Aperture 2 vs. Lightroom 2

i feel like i shouldn't vote if i've only used one of 'em. I loooove lightroom although i do like the sound of some of the things i've read about aperture - mainly the lack of division into strict library/develop modes.

tried them both, preferred aperture 2, although apple really should rip off the lightroom presets for the next version.

I've only used LR (1.3.1 thru 2.3) and I couldn't cope without it!

Yeah it's the presets that are making me lean towards Lightroom.

xpost

There's a lot onscreen with Lightroom 2 - would I find it awkward on a 15.4" macbook?

Seems fine on my 15.4" Vaio. You can hide any/all panels as you wish, btw - the preview image gets bigger as a result.

I tried both and vastly preferred Aperture. Lightroom to me seems to be geared toward 'session photographers' - i.e. pros who take hundreds of photos at an event and need a quick and dirty way to pare those hundreds down to a few dozen potentials. Since I tend to be more of a casual snapshooter I find Aperture's amorphous nature much more suitable to my style. However I find even on my unibody 15" MBPro it's a little sluggish at times.

One niggly note is that Apple is generally much slower than Adobe at providing support for newly released cameras. Hasn't been a problem yet but I foresee it will be if/when I pick up the new Olympus E-P1.

Bottom line though, is that both are available as thirty day trials, so you really ought to download both (I would recommend one after another, not at the same time) and see which one you like better.

if/when I pick up the new Olympus E-P1

Lucky you! Keep the board updated on this purchase!

Lightroom to me seems to be geared toward 'session photographers' - i.e. pros who take hundreds of photos at an event and need a quick and dirty way to pare those hundreds down to a few dozen potentials.

This is probably fair enough (though I've not used Aperture - is it a bit more of a struggle on the picking/cataloguing side?). Though I'm only a casual snapper myself I do occasionally have moderately-sized sessions (friends over from California for first time in 6 years, back garden BBQ, 20 guests = 230 pix, kids' party = 150 pix, etc). LR is perfect for that.

aperture isn't a struggle at all for cataloguing and picking - that's pretty much what it was designed for. i sometimes have shoots of maybe 800 pix which it breezes through (helps to have 4gb memory, i think). but it's a bit more flexible in that you can easily edit a shot mid-way through cataloguing without switching modules.

dyao otm about the trials though, best way to find out which you prefer.

Yes, the modules thing in LR is a bit like Adobe forcing its preferred workflow on you; it's only a key press either way, but it is a bit irksome. Aperture supports local corrections (masks, graduated filters, etc) now too, I guess?

(I'm sufficiently curious to download the Aperture trial...)

(Oh, hang on, I'm an idiot. Mac only, right?)

not much in the way of local corrections iirc - think the only ones are spot healing/cloning, but i don't process heavily.

xp yes, sorry!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I downloaded the 30-day trial of Aperture last night, and I think I'll be going for that. Apart from Lightroom-style presets it seems to do pretty much everything I want, and it's £100 cheaper.

I've switched back and forth between them for ages, but end up sticking with Lightroom. Its previews are much quicker, whereas Aperture can take a while to get itself in order. Also the preset thing, and only Lightroom has split-toning (vital for 300).

Aperture's great if you're going to be nobly true to the original image, but when you just want to click a button that says "Make it all colours and Flickr and shit", Lightroom's yer man.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I managed to get Aperture for free, and as such it's terrific!

getting really fed up with the lack of support for the E-P1 and just lack of updating in general. tempted to get Lightroom @ educational pricing, although I know as soon as I pull the trigger Apple's gonna roll out a mega update.

just can't see Aperture being very high up on Apple's priority list at the moment..

Aperture is horrible, I didn't find either version (the first two major releases, don't know if there's been another by now) unusable.

Lightroom, OTOH, is fantastic. Controls that actually resemble working in a darkroom (far more than Aperture or other programs, including old versions of Photoshop/Camera RAW), easy sharpening and output, and freakishly simply cloning to get rid of dust/etc..

haha surely you mean 'usable' not 'unusable'?

I tried both out and preferred Aperture - just seemed to fit my usage profile better; I'm not really a session photographer. I also liked Aperture's output colors better, and did some aspects (highlight recovery) better. I do think Lightroom's got Aperture beat on noise removal, though

Lightroom has downloadable camera profiles that vastly improve the basic color rendition on files.

I could never find a way of sharpening and tonal adjustment in Aperture that made sense.

Really loving Lightroom's brushes for applying adjustments to parts of images non-destructively.

Lightroom 3 beta is out today. New bits include better noise removal and options to add grain. Also fixes the appearing-panels problem on Mac.

might download the beta and give it another go. still love aperture's ui but lightroom has some great features and better noise reduction would save me exporting super high ISO stuff to capture NX (which has the simplest, best noise reduction ever seen imo, but not much else going for it). what we need is a socialist utopia to force them to merge and combine the best elements of each.

also, when will either programme allow you to do curves adjustments properly?

add grain, yay

it's annoying the way lightroom (don't know about aperture) locks the curve so white is always white and black is always black, you can't dial down highlights at all.

Aren't the brightness/blacks/recovery sliders sort of a bit curve-y in the way they work? I haven't really found the fixed curve that much of a problem, tbh - all I ever do is a gentle S-curve or perhaps mid-range boost anyway and it doesn't interfere with that.

Ok, downloaded LR3 beta... Ooh, "Publish Services" in the left-hand panel, one of which is "Flickr". Import dialog is entirely different.

Drag and drop an image to the Flickr photostream on the left, hit Publish and, bang, it's there.

Ok, this is pretty good - allowing you to keep tabs on your exports (whether web or hard drive) in a similar way as the source catalog.

xp freeform curves are quicker and more flexible. if capture nx and the garden-shed outfit who made bibblepro could do it, i don't see why adobe and apple can't. it's not a fatal flaw - i use aperture happily and it doesn't even do adobe's fake curve, you have to shift levels sliders - but i'd like to see proper curves back.

What kind of free form curves are you talking about? Under develop in LR, you can adjust the tone curve however you'd like, in addition to the histogram sliders.

It's fairly restricted, isn't it? The position of the dark/midpoint/light sliders along the bottom of the curve box determine just what kind of parabolic shape you can pull the curve into, with the point curve type (medium/strong contrast/linear) setting the severity of the action. In Photoshop (CS2 on) you stick as many pins as you like along the x=y line and drag into whatever shape you desire.

Apple rumored to release 'Aperture X' by the end of the year; hope they won't make existing users pay for it

been trying out the lightroom 3 beta - the noise reduction does seem better and might tempt me away long-term depending on what apple have planned for aperture X. but the flickr plug-in is irritating - if you publish a batch it puts them in your stream in a random order. didn't think anything could be more user-unfriendly than flickr's own uploader, but adobe managed it. (my fault for using a beta, i suppose.)

new aperture raw update out today....added support for newest canon/nikon cameras, still no support for olympus/panasonics. ugh. very very close to just getting lightroom

Aperture 3's out! Now w/Lightroom-style selective brushes (at last)

presets too. wonder if they've matched lightroom 3's handling of noise, though.

http://images.apple.com/aperture/features/images/adjustments-curves-20091020.jpg

:D

Looks like it's got everything apart from split-toning, so still no 300 preset :)

i don't really understand what split toning is so i won't feel like i'm missing anything.

The split/merge library feature is a good one: you can have one master library on your home Mac, and start a new one on your laptop when you're travelling, then later merge them.

Looks good. Going down the list of cameras with RAW support - yes to the Pana G1/GF1, no to the various Oly Pens...

g1/gh1; no gf1!

feel like if I upgrade I'll be forever paying canikon taxes to apple (I.e. delayed and sporadic support)

is LR3 out of beta yet?

the beta expires on april 30, so i guess they'll have the finished product then.

gotcha.

worth using? or should i just stick with LR2 for the moment

i've just dabbled, but it seems pretty good. high iso stuff comes out looking v natural and filmlike. it's free, so why not?

D'oh - misread, sorry! No GF1.

really mystifies me that G1/GH1 are supported but not the others. LX3 and S90 are supported too, so it looks like they've finally built in lens-correction into their RAW processor.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/28/drudge-siren.gif aperture release supports e-p1, gf-1 http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/28/drudge-siren.gif

Aperture 3.0.1. update U&K too!

congratulations to aperture and all its supporters

Congratulation to aperture for its update

I can get Aperture 3 for about £60 with education discount; seeing as I *ahem* acquired Aperture 2 free of charge, I'd not mind paying for 3. Should I upgrade?

I definitely would for 3.0, the new feature set seems pretty excellent and once I hassled with getting my library converted over I like it a lot.

try it out first?

I tried it out in the Apple shop last week, will def. download an upgrade.

picked up the upgrade copy last night. love apple packaging

Have downloaded the trial at work. Think I may splurge.

Downloading upgrade now..

anyway know what the de facto aperture forum is? would love to find a kodachrome preset

new lightroom beta has support for video (metadata, library, etc., not video editing).

Also the Tone Curve is Photoshop-like now - as many points as you want, endlessly tweakable.

how do you even work a tone curve

are the ends still fixed or can i dial down overexposed whiteness to greyness?

The ends are not fixed.

gbx, we pointed you at a coupla tutorials on the other thread a few weeks ago! Sheesh!

(Just kidding, like).

can i dial down overexposed whiteness to greyness?

Mind you, pulling the ends in (crunching the DR) is not the way to do this. That's actually going to brighten your higher mid-tones. You're better off with the Recovery slider to pull back blown-out highlights (shooting Raw, you might even find there's detail in there, not just greyness).

Recovery had the same problem though, i.e. brightest whites (FFF) were always unaffected. Has that changed? I know, I know, learn to shoot better, stop trying to fix yr schoolboy errors in post :)

Hmmm. I need to have a play with a larger catalog than the one I have at work (which is mostly photos of Movember and various Bake-Offs) to see what you mean. I know that I often haven't been able to completely eliminate blown highlights in the past but IMO it's better to leave them like that than pull them down into greyness (which you could do in a very blunt way by using the adjustment brush and pulling down exposure).

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/photoshop-curves.htm

this site has a very good intro to curves (and to post processing in general)

thx dude, will look into it

You mean you didn't when I posted the same link on the Processing thread in January? ;) It is a good site, that.

I suspect I've been missing a trick or two with the Tone Curve in LR2.x, reading Milo Z's comment upthread and judging by some of the wacky shapes I see in some of my presets. Definitely seems easier to manipulate in a PS CS2+ style in LR3, but perhaps I never figured out how to do that with LR2. I'm generally pretty happy with a little S-curve and using the histogram sliders for everything else.

If they could incorporate specific lens distortion algorithms (a la DxO Optics Pro) in LR3 then I'd definitely be in. It's only maths, innit?

lens correction is already built into camera raw - if your camera has the right EXIF info (i.e. you're shooting a micro 43ds, LX3, or S90) it'll apply the correction automatically. of course you may want to do more than the manufacturer has dialed in (to remove excess CA etc.)

Hmm, I guess the lens correction I'm limited to with ACR (with my Canon EF lenses) is just vignetting/CA (which is all there in the LR interface). Judging by the profound effect I see when applying the 40D+28/1.8 DxO module to images taken with that combo (and these are tiffs exported directly into DxO from the imported LR Raw), there's clearly no barrel distortion fixing going on with ACR.

I should experiment a bit more though. This is based on an hour last night...

PS already has a lens correction tool I think, but it's pretty basic and not calibrated for individual lenses - it would be nice if Adobe incorporated it, but I don't see it happening...

as each lens has its own distortion characteristics, you need to specify how much correction to dial in for each particular lens, and if it's a zoom, at each particular focal length. so it's easy to do for a prime, but for a standard 24-70, you'll have up to 46 different possible distortion characteristics which you need to compensate for..

you should also give PTLens a try - much cheaper and does the same thing

Yes, that seems pretty good. As fun as the FilmPack stuff is with DxO, I have no real use for much else that it does, as it duplicates a lot of Lightroom functionality. The one-click appeal of DxO is rather lost when you find it doing something you don't actually like (the auto noise reduction is not as subtle as LR, I don't think; though you can customise so it limits what it does in Auto mode) and then you have to start going through drop-down menus.

Also, it's not ideal calling external editors from within LR on images you may have already processed in LR; not only do you lose the changes in the export (OK, not with PS or PSE), what you get back is a TIFF or a JPG, so that copying the original LR adjustments over gives you something wildly different. It's tricky working out what the correct workflow would be with something like DxO; either you have to do everything in DxO or just accept that the nicely flat, sharp image you get back in can't be manipulated with quite as much freedom.

for users of aperture - apparently this update may improve stability/memory leaks with aperture 3, and it doesn't show up in the software update

http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1008

aperture 3 has been an absolutely nightmare for me. i think the prokit update and 3.02 have fixed it, but i'm still rebuilding my (admittedly stupidly large) library after trying twice to import all my photos (first by transferring aperture 2 library, then by reimporting files and folders) left me each time with an application that crashed as soon as it was opened, every time. I HATE APPLE etc etc.

anyway, hopefully the reinstall and new library will do the trick.

haven't had any problems yet here (knock on wood). hope yer problems get sorted out! (I have a pretty small library to begin with - also I store my photos in folders on the HD, instead of inside the aperture library package.)

yeah so do i - they're on external drives. but it's huge, because i'm too lazy to throw stuff out. basically:

Level V Hoarder

Household will require intervention from a wide range of agencies. Professional organizers should not venture directly into working solo with this type of household. The Level V household may be under the care of a conservator or be an inherited estate of a mentally ill individual. Assistance is needed from many sources. A team needs to be assembled. Members of the team should be identified before beginning additional work. These members may include social services and psychological/mental health representative (not applicable if inherited estate), conservator/trustee, building and zoning, fire and safety, landlord, legal aid and/or legal representatives. A written strategy needs to be outlined and contractual agreements made before proceeding.

lol - 'external drives' says it all!

So, Lightroom 3 is out. Worth the upgrade from 2.x, I wonder?

I've been using the beta -- it's pretty good, and I like the noise reduction and Flickr integration. Don't know if I'd pay cash money to upgrade if I'd bought 2, though.

The big post-Beta addition is the Lens Correction feature. Pre-loaded Canon profiles are limited to the L lenses and the EF-S range (so nothing for my mid-price primes) but they have a shedload of Sigmas. I don't know whether they'll roll out more. Seems a bit slow with my tiny 400-image catalog at work.

this guy says it has the best noise reduction ever. i'm not convinced by his examples.

Colo(u)r noise reduction was always pretty good in LR, I think (though I don't often use it beyond the preset value for Raw because the in-camera colour NR for high-ISO is quite adequate on the 40D); luminance NR was horrid and blotchy. This seems smoother but they could just be smearing out details (this guy seems to like that effect).

I have more of a problem with this guy standing up in a Ford T-bird convertible going through a tunnel, brandishing a 5D2 and 14L. I bet he was going "Whooooo! Fuck yeah!" at the time.

(If he follows his referrals - I'm only kiddin', like).

Have just invested (cough cough) in Lr3, will have a mess around and report back.

Had a little look-see in the LR3 Lens Profile file for the Sigma 12-24 (cos I've just hired one); there are six focal length settings (12/15/17/20/24) and 12 aperture values (seem to be 1/6th-stop intervals between f/4.5 and f/8.0) plus a load of focusing distances, I guess. So what it does if you've shot something at 22mm f/11, I'm not sure - does a little interpolation? Nearest value? This is part of DxO's criticism - their modules are supposedly much more thorough that this. (Though the real meat of their argument was that users couldn't really be expected to create their own profiles with any degree of accuracy for those lenses which are missing).

3 finally does watermarking properly, that's a big deal for some.

using the demo of LR3 and liking it a lot so far, tho I think most of the improvements are above my pay grade

i swear i read that as "above my gay parade"

Well that's that...

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/06/apple-to-cease-development-support-of-pro-photo-app-aperture/

so is paying $120 a year to adobe / a jackboot stomping on a human face for lightroom the only way forward now?

There are other raw editors out there (I've tried a few) but if you want the catalog management, yeah, Lr seems to be the only game in town. I've been paying £8/month for the Adobe Creative Cloud photography package for over a year now, so that's Lr plus Ps with Silver Efex Pro 2 as my secondary editor (from the free Google release of the Nik tools a while ago).

I rationalise it as being less than I spend on chocolate (perhaps).

You can buy Lightroom, you don't have to rent it. Don't remember how but I did it.

New Lightroom CC out today ... seems to be not awful? The cloud syncing seems to be fast and good, at least between the web client and my iPad and phone and I'm glad they've separated it out from the desktop app, because the link between it and the mobile apps was creaking at the seams. The "save offline" ability for albums is aeons better than the Apple and Google Photos apps' insistence that they just get to manage that for you invisibly, too.

I need to download the new desktop app tonight, because if CC is all it's made out to be I might not need Lightroom Classic any more. (Which is apparently heaps faster in the new release, too)

Seeing as I don't have internet at home for potentially another week, I'm not going to be playing with this for a bit. How do Lr CC and Lr Classic co-exist? I assume they share the same catalog? Changes made in one are immediately seen in the other? If I make some fancy edits in Classic (settings that aren't available in CC), I see them all the same in CC, I guess?

I was thinking I could work entirely in Lr CC and just have an Lr Classic session for a wedding or some other major shoot. But I've yet to see what's missing from Lr CC.

Totally separate catalogues -- you have to do an import process to get yr LR Classic catalogue into CC, and then the link between them is completely broken. Your CC catalogue comes by default with all the albums you have shared with LR Mobile previously, though.

The big thing missing from CC I've found so far is curves, and there's no split toning (which I really only ever used for 300 anyway, so nbd)

Ugh. I'm not sure I like the sound of this. Lens corrections? Vertical/horizontal guides? Masking?

And the catalog split I'd need to get my head around. There's 17 years of pics in there!

You can upload them all to CC though, which is what my laptop is beavering away at now. No more backup hard disks for me to fret about! I'll check on those features when I get in

I still use aperture

So... the practice of LrCC making a local copy of all yr pics makes it's a no-go for most laptop users, I'm thinking? That's your experience, Stet?

I'm basically just using it as a viewing tool for things I've synched with Lr Mobile. That's all that's in there - the 500+ images (Smart Previews only) I've synched over the last couple of years. The LrCC web tool is ok for a quick tweak too. And I'm now sharing Lr Mobile albums with people, rather than a Flickr link. But I could have done this without LrCC.

LrClassic all the way for me, for the time being.

So... the practice of LrCC making a local copy of all yr pics makes it's a no-go for most laptop users, I'm thinking? That's your experience, Stet?

I'm basically just using it as a viewing tool for things I've synched with Lr Mobile. That's all that's in there - the 500+ images (Smart Previews only) I've synched over the last couple of years. The LrCC web tool is ok for a quick tweak too. And I'm now sharing Lr Mobile albums with people, rather than a Flickr link. But I could have done this without LrCC.

LrClassic all the way for me, for the time being.

Oops.

It works OK in general, as you can set how much disk space it should use for previews. I’ve been trying it out with a 20gb shoot and it has kept the local usage small.

The problem is the migration, where it insists on making a local copy of everything first and won’t move without it. I’m hoping that’s a stupid oversight, otherwise I just won’t be able to ever migrate to it

this decision to fork lightroom is really insane

i might live to regret this but i think i'm going to subscribe to lightroom cc

i decided to stick with aperture and bought affinity photo the photoshop killer. if i need a better digital cam program (right now primarily managing film scans) i’ll fork out the 300 or so for capture one.

should i buy lightroom 6 while they're still selling it without a subscription? i "acquired" 5.x and i like it. facial recognition is the only reason i know of that i want to upgrade to a new version. i assume the cloud version also has a slicker workflow for sharing galleries and getting photo snaps into the library.

I preferred 5 to 6 -- the performance tanked miserably for me with 6. CC is getting better, but obviously the standalone doesn't benefit from that

LR6 feels slower than 5 to me for no clear reason. i needed the upgrade in order to handle the RAW files for my new camera so i guess that's that...

it also adds the ability to go in and futz vertical adjustment, not just take what the algorithm decides (tho what you can do is still a bit constrained) and maybe there are other goodies i can't see...

I went from Lr5 on a budget Toshiba W8.1 laptop to LrCC (what they now call Classic) on a Mac Book Pro, so any slow-down was more than compensated for by a huge leap in hardware performance.

Also like the latest color/luminance range masking in Lr, which I'd only previously seen in something like CaptureOne (it was much nicer to use in there though). Though naturally I still do basically the same shit to every photo I work up (with the occasional round-trip to Ps for content-aware fill, or Silver Efex Pro for B&W), so most new tools are wasted on me.

I think the layout in Lr is a bit tired and mid-'00s now. You shouldn't have to scroll down a massive panel on the right to access all the tools. I don't know how I'd rework the UI, tbh.

"When you said you worked on Aperture, you’d get a sympathetic response. Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that."

choice quote

"Many people, including myself, developed long-term health problems. One person, as I mentioned, had a nervous breakdown, others just took forever to get any spark back in their careers. I would look these people in the eyes, and they had this look like someone close to them died.

An amusing aside was that in my annual review, I got the most substantial bonus I’ve ever gotten and the most significant salary increase. I guess getting yelled and screamed at has its perks. Or they felt guilty. Who knows."

I've been meaning for ages to get off Lightroom CC after it caused me to lose a few hundred images last year, and this week's 5.4 "sorry we deleted your pictures" update has finally prodded me into it.

The Downloader is predictably terrible — I have 500gb (how did I manage that) to download and after an hour it's still sitting at 1%.

I'll figure out where to go next after this. I've been using Lightroom since v1. Capture One seems to be the only serious alternative, right?

i switched from lightroom to apple photos and honestly it's fine for my purposes. the developing side is more than i need. the organization is a little basic but fine. it knows about live photos and all the other weird shit that comes out of an iphone.

Adobe finally updated LR so it remembers which preset you’re on when you step away and come back

Okay so moving to M1 Mac means my old copy of Lightroom no longer works. And I'm not paying for a subscription. Anyone have a recommendation?

Right now I'm tempted to just write a script to make the right folders in the photo library and copy images from the SD card, then use Pixelmator on individual images I give a shit about. (I don't shoot a ton any more, although that will change if my family situation turns out as I expect it to.)

A pro I know swears by Affinity (which is about $60?) but it’s not an organising tool; not sure what else there is for that. I still have a basic version of Capture One knocking around - apparently that can convert Lr catalogs.

I can understand not wanting to give Adobe a tenner a month for the rest of time but I can’t switch, not now. And AI masking in the latest version is really good.

i switched from lightroom to apple photos and it's been fine

After years using Lightroom on my phone, I realized that the app also has a camera that can shoot in dng. As far I can tell, the apple processing pipeline is bypassed. Results look good