Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

An Aperture User Looks At Adobe Lightroom

Partly just because it was there and partly because I feel like I haven’t given it a fair crack of the whip, I spent some time yesterday and today with Adobe Lightroom.

For those who don’t care to read the minutiae, I’ll get to the point: In my opinion, Aperture vs. Lightroom is the same discussion as Canon vs. Nikon. Each has strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not a no-brainer decision either way. You’ll produce good results with both applications, and the real decisions come down to personal preference, and specific features that you may need for a very specific reason.

So, let’s dig in deeper:

Appearance

It may seem shallow to discuss each app’s visual appearance, but it’s the first thing that hits you when you launch them and, when you’re going to live with one of these apps for some time, you don’t want to hate it every day.

Coming from Aperture, where everything is a lightish shade of grey, Lightroom’s UI two-tone palette of black and quite dark grey feels really heavy. It reminds me, really, of the Disaster Area stunt ship control panel from Hitchhiker’s Guide:

When you press the black button labelled in black on a black background, a black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it!

I don’t like the look of Lightroom, but I could get past it if I had to.

Interface

Although better than some other applications that Adobe have produced over the years, Lightroom just doesn’t feel totally like a Mac application to me. In particular, the fact that the Library navigator panel has a scroll bar on the left-hand side of its view really makes my skin crawl. A small detail, granted, but I do notice these things.

Another thing I don’t like about Lightroom is the use of plain text labels as buttons in the “Fit, Fill, 1:1, 1:2″ options in the Navigator panel, as well as the large “Library | Develop | Slideshow” etc. at the top-right.

My last general gripe about the Lightroom UI is the light watermark it puts on the grid view with a large number behind each thumbnail. Again, it’s a sufficiently close shade of grey to the thumbnail background that it’s hard to read, unless you look intently at it. When the thumbnails are small, it just looks like visual noise. Not only that but, if you flag an image, the flag icon is drawn over the top of the number - more noise. Perhaps I haven’t appreciated the point of them being there at all.

One very nice feature in Lightroom, though, is the small HUD window that pops up with the name of the command you just invoked with a keyboard shortcut. Really helps learnability and increased my confidence a lot.

Library Management

Lightroom has some serious strengths here. I absolutely love the Metadata Browser - when you want to search by some photographic attribute, this beats the pants off setting up a Smart Album or configuring the query HUD in Aperture for speed of setting up the query and for speed of getting the result. It’s like lightning.

However, I much prefer the uncluttered arrangement of Aperture’s projects panel - it’s just all my ‘photo containers’ and isn’t mixed up with search and metadata.

I don’t use Aperture’s referenced masters feature - I like to keep all my masters in the Aperture library. I feel the UI to this functionality is much better in Aperture than in Lightroom. When I look at Lightroom’s import panel, I feel a bit intimidated and don’t quite feel confident that it’s doing what I want it to.

Ratings

Applying ratings is one of the most important parts of a post-shoot workflow. Lightroom differs from Aperture in the ways that you can rate images: in Aperture you have a simple range from -1 (called “reject”, but it’s treated as an ordinal value one increment below zero) through to 5. In Lightroom, you have zero through five stars, plus three flag states: Pick, Flagged, Reject. This means, oddly, that an image can be a five-star reject or a zero-star pick.

I do like the provision of an out-of-band ‘flag’ in Lightroom. The ability to mark an image as needing attention without having to override the semantics of a particular star value is useful. I often rate a shoot and want to mark the ones that I think don’t work in colour, but might in black and white. The Lightroom flag would be great for this.

In Aperture, you have keyboard shortcuts to filter any thumbnail view by star rating: ctrl-` for Unrated and Better; ctrl-1 through ctrl-5 for “X stars or better”, ctrl-6 for all images; ctrl-7 for unrated images and ctrl-8 for rejects. I find it strange that Lightroom doesn’t provide keyboard shortcuts for this, as I use these keystrokes as one of the main ways to filter through a large project or album of rated images.

Adjustments

I adore the interactive histogram in Lightroom. It’s a fantastic bit of UI. The Tone Curve is far more intelligible than Aperture’s Levels adjustment.

However, I found Lightroom’s little on/off light switches to be unintuitive as a way to enable or disable the adjustment. What would have been so wrong with a checkbox? Also, it was not at all obvious that double-clicking on a slider would reset it to zero, although this does provide the ability to reset a single slider within a control. In Aperture, you can only reset the entire adjustment.

I really, really, really like Lightroom’s Split Toning control. Really really really like it. I haven’t played with the Lens Corrections adjustment yet.

Are Lightroom’s adjustments better than Aperture’s? I haven’t put enough images through it yet, but my feeling is that Lightroom has some tools which Aperture doesn’t have (Split Toning, Presence, Lens Corrections) but I’m not seeing a huge difference between the adjustments which they have in common.

I’m also unable to detect a significant improvement in Lightroom’s default RAW decode from Aperture’s on my Canon 30D RAW files.

Workflow

The major stumbling block for me in thinking about adopting Lightroom is that Aperture has a far stronger export workflow. In particular, ahem, in sending images to Flickr. Given that the vast majority of my images only ever appear on Flickr, being able to get photos simply on to Flickr is critical for me.

Aperture gives Lightroom a good kicking here.

Dual Displays

Aperture has superb support for dual displays. I haven’t tried Lightroom on a dual display setup, but I typically use Aperture in second-display ‘alternate’ mode which shows the currently selected thumbnail in full-screen on the system’s alternate display. Perhaps someone can enlighten me in the comments on what Lightroom offers in this area.

Performance

Performance is a feature. Lightroom takes Aperture around the back and delivers a trousers-down six-of-the-best spanking in performance. Lightroom screams, but it gives up a smidgen of polish to do so.

In particular, when you’re applying adjustments, Lightroom clearly does not apply the adjustment continuously on the full-resolution image. Aperture does and, when you’re used to seeing it in full-res, the Lightroom experience is less than pleasant: you have to adjust the slider roughly, drop the mouse, inspect the result, adjust more finely, repeat.

However, speed of using an application is about more than just how quickly an image pops up to the screen. I admit I’m still a novice in Lightroom, but I often found that I got confused about which of the five major modes I was in. The distinction between the Library and Develop modules seems an unnecessary speedbump in the UI, and it’s not a distinction that is strongly felt in Aperture. In Aperture, you show the adjustments panel and/or the Viewer and you’re in “develop” mode. Hide them and you’re in “Library” mode. I made a lot of mode errors in Lightroom and the problem was made worse by the ‘quick develop’ panel in Library, which makes that view look a lot like Develop.

Conclusion

Very much like my earlier article A Subversion User Looks At Git, my conclusion is this: I have a much greater appreciation for Lightroom than I did when I started this review. It has some features that are better than my current tool, but it’s also missing things that I critically depend on.

If Lightroom could lose the gothic makeup, get an export workflow and minmise the distinction between Library and Develop, I’d certainly be looking harder at switching. All that said, if Aperture just got faster (and supported lens model metadata!), I’d be equally happy.

Look forward to your comments.

Aperture really isn’t a terribly Mac like app either. Non-standard dialogs, micro fonts, no service integration.

Otherwise, I agree with everything. Two comments:

1. Aperture integrates with iPhoto. Lightroom doesn’t.

2. Aperture can import iPhoto albums and metadata, Lightroom can’t.

3. Lightroom can edit date metadata, Aperture can’t. (Big deal for scans or messed up camera date info.

picturesync has a lightroom preset that exports to flickr:
http://picturesync.net/

Nice review.

LR doesn’t support any dual head functionality. At least I haven’t been able to find out how.

From what I gathered there will be a Lightroom API in LR 2.0 and that should make it relatively easy to write a Flickr export facility. The API is in Lua though. Not sure why Lua is the language of choice here and not Ruby. Anyway, I started reading a Lua book

Currently you can export images, the images already contain the tags and then use the default Flickr uploader.
I know that is not very powerful, but at least the tags are set already.

The lack of dual monitor capability is a major loss for LR but if you work in LR with Photoshop, as I do, it’s not too much a problem.

Looks are always down to taste. Personally, I prefer the darker layout to Aperture’s light greys, and you can change some of the design such as the text labels, the panel ends and the header. You can also change the thumbnail designs to suit.

I haven’t given Aperture too close a study. My big problem at the start was the lack of how-to-instructions while Lightroom was fairly easy to understand. I so much prefer the adjustments interface.

But, as you say, it’s all down to the Canon/Nikon argument. At the end of the day, it’s people’s tastes and requirements. Apple and Adobe will be tripping over each other to keep up with every update, so either way, no-one can really lose.

“In Aperture, you have keyboard shortcuts to filter any thumbnail view by star rating: ctrl-` for Unrated and Better; ctrl-1 through ctrl-5 for “X stars or better”, ctrl-6 for all images; ctrl-7 for unrated images and ctrl-8 for rejects. I find it strange that Lightroom doesn’t provide keyboard shortcuts for this”

Lightroom has many keyboard shortcuts that once realized are quite natural. For example the number keys 0 to 5 rate the photo. P is a pick, X is a reject. Holding down shift while pressing one of these keys will apply the setting and move to the next photo. I recommend a quick Goolge for “lightroom keyboard shortcuts” to find a cheatsheet.

I’m an Aperture user. I agree with the dark look of LR, not my thing. I wish I had LR’s speed. Pretty much what you said about the differences.

The one thing that will break Aperture’s back with pros is the speed at which they update for new hardware. I’m a Canon 40d user and it makes me cry that ACR/LR can work with my RAW’s and Aperture won’t. Apple’s secrecy works against it here as there is no clue if 40d support will be added tomorrow or two months from now. Usually we have to wait for an OS update which is pants.

I’m an Aperture user and also own Lightroom. I’ve tried real hard to make the switch numerous times and keep going back to Aperture. My biggest reason is the file management. Apertures just works. Makes perfect sense. I can’t seem to get used to LR’s file management and the little window for the files (for a big library) is useless. Too much scrolling.

There are tools that LR has that I wish Aperture had, but in doing tests, there really isn’t anything I can’t do in Aperture that I do in LR.

LR does NOT support dual monitors. That was a bad setup for them I think.

My Aperture runs faster than LR does. LR brings my macbook pro to a crawl, especially after doing round-trips with RAW photos to photoshop. Since I turned off previews in Aperture, it is nice and quick for me. I can’t get LR to speed up at all.

I’m also not making the switch simply because I feel Apple will have a significant 2.0 upgrade sometime after leopard is released.

As others have mentioned, Lightroom does not support multiple monitors. One thing you didn’t mention that I thought was a really well done feature was targeted adjustments…

I am a heavy Aperture user, but I spent a long time with each of the betas leading up to release.

I totally agree with the comment that Lightroom vs. Aperture is like Canon vs. Nikon. I really like the Lightroom interface a lot, I also loved what they did with some of the adjustments (though I think for people who have not spent a long time to understand Photoshop curves, Aperture’s Levels is easier to understand). I ended up preferring Aperture for some of the areas it’s stronger in (like general album structure and smart albums) along with the lack of modality that Lightroom offers. I can easily see someone deciding that they prefer the Lightroom interface, even though I do not.

I would also note that Aperture a this point has been sometime without a large feature update, and so it might be a bit premature to compare the best of what Lightroom has to offer now against an Aperture interface and capability set that may see some substantial improvements soon. I have thought that Aperture will probably see an update sometime after Leopard, hopefully soon after.

I’m an Aperture user on a MacBook Pro (first gen) and I agree with everything said about and all of your review:

Aperture is slow and its slowness has really mucked up my willingness to use it. I do use it but reluctantly at times. This is not good.

Aperture feels more Mac like but as said above, it too isn’t all that Mac like. iPhoto is the UI I continue to love and even though it’s editing tools have been improved mightily in the recent update, it’s not Aperture.

I tried LR and was hoping it would be exactly what I wanted: something between iphoto and Aperture but to me it wasn’t and did not feel Mac like enough.

If iPhoto had just a few more editing features I’d use it full time again, no problem.

Oh, and I shoot RAW with a 5D.

I think watching the videos on the Apple website is a must for Aperture. There are a ton of great features which are not readily apparent. Although after a few hours with it, I have given up finding how to compare the version with the original master side-by-side. It’s easy in Lightroom, but I’m damned if I can find it in Aperture. The only other problem I have is the speed - it’s dog-slow on my iMac G5 while I’m waiting for the new MacPro to come out.

Are y’all aware that you can drop an alias to the flickr uploader into the Lightroom post-export-tools directory, and it’ll automatically throw your export up to flickr if you pick that, right?

What’s wrong with that as an automatic flickr export? What does Aperture do that’s better in that regard? I’ve been mildly irritated that the flickr exporter doesn’t use Lightroom’s “Title” and “Caption” metadata to set the title and caption, but I have learned to cope.

I’m a heavy Aperture user and appreciate all of the great insight into LR. I find the Aperture Vaults and other file management extremely easy to use and reliable, with one big exception - it doesn’t allow you to create a file-vault on a network drive. I mount backup drives from my Airport and would prefer to keep backup vaults with the rest of my backups.

Does LR have a backup or “file-vault” type of facility? Can it write to network remote drives?

thanks!

I have used Aperture from the start, and doubted Lightroom would catch up any time soon. I was wrong.

I agree that file management in Aperture is way ahead of Lightroom. Finding the right photos is much faster in Aperture.

Where Lightroom excels is metadata and the transportability of that metadata between Lightroom/Bridge/Photoshop. This is a major weakness of Aperture and makes it not usable at all in a multi-user environment. Lightroom isn’t much better in terms of multi-user, but it’s way ahead of Aperture in terms of metadata and the sharing of settings between it and Photoshop.

ACR 4.1 is much better, and essentially identical to the control setup in Bridge. Much better control of highlights and shadows (fill light and recovery) and curves. For this old Photoshop hand, curves is critical. It’s missing from Aperture pretty much kills Aperture at work.

All in all, Apple has its work cut out for it. Supposedly they’re working on the metadata issue. But unless they can make the image adjustments more intuitive, they are never going to catch up to Lightroom. Adobe has a major advantage in thier years of designing and improving Photoshop. Apple faces a major challenge to make their software more usable in those few areas where Lightroom has them beat.

Until then, I”m stuck using Lightroom at work. And in fact, I’ve used Aperture so little that I can’t even remember the keyboard commands any more. Which drives me crazy, because I am working on a project in Aperture right now (to produce a book, which Lightroom can’t do). And not remembering the right keyboard commands really slows me down. It’s a pro app, and because of that, it’s many keyboard shortcuts don’t make it easy to remember. Too bad, on a MacBook Pro 2.33 GHZ Core 2 duo 17″, it’s night and snappy. As it is on my Mac Pro. At home, on the dual 2GHz G5 with a fast graphics card (X800 XT) it’s not much slower. But Lightroom is siginficantly faster, especially on the slower G5. But not enough to be a deal-breaker for me either way.

My greatest complaint against Aperture at the moment is that it seems rather slow to support new cameras, like the Canon 40D. Adobe had support out before the camera was released. But those of us who’ve bought the new camera are still waiting for updates from Apple for Aperture.

If Apple is going to go head-to-head with Adobe, then they need to do a better job of using programmers to stay ahead of the curve.

As a long time Apple fanatic, I worry that Aperture will go the way of Hypercard or Appleworks and I’ll be left with having to move all my files over to a new system when Apple decides it doesn’t have the resources to compete directly with Adobe.

Daniel: there’s a workaround to creating a vault on a network drive. What you do is create a new vault on a local drive, then move it in the Finder to the network drive. Then, within Aperture, you can reconnect the vault to its files. You can do this before your first actual vaulting, so you don’t have to use much space on your local drive.

Seems that Aperture only checks to see if the path is local on vault creation, and not other times. I suspect that the reason Aperture doesn’t let you do it is simply because it’s pretty slow.

I run both Aperture and Lightroom side by side, ive tried to switch to Lightroom several times and every time the lack of dualscreen support puts me off…

I dont see any differance at all in speed between the 2 programs though, im running a Macpro quad2.66 with 4gb RAM.

I have been using the trial versions of both Aperture and Lightroom for the last month trying to decide which way to go. I keep finding myself opening Lightroom instead of Aperture.

For me, I prefer the overall layout, design and way that lightroom works. I prefer the develop options in Lightroom, although I find it a pain having to go to a different ’section’ to do them - would much rather have them all in the Library view the way they are in Aperture. It also runs much faster on my MBP.

I don’t really like the feel of Aperture. I find having to have the keywords hud floating and that fact that it doesnt fit neatly anywhere on the screen irritating. I also dont like the straighten tool (I seem to be very good at shooting slightly wonkily).

One of the things that does appeal far more about Aperture is the dual screen capability. I am looking at updating my dual screen linux box to a Mac Pro at some point and would like to be able to make the most of the 2 windows.

For anyone trying to decide, the best thing really is to download the 2 demos and try them both. Both are great apps, and in my opinion both of them have ‘missing’ features - which you prefer will depend on which of those features you find important.

About the Lua thing: I read that most of the logic in Lightroom is written in Lua with calls to compiled native code for processing and GUI. That would make it very straight forward to expose a Lua scripting interface.

(And with proper examples Lua will not be very difficult to pick up if you have any programming experience.)

Thanks for the review. As an Aperture user since its introduction, I wonder on a fairly regular basis if I committed to the right package. I remain convinced that Aperture can excel if the design team is willing to take unapologetically the best elements of Lightroom (the curves tool, anyone?) and integrate them into the package. It will be interesting to see what Apple does with the next version.

@Ben Donley — the Flickr Uploadr does use the metadata, but in a slightly inane way.

First, it uses what Lightroom calls the ‘Headline’ (and not the Title) entry. Make sure you’ve got the correct metadata viewer preset specified so that the Headline shows (or use this great tool to create your own — http://regex.info/blog/2007-06-27/503)

Second, the Uploadr puts the filename in the title by default. If, after the uploadr has run, you make sure that the title and description field (in the Uploadr) are blank, then Flickr will see that they’re blank, and pull the data out of the EXIF/IPTC info.

Google’ing for “flickr headline title” should turn up numerous posts that talk about this in more detail.

I use Aperture and I basically only have two complaints. 1) It gets pretty slow at times on my Core 2 Duo. I end up waiting straight twiddling my thumbs sometimes. 2) The keyboard shortcuts don’t understand that I don’t use a qwerty layout. Aperture hard maps the keyboard keys. Most keyboard commands are useless and it’s terribly annoying.

In my opinion, Aperture vs. Lightroom is the same discussion as Canon vs. Nikon. Each has strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not a no-brainer decision either way.

That’s a pretty poor analogy. Nikon vs. Canon is a no-brainer is you have a significant investment in Nikon lenses, or are interested in using older Nikkor lenses on your modern body.

It’s only really a tough decision if you are new to photography and buying all new gear. There’s tons of history there, and historically, Nikon dominated the Pro field. Wheras Lightroom and Aperture are both new - so there’s no issue of this investment in lenses and compatibility, etc.

Plus, with the new Nikon D-300 and D3, what are Nikon’s weaknesses as opposed to Canon? Seems Nikon beats or is on par with Canon in every way now.

Not only does the Aperture UI look better than Lightroom, but it also works better in my use. Like you, I didn’t like the Navigator Panel as I have no use for a few of the items in there (print / web). There is visually less clutter in Aperture and by default it only presents you with tools that you are likely to use often. Keyboard shortcuts for everything imaginable is lovely as well.

For my D70s there was hardly any difference between RAW conversions in Lightroom and Aperture for me. I would expect Lightroom to be superior because of ACR but it wasn’t discernible for me.

I also wish there were a few more adjustment tools in Aperture and hope a newer version is around the corner.

http://flickr.com/photos/infrequent

Imagine you are out on location or shooting in a studio with some clients. You take a few dozen pictures and fire up Aperture to download them to your mac. You wait and wait and wait and mean while you can’t do anything else with the incoming pictures. Time is money on location or in the studio and unless you have a G5 ramped up with 8 GIG’s of RAM the performance out of Aperture is going to leave you sitting in front of your mac while your clients look for another Photographer who won’t waist their time. Fire up Lightroom and you’re loading photo’s and at the same time able to perform any type of work you need to while Lightroom works at importing. No waisted time. I chuckle anytime I read about how pro’s love Aperture. They don’t, I promise you that.
As far as look and feel go human beings will adjust to almost everything, speed is the deciding factor here, nothing else is of consequence, not in the real world anyway.

Two other things Aperture offers - complete integration with iLife and it’s not an Adobe product. Bottom line, I don’t trust Adobe. Lightroom never would have even been released if it hadn’t been for Aperture (it was languishing in the labs, with Adobe afraid of hurting photoshop sales).

@Harvard Irving: I don’t agree that the analogy is poor. The inertia in one’s investment in components of an SLR kit is not massively different to the intertia generated by one’s investment of time in learning one of these two applications.

If you’re an Aperture user, there would need to be significant value in switching to Lightroom, and similarly the other way.

Lightroom and Aperture are both fast for me but Lightroom just has a responsive snap that Aperture doesn’t. Even though lots of art directors love Aperture in the end I went with Lightroom because the processed file quality is just much better.

“Nikon D-300 and D3, what are Nikon’s weaknesses as opposed to Canon? Seems Nikon beats or is on par with Canon in every way now.”

Nikon’s digital offerings will be on par or beating Canon when they release a high end camera (D3x?). The D300 and D3 compete with the low and middle end of the pro market with the 1D Mk3, 5D and 40D. My personal gripe with Nikon is that their very high end and exotic lenses are so difficult to find.

“Nikon D-300 and D3, what are Nikon’s weaknesses as opposed to Canon? Seems Nikon beats or is on par with Canon in every way now.”

except now they have crazy prices compared to Canon. Finally a full frame SLR for FIVE GRAND! A little bit better in image quality (maybe) than the several year old EOS 5D which sells for half the price of the not-yet-available D3. I mean, really!

Lightroom for me - the performance is the killer feature. For the books and stuff, I output to a folder and open in iPhoto.

As for lacking things like plug ins for Flickr and so on - some one already mentioned the Export Actions folder. You can drop an alias to just about anything in there that will be accessed on export - photoshop, iPhoto, iMovie, Mail, Entourage, Outlook, iWeb, whatever. However, it would be much nicer if it would work without having to make a duplicate set of the files that is now outside the Lightroom management. I find that I don’t do those “other” things like books and stuff, so the superior adjustment tools, performance and Print module make LR a winner for me. If Apple answers those issues and Adobe does not one-up them, them I will upgrade my Aperture 1.5 to ver 2.0, for certain.

I don’t want to weigh in the Nikon or Canon thing, but please allow me to say that the decision over which one to buy, meaning Aperture or Lightroom for Mac users is terribly difficult at this moment because Apple has upgraded most of its software this year except for Aperture, and due to the secrecy policy, keeps users in the dark about whether 2.0 will counter Lightroom … this month, or Christmas time or in 2008. No doubt the clamour from Aperture loyalists has sparked some “back to the table” efforts on Apple’s part, but really … many of us have tons of photos pilling up, and Apple should realize that they lose potential Mac users to Lightroom with each passing day.

I am using Photoshop, and it’s not as though I can process images from my camera (Canon - ooops). On the “integration” side of things, one could argue for Lightroom being that I’m likely to be finding it more attuned to my Photoshop adjustment tools.

On the other hand I don’t just do photography, but manage and host web sites, creatae podcasts with video and sound, and play and compose music. I’m a fan of Mac and of Apple computers, and, of course, the direction Apple has taken with integration. The buying decision is no so simple for me.

However, I am very getting very tired of only having the rumor mill to feed off of while waiting to find out what Aperture will be. No doubt I for one would be much more willing to take a wait and see stance, if I either had some idea what that target date of 2.0 might be, or at least some kind of vague idea of what they were improviing. I think the silence thing works against them as much as it works for them.

Yes, it’s not the end of the world. I have Photoshop. However, I can ONLY WAIT SO LONG to see if Apple is going to respond, or fold under the pressure. I would guess this delay of the release of Aperture might possibly signal they are working hard to improve it. But without knowing if they plan to release it with Leopard or much later, I’m less likely to sit around and wait.

Finally, I don’t understand why there has to COMPLETE silence on the subject of 2.0. Why can’t they do what they did with Leopard and simply say some great things are coming for Aperture? If anything it really it doesn’t lower expectations to minimize customer disappoint but in fact raises hopes beyond where they should probably be … making people more critical in the long run of what they release. I don’t get it.

What harm would it do Apple say something … even as vague as yes … we are working on release 2.0 (to my knowledge they haven’t even gone that far). I simply don’t understand this business of TOTAL secrecy. Frankly, it’s not only annoying, but seems to do everything but take the Apple user’s best interests into consideration.

Many people already expect Aperture 2.0 to be released shortly after or along with Leopard. And, of course this could happen. Why not? It makes sense. They aren’t going to wait until the next Photokina.

Leopard could just as easily arrive without Aperture in the wings, let’s face it. A statement such as “Well, we were planning to release it with Leopard but decided we wanted to work on some very exciting new things, so … we’re delaying it a bit, ” a statement like that would be disappointing but better than NOTHING, and therefore, welcome nonetheless.

I’m way late joining this threat but loved the Nikon/Canon Lightroom/Aperture comparison. I whole heartedly agree with it. I started out w/ Nikon, got woo’d over to Canon on specs but just wasn’t feeling it (this was pre digital). There are a whole lot of simple little things that add up to a complete shooting experience that puts me firmly in the Nikon camp.

I bought both Aperture and Lightroom and am selling my Aperture license. Had Lightroom been release earlier I wouldn’t have Aperture; had they not offered the early adopter price I might have stayed with Aperture. When it comes to moving through a big pile of shots, rating, keywording, selecting etc, I could move much more quickly in Lightroom. This might stem from the fact that I’m a recent switcher and don’t completely GET the Mac way of doing things yet. Early on, when I stepped away from both apps for a few days, Aperture required more re-learning where all the Lightroom maneuvering through the GUI came right back.

The Nikon/Canon drivability comparison fits when working on a single project from input to output; you will know which one works best for you. It is less applicable to Image editing where Lightroom is flat out better or library management where Aperture is way ahead. I have to remove Aperture from my laptop because it is way too fun and winds up distracting me, which sums up my general feeling about both apps. If I wanted to play around with a gorgeous interface and marvel at a museum’s architecture, Aperture is a magnificent piece of software that would provide that experience. If I wanted to cull a mountain of images and present one to a museum, Lightroom is the tool.

Something fun to consider. If I were given an assignment and could use whatever gear I wanted and had to perform at my best with very little margin for error I would go with Nikon/Lightroom. If I were told to use Canon/Aperture, I’d be completely happy.

“Finally, I don’t understand why there has to COMPLETE silence on the subject of 2.0”
This one is easy…. Because idiots like me don’t have the patience to wait for the new version. In my defense, I buy it if it does what I need and deal with upgrades when they are available.