Aperture VS Lightroom in Real Use

[ForrestTanaka]

With so many more Windows users here, not sure how much interest there is in this, but in case this is helpful to anyone in the silent minority, I just completed an interesting experiment of a week of heavy Apple Aperture usage. I've been using Adobe Lightroom as my main workflow tool since the day beta 2 came out, but was disappointed with the lack of progress made in beta 3, so I thought I'd try Aperture under heavy usage. How, when there's no trial program? Bittorrent. Yeah, I know, but there's no way I was putting down any money without full usage for at least a week. So here's my impressions after that week.

Where Aperture really shines is versioning. The biggest disappointment in Lightroom B3 is the lack of versioning, which they'd been talking about for quite some time. in Aperture, just a right-click and a menu selection creates a new version, either from the original master file, or at any point along the change sequence. In addition, you can easily visually see and organize the versions using the Aperture concept of "stacks." Lightroom B3 did add a good history, like Photoshop's, but it's not versioning.

Aperture's Keywording is also quite good, with a small window that overlays everything, and you can drag and select any of a very nice set of built-in keyword categories. Lightroom is still awkward, with a panel on the left side which makes keywords a bit clumsy to adjust and delete. It will probably change a bit later.

Aperture has a nicely-designed back-up facility known as "vaults." Lightroom has no concept of backing up at all, though that will probably come eventually.

But where Lightroom really shines is where it really counts: image adjustments. Aperture is based around histograms, and you make adjustments to even out the histograms (typically). I thought I'd get used to it, but it's still a very alien concept to me. Lightroom is based around the Curves display, like Photoshop's Curves command. It's a much more natural place to be, at least to me.

Cropping and rotating are far more natural in Lightroom, with a combination tool to handle both. Sort of a resizable, rotatable window to your photo. Aperture breaks these into two tools: crop and straighten; Ne'er the twain shall meet. It is very unnatural.

Both applications are very stable. In the few months I've used Lightroom almost daily, it has never crashed. In the week that I used Aperture, it has never crashed, even with me doing fairly unusual things, like removing external hard disks that it was using in the middle of an operation, changing the multiple monitor configuration while it was running, various things.

Performance is OK for both on my 1.5GHz PowerBook G4. I'd say Lightroom feels a bit faster overall. When a photo is straightened, Aperture becomes very sluggish in all image adjustments, but you can just turn off straightening temporarily to bring the performance back. Lightroom doesn't suffer significantly from straightening.

My main concern with Lightroom, and not being part of the Lightroom team it might be an unfounded concern, but its development seems a bit scattered. It's as if they're trying to figure out a focus based on user feedback, and being a beta, focus should have been determined long ago. Makes me worry a bit about the final product and feature-creep.

But after the week, Aperture is no longer on my hard drive, and Lightroom is. Aperture's versioning and back-up method will be painful to leave, but Lightroom is more natural to use in the important things, so it stays.

[Wayne MG]

I appreciate that review Forrest. Thanks for taking the time to share your experience.

I have both Aperture 1.1.1 and LRB3 on my PB G4 1.67 GHz loaded with 1.5 GB RAM. Important stuff is processed with LR and family snapshots are done with Aperture. Nothing against Aperture really, just a convenient way for me to separate my photos and the different frames of mind they put me in.

That reminds me - I need to send in my Aperture rebate by 30th June.

LR Beta *2* crashed on my once. But maybe it was my fault. I was doing a rather large batch export and went to bed. My computer went into sleep mode at some point and LRB2 became stuck in a routine. I was able to quit it and restart but it just kept getting stuck on a particular file while loading the library. Eventually, I had to delete my library and create a new one, causing me to lose all of the Developing and adjustments I performed.

Another thing about LR libraries - I like small size since the files themselves aren't imported and duplicated, just referenced. This saves me a lot of storage space.

With the Aperture library, the files are duplicated after import to create the vault and the backup features you mentioned. This results in huge library sizes. Maybe there's a way to just reference the files from another location like LR does but I haven't looked into how it could be done.

I love the auto-rotate and crop function in Aperture, and the stacks too. But the slower res-in times just annoy me too sometimes, especially as I'm working with 12-14 MG files from my camera. (Oh wait, LR doesn't res-in immediately either. The slowness might be due to my own hardware limitations - afterall, I'm running these apps near the bare minimum spec requirements). So naturally, since LR is a bit quicker I have also gravitated towards it.

But I'll continue to use Aperture and try to learn and improve my skills there. Ultimately, who knows how much Adobe will charge for the final release version of Lightroom?

[Martin]

Great reviews guys! As someone eagerly awaiting Lightroom this comparison was interesting to me too. I've not really seen anything bad said about Lightroom so far, so it was refreshing too.

Thanks for taking the time to put this together. Great reading.

[Mojo_Yugen]

Does (or will) Lightroom support a plug-in architecture like Photoshop? I've heard that Aperture doesn't and isn't planning on it. That seems like a big mistake by Apple if it's true.

[ForrestTanaka]

Does (or will) Lightroom support a plug-in architecture like Photoshop? I've heard that Aperture doesn't and isn't planning on it. That seems like a big mistake by Apple if it's true.

Seems like it will, though it doesn't sound like they've nailed down what they'll allow plug-ins for. But apparently the web-site generating module in B3 is already a plug-in that's built into the application. A photo organizing application definitely has less place for plug-ins than Photoshop, but there are still places for them.

Don't know on Aperture. I know it doesn't support plug-ins now, but never heard that they never will. Final Cut Studio is all about plug-ins (and one of the MBP members, Graeme, has a business in this, and US$100 of my money for a set!), so it wouldn't be unprecedented for Apple.

[Mullbasses]

I'm pretty late to the game on this one but here's my two cents.

In Aperture version 1.5 Apple has opened up the source code to some plug-ins. At the moment they are exclusive to export protocols. A series of downloads that pre-format and attach info to images being exported to Flikr, Getty images, Digitalfusion, iStockphoto etc. A real time saver when your concerned with copyright. It will also attach GPS info to the image through integration with Google Earth.

The versioning of Aperture in conjunction with two monitor support makes it a superior product in my opinion. It also allows you to choose psd or tiff format when exporting to Photoshop which is important to my work flow anyway. I have used lightroom more than Aperture up until now but unless Adobe facilitates the use of dual monitors and export via psd I'll be sticking with Aperture.

[Mojo_Yugen]

I believe there is, or will be very soon, a legal trial version of Aperture for downloading.

[ForrestTanaka]

I believe there is, or will be very soon, a legal trial version of Aperture for downloading.

Yes, I'd forgotten about that. It's been available for a few days at the Aperture web site.

I agree with Mullbasses completely on what Lightroom is missing. John Arnold, also part of the Photocast Network, has feedback on Lightroom that I think is spot on and agrees with this too. I've been complaining about no versioning in Lightroom since B1, and I can't figure out why they rely on the horrible TIFF format instead of the great PSD one. I realize Adobe owns both, but they've mismanaged TIFF as badly as Aldus did when they owned it. And they really have to do something with multiple screens. I remember they said they were thinking about it, I think during the B2 timeframe.

I should try multiple monitors on Aperture 1.5. With 1.2, it didn't work quite the way I wanted, and it even got stuck and I couldn't get it to unblank one screen.

Still, I find myself to be far more productive with Lightroom. With Aperture, I wasn't able to get used to the Levels method of adjusting the response curves, cropping and straightening is very awkward, and I really hated the pop-up tools that were continually in the way in full-screen edit mode.

[ForrestTanaka]

I doubt anyone cares, but since I've said so much about Lightroom's supremacy over Aperture, I figured I should say something. Two weeks ago, I became an Aperture owner. So what happened?

First, I finally upgraded my 1.5GHz PowerPC-based laptop to a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. Lightroom has always had a significant performance advantage over Aperture, and it still does. But, Aperture's performance overall on this machine is quite acceptable.

Second, the trial version Apple has posted let me spend days with it as a primary workflow tool. I found myself getting used to the levels method, and found that the other slider controls are actually very useful and quick to use. I find myself coming out with something I'm happy with quicker in Aperture than in Lightroom now.

Finally, I was actively using Aperture's versioning and stacks, and I found that going back to Lightroom without versioning or stacks was a complete deal-breaker. Now that the other issues I had with Aperture were effectively gone, there's no reason to go back to Lightroom. Of course, Lightroom is not done, so they may come up to or pass Aperture. But it began to feel like Aperture was at a whole technological level above Lightroom at this stage.

[Mojo_Yugen]

I think that the lack of versioning inside of Lightroom is it's biggest drawback (to me at least). While I think it's going to be included at some point it wont be in the 1.0 release (unless they decide to push back to launch to include it).

[Martin]

Versioning wouldn't be an issue for me either. I haven't tried aperture though, and probably won't, so I can't make an objective decision.

Thanks for the update though Forrest. It's interesting to hear how this panned out for you.