Aperture vs. Lightroom: Redux
With the release
of Lighroom
1.1 (and more
recently, 1.2) I have had
another opportunity to put the two up against one
another. I had said in my last iteration
that I
preferred Aperture
due to its
fantastic organization features, which though Lightroom
mimics to a lesser extent, does not quite get it on the
nose. Nothing’s really changed in this front, and the
1.1 & 1.2 updates added only marginal functionality
that was missing in the version 1.0 release, while
Aperture as been feature-frozen since the 1.5 update
about a year & a half ago. So if the programs
haven’t changed much, then what has?
My realizations, I guess. A lot of fuss has been made
around how LR locks you in to modal thinking whereas AP is
more like a blank canvas that allows you to play with
images and edit them from anywhere. “Artistic” types like
to say that LR is too limiting in forcing you to work with
their organization philosophy, while AP allows you to work
like you want.
Well guess what: I think I want to work in a modal
workflow. After using AP for the better part of two years,
I can say that this is how I work: I view the library,
select a picture, then to edit it, set the palettes up to
give screen priority to the image, making it nice & big
while not covering it up. And to do this in AP, one has to
click far more things to get from one “Mode” to another
than one does in LR:
And the more I
play with it, I think LR has the idea right: You want a
certain setup for everything when you’re editing, to focus
on the image, and these priorities are different than the
ones you have when you’re sifting through your library to
find images and organize them. And what’s more, since AP is
mode-less, there’s no preservation of settings from one
setup to another, meaning if you wanted to browse your
library with large images but edit with only a small
thumbnail strip of images, you have to change these
settings each time you go from one to the other, since the
browsing pane is the same browsing pane from one “mode” to
another.
In LR, this is not the case. Settings are preserved
independent of settings in other modes. So in my mock
library, I have the thumbnails set larger, with certain
palettes open to help me organize & view my catalogue.
When I want to edit an image I find, I go the the “Develop”
module, and there the settings are starkly different:
screen priority is assigned to the image, certain palettes
are visible while others are hidden, and the library viewer
is given very little priority (I’m here to edit, not
organize). So in the end, I’ve come to the conclusion that
there’s nothing wrong with a “Modal” way of working – we do
it anyways. Aperture users (if you’re reading this), when
was the last time you really wanted to edit your image from
a small thumbnail view anyway? You want it nice & big
so you can see what your changes are really doing, right?
Meaning if you were looking at your library when you saw an
image you thought was too dark or “not right” in some way,
you’d probably go and start clicking on things to give the
image screen priority, dragging things around to make it
the right size, etc etc. Well guess what? That’s modal, and
painfully, horribly so.
Lightroom is most definitely faster to edit I have
discovered. And not only that, but the two programs edit
differently. Previously, I had found
that I could achieve similar results with both programs
on the same image in roughly the same time. This isn’t
quite true, now that I’ve really played with LR more. I
can now get an image to be quite admirable in LR with
almost no time lost at all. Not only that, but certain
edits are not possible in AP as they are in LR, such as
brightening up a background. I find that in LR, I can
select the background and bring out color, detail, and
luminance without much if any affect on the foreground,
whereas in AP no matter how I try to add more detail
& luminance to the background, the colors never come
out right and/or it takes many more tools and steps than
in LR. It also has sharpening tools and lens correction
adjustments that don’t have any sort of comparable
counterparts in AP. Almost without question, it seems
that LR is the Big Dog when it comes to image editing.
Lightroom is not perfect, however. It’s not all that much
faster than AP I find, even though people love to complain
about the slowness of Aperture. It’s library doesn’t play
well with other programs due to its lack of automatically
generated previews, meaning every time you want to use an
image elsewhere, you’ll have to export it out. Its library
organization scheme is to Aperture as the Pinto is to
Lexus. Yeah it’s there, it “organizes,” but it is nowhere
near as powerful as AP in this regard. Yeah, a pinto has 4
wheels & brakes, but it’s nowhere near as refined or
useful as the Lexus. And the UI (User Interface). It has
some lovely flourishes here and there, but I find that the
overall UI experience in AP makes LR seem a little kiddish.
The palettes in AP look like they should be there,
especially the floating ones. In LR, the floating palettes
especially do not look as though they’re even part of the
same program. Sometimes a dialog box comes up, and you
think for a minute that perhaps another program has come to
the front, or the system is warning you of something. Nope.
Lightroom is active and it’s a screen you requested, even
though not matching the rest of the the interface would be
a drastic understatement.
Bottom line is: Lightroom is good. It’s better than I
initially thought. It makes me wish I’d have waited to
spend money on a RAW image processor a little longer.
Because I bought Aperture already, and my library — while
not insurmountable —
is
contained therein. Not only that, but LR is $100 more than
Aperture currently.
I have no inclination at this time to spend the money to
move away from Aperture. Version 1.5 has been the current
version for a long, long while now, and I feel that there’s
a Version 2.0 around the corner soon enough. Aperture had
no competition to get ideas from when it was released,
meaning it’s going through some growing pains, while
Lightroom at least had Aperture to look at and base some
features & idea paths off of. Perhaps with some time on
the market & a worthy competitor, Aperture will see a
slew of improvements that makes LR look silly by
comparison. Who knows at the moment, but one thing is sure:
The upgrade path to AP2.0 would most definitely be cheaper
than jumping ship to rival Adobe Systems.
Time will tell. But since I have put money into Aperture
already, it would seem wise to stick with it for the time
being. Further purchase decisions will come of course, but
not until we’re comparing current to current
– Aperture’s second attempt to Adobe’s second attempt
(Adobe put LR out to the public as a beta, meaning they got
a lot of feedback & feature requests before actually
releasing 1.2 or even 1.0, so I consider this effectively
their “second” offering). But I think it’s safe to say that
with currently-shipping products considered, Lightroom is
the winner in the RAW workflow department. Though not as
polished in the library organization department, it far
outshines Aperture in about every other area, and still
manages to have a useful enough library to get it through.
Aperture was hailed by photographers when it was released,
but with no competing products to compare it to, Aperture
was far & away a winner in that one-horse race. Now
that there are two, it would seem the second entrant has
pulled ahead, and made light of glaring deficiencies in the
former frontrunner that we didn’t know even existed before.
This is not a full feature review, but more an overview of
the programs. There’s too much in each program to compare
here without pages upon pages dedicated. Each program’s
manual is well over 100 pages deep, and enough people have
written books outlining how to use them more effectively
that I’d be lying if I said that I felt I was more
qualified to write that in print than they. However, if
you’re considering either of these tools or just wanted a
perspective other than your own, I offer my experiences
with these two competing programs in the hopes that it
might give you an idea of how they stack up from a
usability perspective, without drowning you in details. I
hope you enjoy!