Lightroom Wins - Round Two

Since the day of the release of Aperture 2 I have been messing around with it. Overall I have been very impressed by it, clean design, great raw processing and very good image management. But there has been one thing that is constantly coming back to me as an issue, does it have it where it counts?

So I began to run it through it’s paces. Importing my entire image library, setting images to high quality and letting them all render. When that was done my image library was over 100GB in size (thats only the previews). That is HUGE! So large that I had to start hosting the library on my 1TB raid drive. This was the first sign that I would have issues with Aperture. Not only did it take roughly 3 days of 24/7 image rendering, but it didn’t help that much. Aperture 2 seemed to actually go slower, even in quick view mode.

Throughout these setbacks I wanted to keep going with this new release, and really start developing images in it. So I began to go through image after image, tagging, stacking, editing, etc. I was very impressed with this process. The ease at which Aperture allows you to rate, stack similar images and tag is very intuitive and easy. The editing is incredible as well, the RAW 2.0 support far outreaches the old 1.0 or 1.5 decoders, even rivaling the Adobe Camera Raw decoder. With the much improved editing system and similar feature set as Lightroom, editing images seemed right at home. What I loved more about editing in Aperture 2.0 was the ability to use an eye-dropper to extract a hue from an image and only adjust that specific hue without touching other hues. To me this far exceeds the “nipple” tool in Lightroom.

So with being this impressed with the release of Aperture 2.0, what makes Lightroom win? Well I have to admit, it really came down to what fit my style and productivity workflow with a pinch of self-opinionation (is that a word?). Even with all these new features and benefits in Aperture 2.0 I couldn’t stop but love just how snappy and easy to use Lightroom is.

One huge thing that has always bugged me about the Aperture development was how GPU intensive it is. This to me is the biggest downside to the entire development process. This rules out saving a couple thousand dollars on a laptop just because I need that superior GPU to run Aperture. The underlying software built into Mac OS X is great, but shouldn’t be this intensive on your system.

Another is how slow Apple is to deliver developer details on up coming releases of Aperture. The whole basis of photo management software being so fragile at such a young age makes it hard to work with a single piece of software that you’re not sure will last another years development. Apple has kept it’s users in the dark for almost a year on the development of Aperture 2.0. Adobe has been very good in keeping its users up-to-date on its newest releases. Which I feel is a huge asset to keeping myself coming back for more from Adobe.

And lastly, it has a lot to do with who is controlling the software. I absolutely love Apple computers, software and design, I don’t trust them to be engaged into the world of photography. I feel Apple is going into this game as a “on their terms” type of mentality, which frankly scares me. The photographic community has been around long before Apple entered a part of the market and they can’t look at themselves as the end game for this software. When I start to see Apple let it’s Aperture developers be more open with it’s users, I cannot trust their development of the product.

For these reasons I have kept with Lightroom and feel it is the way to go for photographers. A company that engages it’s community is a company that I want to work with. Realize that this is my specific opinion based on two years of work with both Aperture and Lightroom. Your milage may vary…

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