2008-02-21
An Aperture 2.0 mini review and my confirmed switch to Lightroom
A couple weeks ago I wrote about my then tentative switch from Aperture to Lightroom. The following Tuesday Apple released Aperture 2. I downloaded the trial and after my initial 24 hours with AP 2 I decided I would probably stay with Lightroom. In the days since I’ve gone back several times to edit a few images in AP 2 and experiment more with browsing and searching. I think that because I spent nearly a year with AP I really wanted to stay with it, wanted to give it a real chance. After nearly a week I’ve confirmed my decision to switch to LR and have gone ahead and started moving the rest of my Aperture images over. Here's why.
Workflow and Speed
There’s no doubt AP 2.0 is an improvement in speed in both browsing and editing but I’m still seeing delays and the spinning beachball… less often of course but the fact that I’m still seeing it when I do not ever see it in LR says something about the basics. I can’t help but think that the drag I’m still seeing with AP, mostly during editing, is tied to Apple’s reliance on the graphics card for much of the workload. I’ve got a MB Pro with 2 gigs of ram, Core 2 Duo and it still just feels sticky to me. Using the Loupe or viewing at 100% feels even worse. I can and often do view my images at 100% in LR and it feels very smooth aside from the initial render of the image when I switch to the magnified view.
When it comes to browsing and searching, again there is no doubt that AP 2 is faster and smoother than its previous version. On the downside, I've also noticed that while I can very quickly scroll through thumbnails in my Aperture Library those thumbs are empty outlines and drawn in with the photo after a very slight delay whereas LR scrolls about as smoothly and images are already 95% rendered rather than empty outlines. As soon as I stop scrolling the 95% rendered images snap to focus. I prefer the method used by LR because I know as I'm scrolling where I'm at, there is zero wait for the thumbs to draw in and I can keep scrolling to where I want to be. While LR lacks Aperture's excellent smart groups I don't miss them much because searching is instant and because of the built in keyword and metadata browser which I'll get into momentarily.
I was a bit disappointed with Aperture 2 in regards to adding keywords and captioning which is another area that I still prefer the LR method. It is much easier to select a large group of images and enter the same caption by just typing it into the caption field and hitting enter with no need to go to the menu bar and choose batch change or even to use the short cut for batch change. I just select them and click into the caption field. While keywording large groups of images is fairly easy in Aperture it is even easier in LR to click a button in an already present sidebar or even typing into the keyword field rather than Aperture's drag and dropping of keywords. Not only that but Lightroom's browsing by keywords feature is fantastic way to actually use the keywords you've added. Just below the keywords section of the sidebar is metadata browsing which provides an easy to use list of criteria such as file type, lens, camera model, ISO, shutterspeed, and more for quick filtering of images.
One last thought regarding workflow, after editing I often like to DO something with images. Most often I like to upload to Flickr and upload to my own image galleries at Enchanted Planet. Aperture accomplishes this with Connected Flow's excellent Flickr plugin and via integration with iWeb and that is great. While LR also has an excellent Flickr plugin it is not integrated with iWeb or any other Apple application such is the iWork apps so I first have to export images to a folder then drop them into iWeb. However, and this has only become an issue since I started using LR, I can publish to a web gallery using one of the included galleries or downloadable templates. I've been fairly happy with letting iWeb step in for Aperture's very basic web export and was really hoping Aperture 2 would bring some greatly needed improvements in this area. Nope. Unfortunately there is nothing at all besides integration with .Mac galleries and the templates appear to be unchanged with there are no new additions. This won't do. With LR the default galleries are much better than Apple's defaults and, even better, I can download user created templates. In the first week of using LR I found and have been happily using such a template that has PayPal integration for selling images. As an example you can check out my gallery of song birds. I could have never done that with Aperture.
Image Editing and RAW Conversion Quality
Image editing and the quality of RAW conversion were both issues with Aperture, especially when compared to LR. With Aperture 2 Apple has done a fantastic job with RAW 2. The editing results are nearly identical with LR in terms of quality. The noise reduction is much better for images shot at ISO 400 or higher though I don't think it's quite as easy as LR to get the best results. With LR noise reduction and sharpening are all neatly available by default in the Details section of the Develop sidebar. With a couple of tweaks I am usually done in seconds. With Aperture 2 i can get those results but it requires adjustments in the RAW Fine Tuning then additional steps of adding noise reduction and edge sharpening sliders (not available by default) before I can even adjust those things. The results are improved over AP 1.5 and equal to LR, but the work required to get those results requires more steps.
In regards to image editing with AP 2 I have to mention the new Retouch Tool which can usually be used to replace the dreaded Spot and Patch tool. The Retouch Tool is fantastic with excellent results and very smooth performance... it is almost too easy to use!! In fact, the first time I used it I actually giggled aloud at how easy it was. There is no doubt that this tool is a huge leap beyond what LR has in the way of spot removal and healing. There are other new adjustments that I'm not going to go into other than to say that they are all well implemented and bring image editing up to par with LR.
In the end I've decided to stay with LR for two reasons: speed and much better web export. I'm certainly glad to see Aperture improving because it provides another option and will, no doubt, keep Adobe on its toes in regards to LR. Moving thousands of adjusted images around is far too much work to keep jumping from program to program. Now that I've seen AP 2 I am comfortable with my choice to switch to LR.
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