With Adobe releasing Lightroom Beta 3 (now for Windows) and Apple’s Aperture (version 1.1) for mac it seems like everyone and their dog has been comparing how both deliver on the hype as being the all-in-one pro shop for managing and editing photos ‘post-production’ once they leave your camera. I think though, that there’s probably still lots of room for me to throw my opinion of the two in based on the way I shoot and see images.

(for no real reason, I’ll be interspersing throughout this post some photos I never really got a chance to display here)

Blah I Shoot Photos Blaah blah

First of all, both products like to hype themselves up as being the best at dealing with RAW format images. Even though I easily could, I don’t shoot RAW though, I prefer JPEGs because it’s way faster and isn’t markedly different unless you’re printing images super huge. Additionally, for reasons of cost and size I don’t use a digital SLR either. That might all make you think, why then is someone who uses a digicam and shooting JPEGs wasting my time discussing two programs aimed at professional photographers that shoot in RAW with 10lb ultra cameras?

Simply because, over and above ‘consumer’ level programs like Picassa and iPhoto (which I used to use), these two have much more in-depth editing controls and photo management features which allow you to do things (after a mildly steep learning curve), that you could never do with the more simple programs. Once I used Aperture for the first time, more as an experiment as anything, I was surprisingly addicted – even though it’s harder to use at first and a lot slower.

Histograms v. Curves

One huge difference between the way each program approaches images is in balancing exposure range/colour. Aperture uses the Histogram approach and Lightroom uses Tone Curves. If you clicked either of those links and then were nerdy enough to read through them you’d notice that both are very difficult concepts to grasp, so pick the one you either understand better or like more. Pros and people with too much time will say that curves are more powerful and flexible, but I haven’t seen a difference really, I stick with histograms simply because it’s a paradigm I can understand and it’s what’s used in cameras.

More image editing

Some images really become something new and interesting when you alter other aspects of the image such as tuning the amount of highlight and shadow (easier in Aperture) or altering lens aberrations and vignetting to mimic a better lens or adding a subtle color cast (Lightroom wins). Other times.. well most times, what I shoot is boring and dull, nothing will change that.

Black and White

One area where Aperture easily wins is when you want to turn an image from random or crappily exposed photograph to artsy monochrome. Everyone’s doing it!
Anyways, in Aperture when you activate the ‘monochrome mixer’, you can choose to pretend that you were shooting black and white film and select what color filter you were using (as you experiment with them, you learn the different characteristics of each) or more directly manipulate RGB sliders. Doing the same in Lightroom gives you a list of 6 sliders which in theory might be more flexible, but in reality isn’t nearly as useful or quick. Ideally, I think you should have apertures color presets, but then also have the 6 sliders (Yellows, Cyans, Magentas also manipulatable) available.

Organization

The other forte of Aperture is that you can ‘stack’ images. Basically, if you’re style involves taking a few photos of the same thing (to cover possible angles, or exposure ranges etc), instead of having a library full of these similar images you can stack them into one pile that can be expanded at will, as well as rated to find the best one of the stack. It’s a feature I absolutely love and combined with the auto-stacking (which stacks photos that were taken really close to each other in time), saves me a lot of time. I won’t get into metadata cuz it’s boring, but Aperture’s system is a lot nicer to work with as well.

(Lightroom’s strengths)

I don’t want to hate on the other because Lightroom’s a Beta still and also a bit (not a huge amount really) faster on my G5 mac with 1GB of ram and is the only one of these two available for windows. Neither is perfect, and each has it’s own vision of what people (or professionals more likely) want to do with their photo files.

I just like Aperture more is all.

Photos //