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Aperture or Lightroom ?

Posted on 29 December 2007



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During my visit to Silicon Valley, I visited some Apple Stores, both in San Francisco and Palo Alto, and noticed that Apple Aperture was never installed on Apple MacBooks, but only on iMacs and MacBook Pro. I was curious to try it out on a MacBook, since I’ve been using Aperture for a couple of months now and the big issue I have is that it’s terribly slow on my 1st gen. MacBook with 2GB RAM.

Aperture is a great software, I really enjoy using it because it brings all the professional editing tools you need to correct and enhance your photos in a simple and easy to use application. The problem, I repeat, is that it’s very slow. Too slow. Sometimes it becomes unusable. Some guys at those Apple Stores told me that the problem was my Macbook, because the graphic card is integrated and not a separate one. I think this is the reason why they don’t install it in Apple Stores’ MacBooks, so that visitors can’t experience a bad behavior by trying it out.

These days I discovered that it’s not true, the problem is Aperture and some articles over the web confirm this. For Christmas I got an unexpected gift from some friends who know I like photography, a copy of Adobe LightRoom 1.3.1. I’ve read about it before, but never tried it neither paid too much attention to it.

Screen-Capture-31

I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and can definitely say that it really rocks. I easily imported my photo library made of over 10.000 photos and Lightroom is capable of managing it tremendously fast. If I compare this with Aperture, it’s like night and day, a total new experience. I can finally get fast searches by keywords and open as many photos as I want at the same time with a speed never seen in Aperture before. Now my Macbook seems more than 2x faster.

The user interface is very easy to use and, even if I haven’t had the time to test it in depth, some reviews on the web state that all I need is there, even more than Aperture. I can also easily export my photos to Flickr thanks to this very well done plugin.

As I read somewhere, the point is that Adobe is fully committed on photography and some of the best minds in this field work on those products. In a couple of months Lightroom passed from 1.0 to 1.3.1 while Aperture is still at 1.5, with no substantial improvements during the last year. All these points lead me to decide to completely switch to Lightroom, also because many famous photographers are using it and the available documentation is really wide.

Is anyone using Lightroom? What are your comments?

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Luca Filigheddu - who has written 1967 posts on LucaFiligheddu.com.

Luca is currently CEO at Abbeynet, a company specialized in VoIP and Web 2.0.

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Viewing 7 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    LIghtroom is not written with Cocoa. It will fall behind. Performance is not productivity. Aperture has the superior workflow. If you are a pro you can afford the hardware you need for Aperture, then performance is no longer an issue.
    • ^
    • v
    I know that Aperture is not written with Cocoa, but I read about professional photographers using a 3Ghz Mac Pro that still experienced an increased speed. I'm not a PRO, so for me a new hw is not worth it. I'm now using Lightroom and think it's the right choice for getting better performances.
    • ^
    • v
    Lightroom is usable and productive while Aperture is so slow it is unproductive and unusable (on my hardware a 2.4 iMac w 4 gig, and esp a 2 Macbook with 2 gig ram.) Besides, LR is a very good program. I'm one of the thousands of non pro photographers who need or desire a program like LR or Aperture.
    • ^
    • v
    I've been using Aperture on a quad G5 with a 30 in monitor and a speedy 2.5 terabyte raid array. 4 GB ram and the best graphics card I can afford. Even with all that, it seems pokey to me. Making adjustments should seem effortless. But they seem labored. Lightroom, of course, appears to be doing things instantly. I like the file management part of Aperture's workflow, and I guess that's why I've stayed with it. And the flexibility of working on an image at any point in my workflow. Lightroom imposes some other constraints on that. And I like the LR adjustment controls better than Aperture, I'm sure Apple will keep Aperture relevant. Like the other pro apps, it takes generations, but they keep getting more deeply competent once Apple commits to owning the market. That said, I think Adobe did a much better job with an open beta to bring a world of people into Lightroom. And, like Photoshop, since LR works across platforms there will be far more development activity around it both within and without Adobe. I use LR now on my G4 powerbook when I need to work with raw photos. Will be interesting to see what the new family of Macbook Pros can do with Aperture. But the long term force of Adobe in the photo/graphics market may well win out for me, especially if we don't see an Aperture 2.0 and some exceptional performance on laptops in the next couple of months.
    • ^
    • v
    I tried both. And gave up both.

    Aperture, really and truly, was just too slow on my G5 2.5GHz dual processor G5 with RAID and a Nvidia 6800 graphics card.

    Lightroom was nice. But then I had to move my Lightroom library to another disk/computer. Catastrophe - left in tatters. I'm back to good old reliable and fast iView Media Pro 3.1 with Photoshop Camera Raw to develop the pictures.

    Thanks for sharing.
    • ^
    • v
    I'm using a dual 2.0 G5 with 2.5GB and the GeForce 6800 Ultra GPU. Maybe 20k photo files.
    It is interesting how variable the performance issues are for different users.
    I have a lot of metadata - comments and ratings - from iPhoto. For the JPEGS, this data seems to be lost as far as LightRoom is concerned. Aperture can access Apples proprietary metadata file. For raw files, Aperture, and I think iPhoto 6, will export the sidecar files, so that info should be available to LightRoom.
    I decided to keep iPhoto 6 for the organizing structure. Its file system is logical. Its stacks ("events") are very useful, and make it very fast to visually search. It never gives me a system busy "beach ball". Its keywording is now very powerful. It is a huge improvement over the previous version and fully worth the upgrade price. (But don't let the "new" iMovie overwrite your previous app - it is a piece of junk and should have been renamed as such.)
    I find Aperture's speed to be adequate. Perhaps the GPU contributes significantly to the speed. But its tools are not as useful as LightRoom's.
    LightRoom is a never-ending beach ball on my machine. The left panel of the library module is nonsensical to me. Because of its glacial speed, it was impossible to use it to organize my files, so now I just use it for its tools and flash web pages - which are great. I'll have to try it on an Intel machine - perhaps it will be useable...
    As far as commitment to photography, Adobe was ready for the Nikon D3 and D300 immediately. PhotoShop and LightRoom can handle the new NEF raw files just fine. Two months after release, Mac OS X and Aperture and iPhoto are unable to deal with the raw files. This says volumes about where each companies priorities lie.
    LightRoom being cross-platform might be important to some, but I live in a Windows-free world. (Though 10.5 Leopard ("Leoptard") has so many annoying and useless "features" that I might consider Windows if forced to "upgrade" to Leopard. I tried it twice and ended up banishing it from my machine.)

    jc
    • ^
    • v
    John, thank you for your insightful comment, really appreciated. BTW, your photos look great :-)
 

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