9 Apr
Reader Question: Do you use Aperture or Lightroom?
Posted in Photography, Software, Technology by JimOver 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
laanba
on April 9 2008
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.
Eric
on April 9 2008
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).
Jared
on April 9 2008
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.
bloopy
on April 9 2008
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)?. . .
luca
on April 10 2008
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-takes-on-apple-explicitly.html
Mark
on April 10 2008
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.
Brian Auer
on April 10 2008
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.