Posted by Walter Rowe on February 23, 2010 at 3:06 PM
I've read the Apple "New Features" and played with the trial a little. I'm a long-time Adobe user (Photoshop, Lightroom). Has anyone compared Aperture 3 with the Lightroom 3 beta? One strength Lightroom has over Aperture is how it can manage DNG files. Aperture 3 imports them and can write meta data back to them, but it does not store the raw settings you use to process the image. It would be nice to have that stored too (like Lightroom). The slideshows in Aperture 3 can be pretty powerful as they can include both video and audio, and overlay music with lots of different slide transitions and music fades, etc.
I saw one suggestion in a blog about Aperture 3 positing this could be Apple's last release of the tool. Any thoughts on that? How committed has Apple been to commercial software in the past? What is their track record?
I'm a Mac user running Snow Leopard, Lightroom 2 and Adobe Design Premium CS3. I'm interested in other people's opinion on Aperture 3 based on first-hand experience with the tool.
Posted by Jim DeWitt on February 23, 2010 at 5:10 PM
I'm a long-time Aperture user, starting with the very buggy 1.0. Version 1.5 was quite stable, and versions after 2.1 have also been stable for me. I have a 90,000 photo library spread across a 2TB database. I run on a somewhat elderly dual Intel Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM.
At each new iteration of Lightroom and Aperture, I try to do a comparison. I've decided to remain with Aperture. The new feature that's compelling for me is the brushes tool (I don't take very many photos with faces), and it's pretty slick. Performance seems to have been improved, especially with a defragmented disk. I still don't like the way Lightroom imposes its idea of a "proper" workflow on me; Aperture is more free-form. I also like the multiple ways that Aperture lets me tag photos; since I moved from the folder-based system to Aperture, I have been much better able to find photos I know I took. If I'm diligent with keywords (especially on import) and captioning, it's really very powerful.
There were long, heated discussions in the Aperture Forum on Apple's website about whether or not Apple will abandon Aperture. No one had hard information, and no one could pin down any of the rumors. Certainly Apple has abandoned/orphaned good software in the past. But then, so has Adobe (Framemaker, alas). There re no guaranties. But Aperture has quite a nice suite of export tools...
Posted by Michael Elenko on February 24, 2010 at 2:03 AM
Walter,
I don't know if you've seen this by Matt Kloskowski of the Lightroom Killer Tips site:
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2010/5-reasons-to-stay-with-lightroom-and-not-switch-to-aperture/
His points are worth reading at least. I did trials of both Lightroom and Aperture a couple plus years ago when Lightroom first appeared and settled on Lightroom, but I like both applications. My shooting partner just upgraded to Aperture 3 happily.
The thing I prefer about Lightroom is that the support community is much larger. I totally understand why, but still it is what it is. I also appreciate the ongoing communication provided by the Adobe Lightroom development team. Apple, of course, is notoriously closed about upcoming features for most of its products. For better (hardware) or worse (software).
I don't think anyone except a few know about Aperture's future. Apple's track record in other professional level software in video editing and sound engineering is mixed-to-good. To me Aperture isn't as important to Apple's core business markets as it may have been prior to the iPhone's explosion, but that doesn't mean it is not an excellent tool.
In contrast, Lightroom and Camera Raw do seem to be important to Adobe and their releasing RAW updates for new camera models fairly promptly seems to bear this out.
ME
Posted by Ian Wolfenden on February 24, 2010 at 10:14 AM
Walter : I cannot reply in detail to your query because I have only ever used Aperture ( 2 and now 3 ) for processing and storing my images. What I can say is that Aperture 3 is much faster than 2 and the new brushes features are very intuitive and a great improvement.
I, however, like many others ( see many pages on the Apple Discussion forums : ` Aperture hanging, hanging....' ) have found overlaying 3 on 2 a real headache - the programme crashing constantly as it tries to upgrade the images from the previous version. I only managed to convert my Ap 2 library by running Ap 3 in 32-bit mode and even then it has not made a perfect copy. There seems to be no bug fix yet for this problem, which does not seem to affect everyone - but a lot of people nevertheless. Be prepared just in case !!
Posted by Walter Rowe on February 25, 2010 at 1:34 PM
Thanks for the responses so far.
I have played some more with Aperture 3. It has its limitations. Lightroom has more flexibility in batch renaming files, for example. In Aperture 3, you can only use a 4-digit year. In LR2 you can use a 4-digit or a 2-digit year. And in LR2 you can choose the camera's image number as the sequence number in filenames. In Aperture 3, you cannot reference the camera's sequence number at all. Lightroom also provides much more access to the metadata in batch renaming. They seem to have taken a page from The DAM Book. Apple seems to have missed that page.
The editing tools are powerful in Aperture 3, but they aren't exportable with the raw files to any other tool. You can export only a baked image. With Lightroom you can export the raw parameters to DNG and use them in Photoshop. You don't have to bake a PSD or TIFF file as a go-between. And with the Photoshop smart layers, that allows you to make adjustments to the raw file without going back to LR2.
Lightroom also can use the copyright text embedded in your IPTC data as a watermark. Aperture 3 requires you to create a watermark image in another tool and then select it from within Aperture 3. LR2 also provides more options for where I place that watermark during export.
Overall, it just feels like Lightroom provides more flexibility. I am sure with Aperture 3 now released that Adobe will feel some pressure to match their capabilities. Here's to competition!
Posted by Walter Rowe on September 28, 2011 at 7:22 PM
It has been a year and a half now since I started this thread. I'm wondering if anyone has more experience or cares to add to what they've already written now that both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 are quite mature.
Posted by Walter Rowe on January 11, 2012 at 3:38 PM
Well, this is timely (and perhaps not so timely) given the LR4 beta release yesterday. I found some articles scattered around "the Internets" that compared various all-on-one tools like Lightroom, Aperture, Capture Pro, DxO Optics, etc. I decided to do some investigating of my own and wrote an article comparing Apple Aperture 3 and Adobe Lightroom 3. I hope some of you find it useful if you are Mac users.
Some of the shortcomings of Lightroom compared to Aperture appear to be addressed in Lightroom 4 based on the beta released yesterday. I anticipate Apple will release an update to Aperture some time in 2012. We shall see if they address any of the shortcomings of Aperture compared to Lightroom, especially since LR4 beta is now publicly available for Apple to see and try to leap frag ahead of.
Discussion
6 repliesI saw one suggestion in a blog about Aperture 3 positing this could be Apple's last release of the tool. Any thoughts on that? How committed has Apple been to commercial software in the past? What is their track record?
I'm a Mac user running Snow Leopard, Lightroom 2 and Adobe Design Premium CS3. I'm interested in other people's opinion on Aperture 3 based on first-hand experience with the tool.
At each new iteration of Lightroom and Aperture, I try to do a comparison. I've decided to remain with Aperture. The new feature that's compelling for me is the brushes tool (I don't take very many photos with faces), and it's pretty slick. Performance seems to have been improved, especially with a defragmented disk. I still don't like the way Lightroom imposes its idea of a "proper" workflow on me; Aperture is more free-form. I also like the multiple ways that Aperture lets me tag photos; since I moved from the folder-based system to Aperture, I have been much better able to find photos I know I took. If I'm diligent with keywords (especially on import) and captioning, it's really very powerful.
There were long, heated discussions in the Aperture Forum on Apple's website about whether or not Apple will abandon Aperture. No one had hard information, and no one could pin down any of the rumors. Certainly Apple has abandoned/orphaned good software in the past. But then, so has Adobe (Framemaker, alas). There re no guaranties. But Aperture has quite a nice suite of export tools...
I don't know if you've seen this by Matt Kloskowski of the Lightroom Killer Tips site:
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2010/5-reasons-to-stay-with-lightroom-and-not-switch-to-aperture/
His points are worth reading at least. I did trials of both Lightroom and Aperture a couple plus years ago when Lightroom first appeared and settled on Lightroom, but I like both applications. My shooting partner just upgraded to Aperture 3 happily.
The thing I prefer about Lightroom is that the support community is much larger. I totally understand why, but still it is what it is. I also appreciate the ongoing communication provided by the Adobe Lightroom development team. Apple, of course, is notoriously closed about upcoming features for most of its products. For better (hardware) or worse (software).
I don't think anyone except a few know about Aperture's future. Apple's track record in other professional level software in video editing and sound engineering is mixed-to-good. To me Aperture isn't as important to Apple's core business markets as it may have been prior to the iPhone's explosion, but that doesn't mean it is not an excellent tool.
In contrast, Lightroom and Camera Raw do seem to be important to Adobe and their releasing RAW updates for new camera models fairly promptly seems to bear this out.
ME
I, however, like many others ( see many pages on the Apple Discussion forums : ` Aperture hanging, hanging....' ) have found overlaying 3 on 2 a real headache - the programme crashing constantly as it tries to upgrade the images from the previous version. I only managed to convert my Ap 2 library by running Ap 3 in 32-bit mode and even then it has not made a perfect copy. There seems to be no bug fix yet for this problem, which does not seem to affect everyone - but a lot of people nevertheless. Be prepared just in case !!
I have played some more with Aperture 3. It has its limitations. Lightroom has more flexibility in batch renaming files, for example. In Aperture 3, you can only use a 4-digit year. In LR2 you can use a 4-digit or a 2-digit year. And in LR2 you can choose the camera's image number as the sequence number in filenames. In Aperture 3, you cannot reference the camera's sequence number at all. Lightroom also provides much more access to the metadata in batch renaming. They seem to have taken a page from The DAM Book. Apple seems to have missed that page.
The editing tools are powerful in Aperture 3, but they aren't exportable with the raw files to any other tool. You can export only a baked image. With Lightroom you can export the raw parameters to DNG and use them in Photoshop. You don't have to bake a PSD or TIFF file as a go-between. And with the Photoshop smart layers, that allows you to make adjustments to the raw file without going back to LR2.
Lightroom also can use the copyright text embedded in your IPTC data as a watermark. Aperture 3 requires you to create a watermark image in another tool and then select it from within Aperture 3. LR2 also provides more options for where I place that watermark during export.
Overall, it just feels like Lightroom provides more flexibility. I am sure with Aperture 3 now released that Adobe will feel some pressure to match their capabilities. Here's to competition!
Some of the shortcomings of Lightroom compared to Aperture appear to be addressed in Lightroom 4 based on the beta released yesterday. I anticipate Apple will release an update to Aperture some time in 2012. We shall see if they address any of the shortcomings of Aperture compared to Lightroom, especially since LR4 beta is now publicly available for Apple to see and try to leap frag ahead of.