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Editor's note: Once Lightroom 1.0 was released, many people suggested that an Aperture vs Lightroom comparison would be valuable. On one hand, I liked the idea because comparisons, when handled properly, are useful. But I wanted something that would be helpful for both our Aperture and Lightroom communities.
It dawned on me that we could run parallel comparisons by two different writers on each of our sites. From the Aperture blog, I asked Micah Walter (the author of this article), and from our Lightroom site, Michael Clark.
In my opinion both of these guys have put forth an outstanding effort. In Michael's article, Lightroom vs Aperture - The Results, he takes his Lightroom experience and pits it against Aperture during a real shoot. In this article, Micah brings his Aperture experience into play as he compares it to Lightroom on location.
To get the full benefit of what these guys have done, I encourage you to read both articles. It's an investment of time, I know, but the reward will be a greater understanding of these two innovative photo management applications.
Before I jump into this article, I'd like to take you back to a scene and a quote from a favorite movie of mine. The movie is Roxanne, starring Steve Martin. Here's the scene:
Steve Martin's character Charlie, who's based on Cyrano de Bergerac, is faced with the task of impressing Roxanne by figuring out how to break into her apartment. He walks up to the door with his red toolbox, and pulls out its only contents, a credit card. "Well, every job has a perfect tool. Let's see... Uh, this lock doesn't accept Master Card." After trying the credit card, Charlie performs some pretty acrobatic maneuvers to climb into an upstairs window, and he's in. Job done.
I often think about Charlie's mantra that there's a perfect tool for every job. In that scene, he needs to try other means to achieve his goal, even though he thought he had the perfect tool going in.
Digital photography started out with a step-by-step way of thinking. Just like the way we used to work in the darkroom, there are steps to be followed, and a proper way to make order out of chaos. As usual, we coined a buzzword for it--Workflow.
When I first found out about Apple's Aperture, I found myself thinking, "they can't do that, there's no way that's going to work." Over a year later, I've changed my tune. Now, I find myself wondering if I've found the perfect tool for my job as a photographer. Aperture isn't perfect, but we're definitely heading in the right direction--further and further away from a workflow.
Shortly after Aperture was unveiled, Adobe released a public beta program as their answer to Aperture. Lightroom was hailed as a much more compact, faster and easier to understand alternative to Aperture. During the year in beta, Lightroom made some major upgrades and is now evolving into a clear competitor. Again, digital photography is headed in the right direction.
It really amazes me where technology can take us. It's no longer about making my life easier and reducing the number of steps I have to take to achieve a goal; it's about deleting those steps altogether so I can get back to creating my art.
I started the week out with a pretty basic idea. I wanted to jump into using Lightroom without any prior knowledge to see if I could make it work. At first, I really loved the program and was in heaven hanging out with the new kid on the block. I'd spent a little time playing with the software during the beta period, but the newly released version was far more complete and had a certain freshness that I couldn't deny.
Needless to say, my initial impressions were positive. I had some difficulty getting used to the Library module, but quickly figured out how it worked, and was able to move on. The Develop module blew me away and is still calling out to me as a really powerful RAW converter option.
I should mention here that I've never been a big fan of Adobe's Camera RAW plugin for Photoshop. I couldn't get used to how it made its conversions. Before I used Aperture, I dealt mostly with RAW images using either Nikon Capture, Canon Digital Photo Pro, or Phase One's Capture One software. I just thought you should know that.
I spent a good deal of time working with the Develop module. I'd heard really good things about Lightroom's RAW conversion, and users' claims that it produced a much more film-like look. I tried running a few comparisons, but in the end my results were inconclusive. Though I really loved Lightroom's Develop module, I felt I could reproduce the same effect in Aperture, if I wanted to.
Over the course of the week, I played with all of Lightroom's modules. I developed images, I converted images to black and white, I tried making web galleries, and I even explored the Print module. All in all, I'm sure I only scratched the surface of what Lightroom can really do, but I feel like I got a pretty good crash course, and I certainly learned a great deal from all of you!
Figure 1. Lightroom with the UI dimmed
Editor's note: As part of this project, Micah published a series of blog posts discussing his findings. Readers could comment on the post, and some lengthy conversations ensued. I've listed the links to all of those posts at the end of this article.
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