thomas fitzgerald.net

Ever since Adobe Lightroom shipped there has been a long running debate as to which was the better piece of software for managing your photos, Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture. Apple actually started the “Photography Workflow Tool” race with Aperture. While many billed it as a professional version of iPhoto, it was a whole new class of application. Just as Aperture introduced the world to this concept, Adobe jumped into the fray with their own tool, Photoshop Lightroom. Since then the two have been battling it out as the workflow tool of choice for the professional and advanced amateur. Deciding between the two however has not been easy. Both offer distinct advantages and both approach the concept differently. Adobe has the largest market share (more on that later), but Apple has the more mature application. Choosing between these two applications is a struggle that I have raged over back and forth for much time, and I still have difficulty reaching a firm conclusion. What follows then, is not a direct feature for feature comparison of both programs but rather a discussion of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each application.

Aperture and Lightroom both approach their primary goal of being the ideal way to organize and catalog your photographs from very different angles. To understand this fundamental difference you must take a step back and look at the origins of both of these pieces of software. Before Lightroom, Adobe’s main tools for accomplishing the task of developing raw files and managing photos was a combination of Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge, both elements of Photoshop. Camera Raw was the developing side of the equation and bridge was a file browser with some sorting, logging and metadata editing capabilities. The main element of course, the business end of this duo was Camera Raw, and many a professionals workflow was and still is based around Adobe Camera Raw.

For its part, Apple had iPhoto. iPhoto is basically iTunes for your images, or as Apple called it when it first came out, “the digital shoe box”. Unlike bridge which is essentially a file browser, iPhoto uses it’s own library structure and keeps complete control over the organization of your photos, much like the way itunes manages your music. iPhoto allowes some key-wording and searching, and had some basic image editing abilities along with some powerful publishing options. It was, and still is however, a consumer tool, although many professionals used it because it worked as a powerful organizer. Many predicted Apple would come out with a professional version and eventually the did with Aperture.

The difference then between the two is this. Lightroom is essentially bridge and camera raw bolted together, with some additional output capabilities. It is primarily focussed around the image processing capabilities of the develop module, which is to all intents and purposes, Adobe Camera Raw. The database side of things, is essentially a turbo powered version of bridge, with some additional searching and metadata functionality added in. It’s still based on a folder and file structure and uses the file hierarchy, but adds the ability to sort via collections (essentially Albums). Lightroom’s main strength though is its develop module.

Aperture on the other hand is first and foremost a database. Its main focus (in my opinion) is the organization of your image files. Although you can use your own file structure, it has it’s own library and works best when you let it manages your files. It has a powerful project based structure, layers of metadata and powerful searching. It adds to that raw processing and some web and other output options which I will go into later, but it’s key strength is it’s database and file organization.

Of course this is pretty broad generalization but for me, this is the key difference between the two applications, and I think it will explain, as I delve further into the strengths and weaknesses, as to which might best suit your needs. So in other words, think of it like this: Lightroom is an image editor with some organizational tools thrown in, where as Aperture is an organizational tool with some image editing capabilities.

Workflow

As both of these pieces of software were billed as workflow tools for professional photographers, this should be a key aspect of what they do. The way you work within Aperture and Lightroom differs greatly and in my opinion is Aperture’s greatest strength and Lightroom’s greatest weakness.

When you import photos into Aperture you create a new project to put them in or choose an existing project. You can then choose where on the disk to store your photos or let Aperture manage that task, and it keeps the images in its library file. This makes for a very neat way of organizing photography sessions. You can group shoots by project and then you can add albums (think playlists) and sort files within that project. You can also copy or move photos between projects, and you can create global Albums that contain images from all projects. I’m simplifying this somewhat but you get the point.

Lightroom on the other hand leaves it up to you where to store your pictures. You choose a disk location (drive, and directory) where you want to store images and this comes up inside lightroom in the folder browser. You have to manage where your files are by folder on the disk. You then have the option of sorting into collections and collection sets. Collection sets are like Aperture’s projects, in a way, in that they can contain multiple collections, which are essentially Albums. Collection sets however cannot contain photos themselves. Just collections. It should be noted though that collections and collection sets are distinct from the folders where you store your images. When you import photos into lightroom they are not automatically put in a collection, you have to do that yourself. This is where most people fall down, and rely on creating folders on the disk, and using the folder browser for sorting their images. The problem is, that as we’ll see in a minute, Lightroom is organized into distinct modules, but only collections are visible outside the library module, which is the main organizing section of lightroom. You basically have to manage two different sets of locations. It’s confusing and unnecessary and in my opinion is Lightroom’s achilles heel.

Once you have imported your images into either piece of software it’s time to sort them. Both offer differing ways to flag, sort and search your images. In Lightroom you can mark your images with a flag, a color label or a star rating. In Aperture you only get a star rating. I wish Aperture had some more options in this respect but many professionals argue that these multiple options are unnecessary and you only need a way to mark your keepers. Either way, once you select your images that you want to keep you can then make albums in Aperture or “Collections” in lightroom. These are pretty much the same thing. Aperture though allows you to make folders within a project and create multiple albums, sort them by folder and so on. You can do similar things with collection sets within Lightroom but it’s not as flexible. Aperture goes one step further and allows you to have folders of projects.

Both programs allow you to add keywords and search by metadata. Lightroom has a big panel at the top of the library module that you can drop down and limit what the view shows by various forms of metadata, where as Aperture gives you a transparent search “HUD” that you can use to search various things. You also get a small search field for doing quick searches. Lightroom 2 has one cool trick up it’s sleeve. As you add keywords to an image it looks at the rest of your images and suggests keywords based on what you’ve chosen before. Aperture has a great feature too. It allows you to add a custom metadata field to your images. This can be anything you want and can contain any value you want. It’s a very powerful feature which I will cover in a future article.

Processing

Once you’ve sorted you’re images you’ll want to do something with them, right? Well, this again is where both pieces of software diverge in their chosen workflows.

Aperture is very flexible in the way it works. There are no modules as such. You can see the library and albums and all your images no matter what you are doing. You can edit metadata and edit an image without having to switch to a different module. If you are making a book layout you can edit an image without having to get out of the layout mode. You can even make raw edits on a thumbnail if you wanted to.

Lightroom on the other hand enforces a relatively strict workflow. You import your images, sort them, then “develop” them and finally output. Each of these is a separate module. While the library module does allow you to make some quick changes to the raw file, if you want to make edits you have to go into the develop module. Similarly, if you are in the develop module and want to change any metadata you have to go back to the library module. Even if you just want to change the name of an image you have to go back to the library module. Not only that, but if you want to select an image from a different folder you have to go back to the library module as the develop module only sees collections. It’s very like the way you work with bridge, and then open your raw files in camera raw. In lightroom you select your image and then “open” it in the develop module.

Once you set about developing your images however, Lightroom comes into its own. The develop module in Lightroom, for the most part is superior to the raw processing options in Aperture. It gives you many creative options and offers some impressive non destructive editing capabilities. Aside from the basic exposure controls, you can paint exposure changes onto various parts of an image, paint contrast or sharpness, or paint a color tint, all of which is non destructive. There’s also a cool gradient tool, which allows you to do various changes based on a grad, much like having a graduated filter on the front of your camera, except you can control things like contrast and sharpness with it too. It really is very powerful. There’s a curve editor too which Aperture lacks, and lens correction tools, for fixing things like chromatic aberration. There’s also a selective color correction feature where you can click a button, and get a special cursor which you can drag over an area of color to change it’s saturation or hue or brightness.

Lightroom has another killer feature in the develop module. You can save any combination of settings in the develop module as a preset, allowing you to make a library of “looks”. This is very cool and very useful. The develop module has a preset browser and when you hover over a preset you see a thumbnail of the image you’re currently working on with those settings applied, so you can see what it would look like before you apply that setting to it. It also has a history browser showing you every step you’ve made since you started working on your image and you can step back to any of those at any time.

Aperture for its part offers a more limited set of tools, however those tools do work well. It lacks chromatic aberration correction which is a bit of a pain but in general I find Aperture’s raw conversions can look better than Lightroom’s. They are generally sharper and clearer. I find that Lightroom (and Camera RAW) has a tendency to mush fine detail (such as fur or grass), whereas Aperture does a better job of preserving it. Aperture offers nothing like Lightroom’s preset browser though, however you can save presets within each module (or “brick” as Apple calls them) of the raw adjustment panel. While Aperture’s options are fine for most use, Lightroom does offer more creative options and wins on the image processing front.

Output

When it comes to outputting your images both Aperture and Lightroom offer different options. Lightroom has modules for web, slide show and printing. In my opinion the web output module, in its default offerings, is fairly basic in Lightroom compared to Aperture’s although it is extensible and there are some cool plug ins available for it. The Slideshow module allows you to set up layouts for playing your slideshows and in my mind is completely unnecessary. Aperture offers a simple button you press and you get a slide show. Lightroom offers you a bunch of hoops to jump though for the same simple option, and I suspect few professionals will use, although maybe I’m wrong, maybe there is a keen slideshow module following out there.

The print module in Lightroom is excellent. It allows you to do various layouts, add text and save those layouts as a preset, complete with preset browser like the develop module. Lightroom also supports 16 bit printing which when used in conjunction with a supported printer should give finer and better output.

Aperture offers a web module too, and can create some nice websites, with templates. It has a nice faux weblog type module too, but in my opinion, neither of these programs’ default options offer professional web output. There is also the option in Aperture to use the mobile me gallery if you have a mobile me subscription. One thing that Aperture does offer however which has no comparison in Lightroom, is a great book layout module and online book ordering. You can basically choose a template and layout your book, then order it online in a couple of clicks. The results are of very high quality and are an excellent tool for portfolios, weddings, gifts or other ways to show off your work, either for a client or yourself. Aperture also allows you to order prints through it’s online partner service, the same one it uses for iPhoto. Aperture has options for printing yourself too, including multiple layouts and index prints, but they are not as good as Lightroom’s print module.

Both applications offer export plug ins which allow you to send your images to a variety of online services, ftp sites etc. Aperture has a greater selection of these and the interfaces generally are much better. Lightroom uses the same interface for all its export plug ins and it shows. It’s often overly complicated and has the look of being limited by the plug in architecture (I’m not sure this is actually the case - but they all look the same so I suspect it is)

Aperture also offers image editing plug ins. There was a lot of noise made in the community when this first launched because people were complaining that these were not non-destructive. Basically, when you choose to edit your image with one of these plug ins it creates a new version and applies the result to that. The arguments were somewhat misleading though because people were only really complaining that Apple’s own dodge and burn plug in required this flattening technique where as dodging and burning was non destructive in Lightroom. Never the less, there has been a huge range of plug ins made available for Aperture and they offer an impressive level of power, despite the need to “flatten” your raw image.

Lightroom does not yet offer an image editing architecture, although they do provide a way to round trip to an external editor. Adobe claims that this is the same as Aperture’s plug in architecture but while it may provide the same result, Aperture’s architecture allows plug ins to communicate with the main software and draw a range of data from that, something which Lightroom does not do.

For backing up, Aperture has a very powerful built in back up system, called “vaults”. You basically choose another disk and Aperture will make a complete backup of all your images and your database. You can have multiple vaults spanning multiple disks and it is a very powerful and useful system. Lightroom offers to back up it’s catalogue file every time it launches or when you choose, although it doesn’t back up your images, which, given the file and folder structure I mentioned earlier, could mean your images are all over the place. Lightroom does however offer you the option to automatically back up images as you import them.

Aperture offers another very powerful feature that Lightroom can’t match. When you work within Aperture it generates “preview” jpegs of the images in your library. The resolution and quality of these can be set within the software’s preferences. The cool thing about these is that they appear in Apple’s system wide media browser. You can access them from any application and they will sync with your AppleTV and iPod / iPhone if you have one. It’s very useful and requires you to export images from Lightroom and import them into iPhoto to have the same effect. It makes Aperture feel much more integrated with the system than Lightroom.

Frustrations

There are things in both pieces of software that will drive you mad with frustration. While both programs are on their second major release both have quirks and bugs that can be very annoying. With Aperture it’s general stability. There have been a couple of well documented bugs including one where Images would suddenly go black if you try to edit a parameter. The only way to fix it was to quit and re-launch the program. This has been mostly fixed in the latest versions but ti still occurs. Every now and then the program will get stuck too. If you quickly cycle through a bunch of images it can get stuck “loading” the current image and you have to toggle preview mode or step forward and back to kick it back into action. It’s very annoying.

Lightroom is for the most part fairly stable, but some of the interface designs are really annoying. When you import images Lightroom shows you a nice preview of what the image looks like as it comes off the camera and then re-renders the image preview and it ends up looking completely different. So you can be cycling through your pictures and see something you like and then suddenly it will change before your eyes. And then there’s the full screen mode. Or rather lack there of. In Aperture you can go into full screen mode by pressing the “f” key. In lightroom to achieve the same effect you have to press Shift + tab, followed by Shift + “f” and then press “L” twice. And even that doesn’t give you a proper full screen view. To get back out of full screen press the same sequence again. Would it have been that hard to offer a proper full screen view?

And then there’s the flourishes. I know this may sound petty and inconsequential but it annoys the life out of me. At the end of the panels either side of the image in Lightroom there is a flourish. It serves no purpose what so ever. Not only that but there is an option in the preferences to select a list of flourishes (or turn it off). Lightroom is billed as a tool for professionals and yet here is something so completely inappropriate for a professional application. How much resources went into coding all the options for that and designing a completely useless feature. Sure, it probably wasn’t long but surely that energy could have gone into adding a proper full screen mode or a single key stroke to enter the faux full screen that Lightroom currently offers.

Market Share & Marketing.

This is pure conjecture on my part, but I’m guessing when Apple first released Aperture Adobe were pissed. The photography market was Adobe’s. They owned it with Photoshop. They were undoubtedly already developing Lightroom but they knew that by the time they would have it ready for release Apple would have a good head start. They needed to gain back ground and fast, so they did a very clever thing. They gave it away. In the guise of a “public beta” they allowed anyone to download and use Lightroom for an extended period until it went final. Now, this often happens with independent software developers, but never with a large company like Adobe. They claimed it was a new era of co-operation with their customers so they could develop the best tool possible. I call BS on that one. Still though it worked. Once you have a large library in either piece of software it becomes difficult to move to another, because your raw edits are not transferable unless you flatten your images to something like Jpeg or Tiff. For most people this would be too much trouble. So people who were using the public beta of Lightroom were left with a good reason to continue to use Lightroom. I’m not saying this was the only reason that people stuck with lightroom, or even that this was a shady move on Adobe’s part. It was a brilliant move and seems to have paid off.

On the flip side though there has been a lot of undeserved negative press about Aperture propagated both by hardcore Adobe fans and amateurs who tried out Lightroom and Aperture without really understanding what either did. Aperture when it first launched had a much higher system requirements than Lightroom and led a lot of people to believe the software was slow and unusable. Which it was if you tried to run it on a machine that was not suitable for running it. But, if you run it on a machine powerful enough, it flies and in many ways is much faster than Lightroom. My point is this: you shouldn’t read a lot into the relative market share of these two products. Adobe got a lot of good press over it’s public beta move and Apple got a lot of negative press over people trying to use it out of context. Apple has addressed much of this but they still fail to match Adobe’s PR machine. In fact, at the moment you wouldn’t even know Aperture existed, apart from the section on Apple’s website. You see little or no advertising for it. All of Apple’s evangelistic energy at the moment seems focussed on their consumer products, particularly the iPhone, which has led many to question the future of the company’s Pro Apps, but Aperture and their Final Cut range. I doubt however Aperture or Final cut is going away any time soon, but Apple’s trademark silence and secrecy doesn’t do much to quell these rumors.

Conclusion

So, after all that, which piece of software do you choose? Well, unfortunately it’s still not an easy answer. Both are good pieces of software and both are aimed at slightly different markets. If you’re a sports or press Photographer who does only basic image editing, but need to sort through large amounts of images quickly, then Aperture is a no brainer. It excels in this area and is much better than Lightroom for these tasks. If you are a Landscape or Artistic Photographer, then you may be better off with Lightroom. Its editing capabilities will probably appeal to you more than Apertures. Similarly, Amateurs who like to tinker with their images might be better served by Lightroom.

Just to throw a spanner in the works though, there is a third option. If you use Aperture and occasionally want access to Lightroom’s powerful editing capabilities, and you have Photoshop CS4 then you already have the develop module to all intents and purposes in Adobe Camera Raw. If you set Photoshop to open all files in Camera Raw then you can send your file from Aperture to photoshop, and essentially get Lightroom’s develop module as a plug in. If Adobe were any good they would release Camera Raw, or the Lightroom Develop Module as a plug in for Aperture, but I know this will never happen. (It would be the best of both worlds.) In the mean time, I hope this some what elongated blog article will help you get a little closer to you decision as to which Photography workflow tool to use.

Links

Aperture Website

Aperture Plug Ins

Lightroom Website

Buy Aperture from Amazon