Aperture or Lightroom?

November 13, 2006 9:07 PM

Which one should I use for my photo workflow? Aperture or Adobe Lightroom Photoshop?

I'm on a G5 iMac with 1.5 gig of RAM. Aperture can be slow at times, but useable. Lightroom feels snappier. Both programs look like a step-up from my previous workflow of importing into a big unsorted iPhoto library and then editing in Photoshop.

I've played around with both and from what I can discern, Lightroom has better RAW processing but Aperture has a much better UI and better organizational capablities. Whereas I can't find a better way to sort within Lightroom, in Aperture it's easy enough to send a pic out to Photoshop and then back.

I'm also wary about committing my photo library to a program that's in beta and will expire or drastically change in the next several months.

This dilemma is even worse than choosing which browser to use when I moved to a Mac. (It took me several months to choose Camino.) At least then it was effortless to switch between the many different options. I don't want to move my photo library back and forth constantly because I can't make up my mind.

So which program did you choose?

posted by alidarbac to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Also consider Bibble, which has an OS X version. I only use it on Windows, though.
posted by aye at 9:16 PM on November 13, 2006

i am using lightroom. seeking an alternative to plain photoshop CS, i jumped on aperture the day it was released.

big disappointment. the raw processing (canon 20d) was terrible. and it was butt slow on my 2x2GHz G5 / 3GB ram.

i pretty much gave up on it right away.

i started using lightroom around the 2nd beta, and i really do like it much more. i agree that its organizational features are not as good as aperture, but i like having my photos stored in plain directories where i can see them. also, since i was very used to Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom's controls were very familiar to me; Aperture's always seemed a bit alien.

performance-wise, somehow beta 4 seems a little slow when i go to move the crop handles, but its still way faster than the latest version of aperture.

for the life of me, i couldnt figure out how to duplicate a photo in lightroom. i wanted to do an HDR pass on one raw image set to 3 different exposures. this is where aperture would have been helpful, with its ability to create different versions of one picture. as it ended up i just set the exposure 3 times and exported the picture to TIFF after each different setting. kind of a PITA.

i'm sure that lightroom will continue to improve, and i expect to buy it when it finally gets to 1.0.
posted by joeblough at 11:06 PM on November 13, 2006

I have not used Lightroom, but I really like Aperture. As an organizational program, for tracking versions and maintaining originals, I think it's just stellar. Prior to using it, I managed everything manually (when I wanted to experiment with a file, I just duplicated it).

However, it does lack in terms of processing features. I find this acceptable, though; I'm perfectly happy to do my tweaking in another program and just use Aperture to manage all the various copies and versions, and backup everything to Vaults.

Is there some way that you can use Aperture for management and then do your processing in an Adobe product, if you prefer how they do RAW?

I think it just comes down to personal preference; I'm not sure what kind of insight anyone else can give there. If you like Aperture's management, but Lightroom's processing, then I guess it just comes down to which you value more.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:09 PM on November 13, 2006

I saw a side by side with the processing and there were artifacts on Aperture's. Thats kind of a deal breaker for me. Also, that I don't have a full gig of RAM and cant run Aperture (I tried today, hopefully that will be corrected tomorrow.)
posted by Brainy at 12:19 AM on November 14, 2006