he could say was that it must tie in to their on-demand print service. The discussion left me wary and unimpressed as most photographers at the time had begun to accept Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB as the standard color space to use.

How flexible is the “vault” for image storage?
At the time the “vault” storage model was very inflexible. The “vault” was tied to one drive. If that drive failed you were SOL and there wasn’t a meaningful system to back up the “vault” at the time. I believe Apple has since fixed this, but too little too late as far as I’m concerned.

So pretty straight forward about Apple’s Aperture… why Lightroom?
Lightroom was beta at the time and it too had its limitations, but…

1. Its ability to port files over to Photoshop with little hiccup was a big selling point to me. For the type of photography I focus on I still need to make localized edits in Photoshop.

2. The ability to start off with non-destructive edits and the space savings that afforded was huge.

3. Keywording and metadata… I really liked the system Adobe set up for this. Having a database to query and pulling images with certain keywords was huge. By the time the beta wrapped there was a backup mechanism in place as well.

4. Post-beta Adobe threw in mapping dust spot removal so you could carry over spot removal from one image to another, they expanded their web export features and they expanded the functionality of their RAW converter.

Additional feedback I heard from other pros was that Aperture had very unintuitive controls and this matched up pretty well to my initial demo experience at MacWorld.

Honestly I have no allegiance to one or the other. I’ll use the best tool available, but at the time Adobe had the edge even though it was beta and not all the features were baked in yet. As a result I’ve been on the Lightroom bandwagon ever since. Adobe did just release Lightroom 2 Beta and they’re expanding their feature set to include Smart Collections which is another huge feature I’ve been looking for & they’re expanding they types of non-destructive edits that you can make. Apple has never been open about their software so Adobe’s transparency and beta program makes it easier to stick with their software.

That’s the history behind my choice to use Lightroom.

What do you use and what factored into your decision?

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Lightroom, Apple, Aperture, software, photography, application, beta, post-processing, post, processing

Stay Connected with Jim
	Join Me On Twitter	Become a Fan on Facebook
	Listen to EXIF & Beyond	My Latest on YouTube

Posted by Jim on 04.09.2008 at 12:29 am
Tagged: Photography, Software, Technology , Adobe, Aperture, Apple, Lightroom, Photography, Photoshop, Software

Related Posts

jakob aebischer

Lightroom indeed, I used to work with Aperture. But I think as long I have to switch to Ps it`s so much better to stay on Adobe. And therefore its on both platform available. Another great reason. Just miss a proofing feature inside of Lr, what else? Ah yeah the lupe mode in Lr isnt that great as it was in Aperture. And the dust remove tool isnt good enough. Hope it gets better in future:-)

Nice blog, like it a lot!

Tony Rath

I have just begun using Lightroom. I have been using a combination of iViewMedia Pro (now Expression) and Photoshop, and still use iView to keep track of archives, but am slowly developing a workflow using Lightroom. The RAW conversion tools and Metadata input appear to speed things up, the learning curve is a little steep, but watching a few tutorials and learning a few of the hotkeys has helped.

Gerry Curry

I use Aperture with Photoshop as my rarely used secondary editor. Although many consumers and "prosumers" are using Aperture, it's important to remember that it's designed for professionals who will typically use recent model computers, so I have no problem with the system requirements. Aperture exports flawlessly to Photoshop, and when you're done and save, you're right back in Aperture. The vault is extremely flexible. I have both programmes and have tested them extensively. Although they are very different in feel and philosophy, for all practical purposes they are both excellent programmes that require the same amount of work for the same result.

So why did I choose Aperture? When Adobe finally decided to port its applications to Windows, (yes, I'm that old) they made a philosophical choice to keep all their programmes feature-identical on both platforms. To my mind, this was a big mistake, and a real slap in the face for Apple. Even Microsoft embraces Apple's software design philosophy when they design Mac software. Lightroom's lack of integration with other software on a Mac makes Lightroom a no-go for me. Having Aperture's libraries available in iWeb, Pages, Keynote and even iPhoto makes my life extremely easy. Being able to publish directly to and from MobileMe, send emails and all the other features that tight integration with the OS allows makes everything I do easier. As a Mac programme, Lightroom, and all other Adobe programmes really should have this kind of integration.

Brian Auer

I don't use either of them. Bridge+ACR is the way to go. If I had to pick though, I'd be using Lightroom just because it's an Adobe product.

Mark

Lightroom, initially on a PC, and now a painless transition to Mac. I really like the process Adobe has gone through in developing this program, soliciting feedback from the entire photographic community and bringing onboard some top notch pros to also offer input. It really shows.

I briefly started using IMatch and IViewMediaPro on PC, but when LR came along, it really was the complete solution I was looking for, and only continues to get better. Heck it is only v1.3 - it has a lot of room to grow.

luca

I started a similar discussion on my blog a couple of days ago. It turns out that Lightroom is my choice.

http://www.lucafiligheddu.com/2008/04/adobe-tak...

bloopy

i thought the thing with color spaces was that they were essentially hardware independent. . . i mean i know printers using the cmyk color space have a smaller gamut than the srgb or adobe rgb color spaces you'd see on your monitor, but isn't the idea behind colorsync profiles that they allow you to work in whatever color space you want, and, assuming your workflow is set up correctly, you can have accurate color anywhere in the pipeline?. . .

as in, shouldn't any hardware that supports colorsync and/or color profiles support some new apple color space, as long said color space has a profile to go along with it (a la srgb and adobe rbg)?. . .

Jared

I use aperture. Many times I wish that aperture had the speed and tools that lightroom has. However aperture has a workflow with its existing speed and tools that fit the way I think and create.

Some of the limitations of aperture such as speed, vault flexibility have been addressed with the newest version.

Personally I hope both tools develop very quickly, the competition between the two can only be a good thing for us photographers using them.

Eric

Lightroom. Primarily because it's cross platform, as I have a workhorse PC running Windows and a Macbook Pro for a laptop. Lightroom runs on both and makes it pretty easy to sync the two. (Plus, there's just the reality that a laptop hard drive is insufficient to hold my whole collection of RAW images; I only ever keep a subset on it).

laanba

I use Lightroom. When looking at the system requirements, Lightroom was the one that actually had a chance of running on my old computer. Since I was just experimenting at the time, that is the one I played around with and I fell in love immediately. Happy to say it is now running happily on a new computer.