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.'"

Video card limited

[XaXXon]

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 They don't specify the g5's video card, but I'm guessing it's as out of date as the machine.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.

Do they know anything about Aperture?

[beelsebob]

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.

I prefer Aperture

[tji]

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.

Re:How Professional are You?

[sgant]

I look at it this way...and it's the way I've been using it in beta. Lightroom is just the replacement for Bridge. It's can't produce a finished photo (for me at least as it's noise reduction and sharpening are laughable), but it processes the RAW data, then pipes it to Photoshop to finish up and output.

So it's basically (again, for me) just a $200 Bridge upgrade.

Re:I still prefer the Darkroom

[Frumious Wombat]

Providing that your film-holders are all in spec, putting the sheet at the same plane as your ground-glass, that the guides are holding it flat, and that you aren't one of those wierdo's who's stashed a freezer full of Super-XX from the 70s(nice tones, but hardly sharp) or shooting Efke 25 (for any LF stopped down for depth of field, exposures long enough that rocks get bored and start to fidget) You might actually get sharper pictures from a decent medium-format, just due to film-flatness issues. Calumet roll backs, Pentax67, or RB 67s are pretty cheap, and have the same aspect ratio (roughly) as 4x5. Plus you can afford color film for those.

Besides, 4x5 is generally too small to contact print. You really need to try FP4+ in 8x10.

If you got an enlarger big enough for 4x5 for $75, I'm impressed. Btw, just yanking your chain. I have a couple boxes of Agfapan 100 in 4x5 stashed away for a trip when I'm inspired and on my game.

That need is overblown.

[SuperKendall]

I am using an older Powermac G5 1.8 DP. Aperture runs fine on this setup, with a somewhat older GPU (ATI Radeon 9800).

There actually is not that great a difference between Lightroom and Aperture performance on most hardware, I have found - the real difference is perception. Lightroom does, as noted elsewhere, respond instantly to what you are doing - you make an adjustment and right away you see it is doing something. However, it can take as long as or longer than Aperture to actually finish what it is doing - so in the end, both programs finish work about the same time.

I have not checked this in version 1.0 yet but this actually led to problems in the beta. When adjusting exposure for instance, any change to the exposure slider in lightroom instantly reduced the resolution by 4x or so (so the image looked very blocky at 100%). So the slider responded very quickly BUT you couldn't really evaluate what effect the exposure had on fine detail (single pixel highlights).

Aperture instead opts to respond in real-time to the full image. For careful changes to an image at 100%, this is a better model even if the slider behaves a little more slowly. As I said, I have not carefully looked over Lightroom 1.0 to see if this has been addressed, so they may have fixed it - I just wanted to note that speed may not be entirely beneficial in a UI if it comes at the expense of ability.

Re:Lightroom is ... nice. Really nice.

[cmcguffin]

I also beta-tested lightroom. When operating on collections of local photos, it's a total pleasure.
I'd buy it in a second if I stored my photos on my PC/Mac.

However, woe unto you if your photos reside on an external server. For whatever reason, Lightroom
chokes (i.e., consumes huge amounts of RAM and swaps like mad, eventually bringing
the machine to its knees) when "reference-in-place" importing photos from non-local storage.
If you you can manage to import a small number of non-local photos, operating on them results
in similar hangs and hiccups.

(This the result of testing on multiple different systems (Mac, PC) on different
100-BT and 1000-BT networks.)

For comparison, Aperture and Picasa have no such issues with non-local files.

My only guess is that Lightroom's multithreading doesn't play well with the longer
latencies introduced by networked storage. My support queries went unanswered,
so I'm not positive.

Dear Adobe: Please Fix! Love, cmcguffin