Since Aperture does not at the moment support the Leica M8, except by hacking the raw preferences, I have been “living in Lightroom” for the past month on New York Times assignments and in my personal work. I have some preliminary opinions about the two program’s strengths and weaknesses.
While the comparison is inevitable, I think at the core the two programs are essentially different beasts, designed with very different photographers in mind. The other interesting thing is that Lightroom went through a very public beta process to refine its feature set and functionality, and I believe that has had a tremendous positive benefit for the end product. Aperture is a very Apple-like product, a sort of take-it-or-leave-it approach, although the 1.5 update did address some of the most basic user issues like the library-package concept.
What follows is a very haphazard review:)
The Digital Darkroom-remember that Grandpa?
I poke fun at that phrase, the “digital darkroom” because it already seems anachronistic. Who talks about the digital darkroom anymore, meaning, who references the idea of a darkroom at all when it comes to photography? Photography has become so entwined with the computer that the two are inseparable now. I went to a birthday party last week in Williamsburg and in the loft space was a fully functional darkroom with slop sink and aristo cold light head, etc, and it was something of a marvel, the idea of the hand process. I don’t mean to be facetious about it, but my point is how Lightroom references the darkroom analogy, there is the “Develop” module and the “Print” module, the breaking down of photographer tasks according to this traditional workflow. Yes, they have added the “Library” module and “Slideshow” and “Web” but the core is “Develop.”
I feel Lightroom was conceived around the idea of photographer as artist and printmaker, and this is very strong in the program. The ease with which you can toggle between working on an image and printing an image is going to make the Ink and Paper manufacturers very rich! Never before have I spilled so much ink just looking at what I have shot, and mainly because it is easy. Lightroom fixes what is horribly broken in the Mac OS-printing-through the simple capability of actually REMEMBERING your print settings! In this is makes Aperture look like a joke, but really what it does is highlight the differences between the two programs. Aperture is better at handling “Gig-age” I believe is the term, masses and masses of images. It is not so good at loving one image however, as the printing is very basic, just as busted as in the rest of the OS, and inflexible. I do suspect the challenge of Lightroom will force Apple to pay more attention to printing, I hope anyway, because right now it is impossible to print in Aperture. Want me to enumerate the issues? I will.
- Whatever scaling algorithm Apple is using to produce contact sheets creates mashed potatoes out of thumbnails-mushy unsharp and useless to edit
- It’s handling of borderless paper options makes the fatal assumption that borderless printing is about printing to the border, and not simply the ability to use the entire paper surface. What if I want to align an image to one or more sides? Can’t be done. What if I need to print a gloss overspray right to the edge of the paper on the Epson R1800 but NOT print the image all the way-Can’t be done. Apple assumes borderless means full bleed and disables the margin settings when you make that paper selection
- Forgetfullness-just as in the rest of the OS, YSMV or Your Settings May Vary. You undoubtedly know what I mean here. Each and every time you print you need to physically set each parameter or who knows, it might, or it might not remember. Lots of wasted paper!
What does Lightroom do right?
- It’s layout options are innumerable and flexible and intuitive and splendiferous! You can put an image on paper just about anyway you can imagine, and then save that setting and it just works.
- Print sharpening. A very nice option.
- Elephant memory. Set it and forget it as Ron Popeil says!
Artists Gotta Get Paid
There are many other things that Lightroom gets right, features that ought to be in Aperture but are not. For example, it’s implementation of contrast masking with “Fill Light” and “Recover” is very very good, and it makes the “Highlight/Shadow” tool in Aperture look bad. While the Shadow part tends to work properly most of the the time, Highlight rarely does what it is supposed to, and creates halos regardless of the settings. So it never gets used. Usually I have to reduce the Boost, lower the Exposure and increase the Brightness to accomplish the same task. Award to Lightroom.
Lightroom’s curves implementation pays hommage to Photoshop’s Curves dialogue box, and goes one better by adding intuitive sliders if you need them. I just drag the curve, but for those not comfortable with Curves, it is very powerful. Also the interactive Histogram is shockingly effective, if you have not tried it, just drag around in the histogram and you’ll wonder how did they come up with that? I don’t use it but it is Freaky!
In contrast, Aperture’s Levels settings are not very useful, and I would like to see them scrapped for a Curves-like interface. Capture One manages to get it right (about the only thing) they have combined Curves and Levels into one and it is the most effective of all.
But back to getting paid. Here is another core difference between Aperture and Lightroom, the image management features. And it goes back to the different views that each program took towards the role of photographer. Lightroom as I have said views the photographer more as an image maker and printmaker, furnishing the ability to love just one image lovingly. I love it. Where it falls down is in its ability to wrangle a thousand images. And this is where Aperture stands alone. Artists gotta get paid, and Aperture excels in this arena, the importing, sorting, metadata, stacking, and output of many images.
In order to understand the differences I think it is relevant to talk about the beta process Lightroom emerged from. I think Lightroom suffers from what you could call beta-feature-request-itis, in that its workflow is extremely fractured into modes or “modules” all with discrete features that don’t operate universally across the entire program. The interface is littered with customization options which are a direct result of “feeback” from users during the beta process, and in my opinion this is what is essentially wrong with Lightroom, and where Apple excels in my mind. Aperture gives you a set of tools and then leaves you alone to decide how and where to use them. You can be in any “module” and use any tool because essentially there are no modes to the Aperture workflow. I can be sorting AND tweaking images without bouncing back and forth between “Library” and “Develop” as you do in Lightroom. Adobe even concedes this is a problem by its incorporation of the redundant and useless “Quick Develop” controls in the Library. The idea here is that when you are sorting and ranking it helps sometimes to see proper exposure for example to decide if you like the image or not. In Aperture I can be in full screen mode and have the adjustment HUD up to one side, I can do two things at once. In Lightroom, well, let me count the keystrokes to get there, I am in Library, so it is “E” for Loupe view, which is how you see just one image solo, then it is “Tab” or Shift-Tab” depending to hide the pallets, and then “L” twice for Lights Out mode, evidently you need to punch the guy in the nose twice to knock him out…and then what if I want to brighten an image I am ranking or keywording-can’t do it, it’s L-L-TAB back again. Lightroom only allows you to do certain things in certain modes or Modules, I call it MODE-MANIA and it is a servere limitation of the program. By the way, the shortcut in Aperture to do the same thing-F-from anywhere to anywhere, F is fullscreen, and the adjustments are available by typing H. That is it.
Organizational Tools
I know Aperture created a lot of confusion at first by it’s handling of organization, but there is method in the madness. Aperture has Projects which are the top level organizational tool. A project can contain anything you can create in Aperture, smart albums, books, web pages, subfolders, etc. It is not a folder but it acts like one, which is where the confusion sets in because you can create folders in Aperture but they are not real folders like in the Finder. And just to further confuse, you can create a Project of referenced images that reside in a real folder on the Finder, and the two share the same name. But, and this is a big but, it works. I think where it works best is with the working photographer model, someone who has jobs and clients and projects, and they are discrete entities. I have never put images into the Library directly. Had I had an archive of images for Stock for example, those could have gone into the mass Library, to be sorted later with smart albums or folders or projects.
Contrast the flexibility of the Aperture tools with Lightroom and you begin to suspect the Library module was bolted on at the last minute. There is a library level but no tools to sort it directly. You can have folders to organize images much like the projects of Aperture. And you can have Collections which are virtual organizations of images. But the Collections don’t integrate with the folders. Lightroom wants you to put everything in the library I believe and then create Collections out of that. Folders seem to be an afterthought. And there is no way to save web views, or slideshows inside of folders or collections that I have discovered. In other words you can’t have two different web galleries of the same set of images in a collection, in the same way you can have unlimited web galleries contained inside a project in Aperture.
My opinion is that the differences in the two methods of organization reflect the differing software developments modes more than anything. Apple came out of the gate with a definite strong statement-a monolithic library structure and a complete set of tools to slice and dice the data. Some complained that it was too strong, and through a lot of complaining, the 1.5 version allowed referenced images.
The beta process of Lightroom left it with a really wishy-washy implementation of Digital Asset Management, and no strong idea of what it is or how to do it. It really needs improvement.
The Conversions
I am going to say little about the conversions since I cannot compare the Leica conversions between the two programs since Aperture does not support the M8. And I have not put any Canon 5D files into Lightroom to see how they compare. My feelings on this however are that I am mostly agnostic about the results, because I see that I can get the same results out of almost all raw converters, and I can get different results too. For most of my work any one program would do fine and it is more important to be comfortable with the tools and features than to pixel-peep at conversions on screen. There are edge cases where one converter or another will yield better results, so they need to be in the arsenal, but overall a web jpeg is a web jpeg, and printed output has more to do with what inkjets do to paper and good profiles than anything else.
Conclusions
I would like to write more about the two programs since they are so similar yet so fundamentally different. Perhaps in a week or so after a few more jobs I can talk about some other workflow issues like Aperture’s implementation of lift and stamp, and Lightroom’s synchronize function, which I am keen to try more. There is also something I would like to say about black and white conversions in Lightroom vs. Aperture and Raw Developer, akin to different developers. For now just say that Lightroom is D76 to Aperture’s HC110B to Raw Developer’s Acufine, or something like that. Finally some pixel-peeping examples might show up too.
‘Lightroom fixes what is horribly broken in the Mac OS-printing-through the simple capability of actually REMEMBERING your print settings!’
I stumbled across this post in a search for LR v Aperture comparisons, and. though the post is 2 years old, I really do feel the need to make a point here: I was one of the lead architects on Mac OS X printing, and I can tell you that remembering print settings is, and always has been, up to the application. Some do it better than others, but if your app doesn’t remember print settings from one print command to the other, that’s not Mac OS X’s fault: it’s the app.
The OS X printing APIs have always supported saving and recalling previous print settings. In fact, they provide far more capability in this area than was ever possible under pre-X versions of Mac OS. But printing is a complex task, and that portion of an application’s development is often left until the very end; the result is that many apps don’t do as good a job as they should.
Congratulations to Lightroom for doing it correctly. Other apps do as well.
thanks for taking the time to put the fine point on my rant:)
perhaps I should have said the OS is insensitive to applications. If I print a photo in Photoshop and then a document in Mail, of course I have to change the settings in Mail. But then going back to Photoshop I still have my settings from Mail. The print dialogue does not know where it is.
Now you can say this is not the fault of the OS and the app is responsible for printing, but because media selection in handled by the OS, (and sometimes colour) you are tripped up every time. What is great about Lr is that it remembers both the OS media settings and its own settings in its presets. I can’t say that for any other app.
I’m sure Epson, HP and Canon bear some responsibility here to…their print drivers are all overly complicated to one degree or another.