Lightroom Vs. Aperture

Nonu writes "Adobe has officially released its Aperture killer, Lightroom, and the reviews are starting to come in. Ars looks at Lightroom and concludes that it's a better choice for those without bleeding-edge hardware. 'Aperture's main drawback is still performance as it was designed for bleeding-edge machines. On a quad Core 2 Duo Xeon, it is very usable but Lightroom just feels faster for everything regardless of hardware. Since Aperture relies on Core Image and a fast video card to do its adjustments (RAW decoding is done by the CPU), it's limited to what the single 3-D card can do. Lightroom does everything with the CPU and so it is likely to gain more speed as multicore systems get faster.'"

sounds about right....

'Aperture's main drawback is still performance as it was designed for bleeding-edge machines.

Bleeding edge, literally. As in, they require removal of an arm and a leg.

Hardware woes

This is something useful... Real photographers often don't have the cash to shell out for a top-of-the-line graphics processing server. Something like this should make it easier for smaller photography businesses to get into digital tech. Less actual film, less darkroom time/space/supplies, faster turnaround... all good for the little guy.

Video card limited

I haven't used either program, but I read most of the review, especially the part about performance.. but their test hardware was a macbook pro and a g5. Neither one of those can have a particularly stellar video card. They don't specify the g5's video card, but I'm guessing it's as out of date as the machine. and the x1600 in the macbook pro isn't a screamer.

I'd be interested to see what a system with a 7950 or (if/when they're supported) an 8800 would do with aperture. All this talk about how fast video cards are these days at doing things other than playing games intrigues me. I think aperture may have gotten it right. Those if Lightroom supports multi-core well, then it'll probably do ok going forward, as well.

Re:Video card limited

While I don't doubt that there are many great photographers on slashdot, I'd be surprised if there was a single regular poster (or lurker) here who depends upon photography on a professional level, as his/her only source of income.

As someone who has spent much time working with pro photographers in my past life as an art director, I guarantee you that any *PRO* photographer will not think twice about plunking down some serious dough for a the latest and greatest mac, chock full of ram and sporting the best video card it will support. Computer hardware is among the *least* expensive financial commitment that a pro photographer will make:

Take a look at how much some decent digital backs for a hasselblaad will run you.
Add to that the many lenses that you need to have on hand as a pro. (Hint: this is the expensive part).
Add a bunch of fast, high-capacity memory cards.
Add a nice DSLR (or more likely, a few) and lenses for that/those camera(s) as well.
Add lighting equipment of various types to that.
Add a large studio space to that, in addition to mobile facilities.
Add makeup artists and assistants.

The costs involved in professional photography are high. A fast mac, chock full of ram with an excellent video card and a 30" cinema display costs *peanuts* in the grand scheme of things when it comes to the operating costs of a professional photographer. Aperture is a pro app, and that's why it makes the assumptions that it does about hardware. Lightroom is more accomodating for tinkerers and semi-professionals, the two occupy different segments of the market.

Re:Video card limited

1D MkII N - that's only $3k

You have obviously never bought lenses, my friend.

Lightroom is ... nice. Really nice.

I've been using LightRoom since the beta's and 1.0 since it came out (link to my walk-through in the sig).

It's a really nice program. As a developer, the structure of the program it self, gives me a warm fussy feeling. More programs should be written like this - it's clear that Adobe has given a lot of though to responsiveness and threading. They haven't perfected it, but most of the time, the program responds very quickly, by starting on something that shows you that it's working on what you wanted it to do - like you can see the details in your thumbs-images get better and better and suddenly it's there. But the important thing is - the interface is still responsive, if you can click on a thumb and have that image load, even if the thumb is only halfway loaded (note: some people do have issue with LR performance, but it seems to be a specific issue for them).

As a photographer - well. As a work-flow program it does everything I want. As a "darkroom" it does most of what it should, but there's still some most have functions that are just not good enough (Noise Reduction/Sharpen/Clone).

Oh, and I badly miss dual monitor support!

Re:There is No Linux Equivilant

I have been using Bibble Pro on Linux and have been very happy with it. It has great workflow support as well as being multithreaded and able to take advantage of multiple cores. It does all its processing in 16bits per color and has excellent raw support for Canon, Nikon, Pentax and others. The workflow support works quite well for me. There are also numerous plug-ins available and they provide the API to 3rd party developers.

They also are fairly good about releasing new versions with new features and support for the latest cameras and lenses. Usually they release a new version every 2-3 months.

It runs on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows, which makes sense since it was based on the cross-platform QT library.

The raw converter in Bibble is very good, being based on dcraw. Similarly, it has many other plug-ins like a single click lens distortion correction based on Panarama, Noise Ninja and many more, all being very easy to work with. Of course it has all the tools for manipulating color, white balance, contrast, curves, shadow and highlight recovery, sharpening and many other features. The evaluation version is free to download.

As far as features, the only feature that I know of that does not work on Linux at this time is teathered shooting. All of the other features now work. Earlier versions did have issues with some features not working on Linux, but they have addressed that.

I did have issues with printing a while back, but it looks like it has been addressed.

Riding along with video card performance is smart

Apple obviously noticed that graphics card performance increases like CPU performance does, or even better. Aperture will have better performance in the long run since it uses both the CPU and video card. In my MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM, Aperture runs well. I've only got 128MB video card RAM too.

Better summaries please

Any chance slashdot editors could actually do some editing? So that summaries aren't just the spiel of the poster but also tell us *what* Lightbox and Aperture are? There's no mention. I had to guess it was something to do with graphics and maybe something to do with pictures....

Re:Better summaries please

So you mean that if you have not heard of it you don't need to know? What about posting the next item about some french software in french? If yo can't read it you don't need to know that either.
Both are pretty annoying.

Do they know anything about Aperture?

The article mentions that Aperture uses the graphics card rather than the CPU -- in fact, CoreImage choses the fastest code path it can, so if you're graphics card is going to do something slower than the CPU, it will use the CPU. Secondly, they mention that it doesn't have a plug in architecture -- with Aperture the plug in architecture is much lower level, you can write plugins for CoreImage, making them available system wide, rather than just in Aperture.

How Professional are You?

I'm a little uncomfortable with the ways these programs are being marketed. First of all, why isn't this program the latest version of Photoshop? I've seen this happen in music products as well. They'll say X is the product to use if you're professional. Then a year later, a new program costing twice as much comes out, doing the same thing only better and they'll say but this is the program to use if you're really, really professional.

If you've been selling your customers a flagship product for editing digital photographs for years, why come out with a different product for editing digital photographs except to prevent your customers from expecting an upgrade version?

The capabilities of Lightroom should be part of the latest version of Photoshop. If it's a better interface, then that should be the new interface of Photoshop.

Re:How Professional are You?

Because this isn't the latest Photoshop. If anything this is Bridge on steroids (in fact, if you use the CS3 beta, Bridge has inherited a lot of the features found in Lightroom). Lightroom is a digital equavelent of the darkroom (geddit?...ha). You 'develop' your raw file...adjust things, take out spots. When you want to be cloning things, merging things, changing the colour of aunties hair....then you use Photoshop. I can't understand how people can't see this distinction...it's black and white.

Do...

...Apple and Adobe have some kind of contract with the camera manufacturers, so that ist's sure that Aperture and Lightroom will support the next-gen, encrypted and proprietary RAW-format? othewrwise the software could be rendered useless when buying a new cam...

Please, make it stop!

Can we please stop assigning the "killer" label to abso-freaking-lutely EVERYTHING? iPod killer, Flash killer, Aperture killer, ad nauseam. Have any of these so-called "killers" actually killed the product they were supposedly released to kill?

I guess the word "competitor" doesn't make for sensational copy.

whats the deal with this killer thing

have there been any killers that killed yet? i take it with all the seriousness that comes on a 3rd grade playground.

bleeding-edge... you know, i bet i have an easier time reading english from the 1700s than people 100 years from now will have reading our interesting version here.

yeah yeah, guilty, i do it too. i guess when i read something that's as horrible sounding as something i wrote myself, i cringe.

Single-monitor workflow is a deal breaker

I really can't believe it wasn't mentioned as a serious Con for Lightroom with so many video cards (especially those of photographers as well as Mac owners) being dual headed. Thumbnails and controls on one monitor and large full-screen views on the second for adjustments is a wonderful way to work. Viewing the Lightroom forums makes it clear that it is important to users.

I love Lightroom's "develop" controls but the productivity aspect is much more important. Simply allowing the Manage and Develop tabs to used as separate windows would have done the trick (not well, but "good enough").

I prefer Aperture

After recently picking up a Digital SLR camera, I started looking around at the photo processing/management options. I tried both Aperture and Lightroom on my MacBook Pro (Core2 Duo, 2.13GHz, 2GB RAM). Everybody says the performance of Aperture is bad, but I found it to be fine on my machine. Maybe I'm not pushing as much data around as a professional photographer, but it handled my 10 MegaPixel RAW files fine. Of course, the app could be whittled down a bit, it has a huge memory footprint, and obviously doesn't fare well on older hardware.

But, probably the main thing that I like about Aperture is the full-screen editing/viewing mode. iPhoto 6 also has this, and when you're working in the smaller real estate of a 15" laptop display, it makes a huge difference. Maybe if I had a 20-30" external display it wouldn't be such a big deal. But, for laptop users, full screen mode is a must-have.

Also, iPhoto 6 doesn't have all the capabilities for workflow stuff. But, it's a pretty good alternative for non=professionals.

What is a...

What is a quad Core 2 Duo Xeon? :P

About Apple

Apple gets a lot of things right, but it shows pure arrogance when it comes to fix its mistakes. It's obvious the approach of using GPUs to perform some computations is flawed in the long run, but you can bet Apple will *never* move into another direction, even if it's a dead end. They have been stubborn about poor and stupid decisions for a long time, yet fanboys keep transforming pain into features.

Re:About Apple

Do you care to explain how using a specialized processor that has the ability to do certain calculations orders of magnitude faster than a generalized CPU is a mistake? Especially when the same system decides on-the-fly which computation resource would best perform the calculation?

To give you a hint: Apple's current system already is setup to do what you say they will never do. If your CPU would better do the job, then your CPU will do the job. If it would better be put to your SIMD unit (Ativec or MMX/SSE2/SSE3/SSE4) then it will go to that unit. And if the graphics card is sitting idle and can better do the job... well...

I still prefer the Darkroom

After spending all day in front of the computer, I just love going into my darkroom to make some real silver halide prints instead of staring at Photoshop. With today's bargain prices for analog photography, I encourage people to jump in! I got an enlarger for $75 at a garage sale. With 4x5" negatives from my large-format camera, the prints are stunning. (a 4x5" negative gives about 200+ megapixels of resolution).

Aperture 1.5 is much improved

I played with Aperture 1.1 but its performance was horrible. Aperture 1.5's performance is much better. I haven't messed with Lightroom so I can't say much about it. But I'm very happy with Aperture. It runs pretty well on my Dual G5 2.0ghz PowerMac. And thats only got an ATI 9600 card in it. I'd love to try it out on a new MacPro.

Aperture still gets my vote

I've used both applications, and found that Aperture does the job without getting in my way. It's typical Apple - really powerful yet deceptively simple user interface. As of version 1.5 Aperture really rocks.

For those who don't know, both of these applications are RAW-image-based, non-destructive photo editing and workflow tools. They are targeted at both pro and serious amateur digital photographers. They are not meant to replace Photoshop (although for digital photo management and editing parts of my job I find I no longer need Photoshop) - they are meant to fill a need that isn't currently being filled. And, both do it quite well.

Aperture is Mac-only, while Lightroom is both Mac and Windows. For the amateur with money, that right there probably decides it. But for the pro, being Mac-only is likely not a big negative for Aperture.

Bleeding Edge Workstation

I have a month old 15in Macbook PRO with all the bells and whistles, and Aperture 1.5 runs at a snails pace. I tried a Lightroom 1.0 demo yesterday and the performance level ran circles around Aperture. Aperture brings my whole system to its knees, even when doing relatively minor tasks, like getting a print dialog.

I'm quite surprised Apple would release such a poorly implemented software product, especially considering its price and the 1.5 version number. After playing around with both products, I will be purchasing Lightroom.

killer must die

There needs to be a version of Godwin's Law for referring to anything that competes with an Apple product as an "insert product name here" killer. This is getting stupid. A few days ago we had an "iPhone killer" when the iPhone hasn't even come out on the market yet, and now we have an "Aperture killer" when Aperture, being a Mac-only program, is decidedly _not_ the dominant software in its market niche.

Hence, I propose Bastian's Law to fill the gap:

Anyone who refers to a product as an Apple product killer rather than describing what it actually does will be drug out into the street, severely beaten, and left to be crapped on by pigeons and crows. Repeat offenders, such as tech columnists who have gone so far as to delete the term "mp3 player" from their vocabulary in favor of "iPod killer" will also have their computers destroyed in an effort to prevent future offenses.

How do you know CoreImage isn't future proof?

"Since Aperture relies on Core Image and a fast video card to do its adjustments (RAW decoding is done by the CPU), it's limited to what the single 3-D card can do." This really depends on where Apple decides to take CoreImage doesn't it?

Aperture Features Explained For Non-Photographers

here [prestonlee.com]

GPU vs CPU

Since Aperture relies on Core Image and a fast video card to do its adjustments (RAW decoding is done by the CPU), it's limited to what the single 3-D card can do. Lightroom does everything with the CPU and so it is likely to gain more speed as multicore systems get faster.

That's exactly backwards. GPUs are designed with much more parallelism than CPU, and their performance is improving at much higher rate than CPU performance, so if an algorithm is well suited for GPU execution, it will outperform a CPU implementation by ever greater margins.

The author of that sentence doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.

Re:What's Aperture

Why is this flamebait?
I've never heard of either program.

Some background for people who aren't on the prow of graphical processing would be appreciated.

Re:Torrents :)

Or....horror of horrors, download the exact same file [adobe.com] legally from Adobe. (registration required but the download is faster than a torrent with 0 seeds and 2 leechers)
You even get a working serial key. All you have to do is send Adobe US $199
If you don't like Adobe and their 30 day trial, try Apple's [apple.com]

Re:poor video drivers?

Nope, this is a motherboard arhitechure problem. Core 2 XEON uses a poorly designed chipset from Intel that cripples the memory bus. Extensive benchmarking shows these system significantly slower that standard core2 motherboards. My desktop is faster than our quad core2 Xeon and everything.