toddvachonphotography

Since the release of Lightroom 1.0 in February (2007) there has been a renewed comparison between it and Apple’s Aperture. Do you need one of these programs? Which one should you choose? Having used them both myself, I will tell you that the biggest adjustment you’ll have to make in integrating either of them into your workflow is getting used to the database management they incorporate. In the long run though, I think taking advantage of this feature will benefit you, especially as your image library grows and you need to find images quickly. Both are also designed to help you move throught the steps from downloading, renaming, selecting, tuning up and outputting faster than using Photoshop/Bridge.

Lets cut to the chase shall we? The short answers are this:

• Both do their job pretty well.
• There are some differences in abilities at this point, so which one you choose will depend on how you work.
• Aperture is slicker, works on Mac only, requires newer hardware, and is less intuitive in my opinion.
• Lightroom is cross-platform, can run on hardware that Aperture won’t, integrates better with Photoshop, and in my opinion is easier to learn.

I make no secret of the fact that I am an Apple fan, and Aperture is an excellent application for a first time foray into the professional imaging market. No doubt it will only get better. But Adobe has a big head start in the field and is more willing to listen to it’s customers needs (e.g. the beta releases of lightroom) as opposed to Apple’s tendency to go it alone. In this case I think Adobe got it closer to right (we’re talking about two programs that are still in version 1, remember). But don’t take my word for it. Try them out for yourself. Both are available as trial versions (this is unusual for Apple, which says something about the difficulty of penetrating this market). Here’s a link to the Aperture trial page and the Lightroom trial page too.

Since there’s plenty to read on the net about this already, I’m not going to get too long winded about it here. Here’s some good places to start for comparison information:

Lightroom vs. Aperture at O’Reilly Mac Dev Center

Ars Technica’s Lightroom Review and skip to the last page to read the Lightroom vs. Aperture comparison.

Ars Technica’s Aperture Review [note: this review is of Aperture 1.0, and has a link to a followup on the last page. A number of Aperture's shortcomings were addressed in version 1.5, a free upgrade from 1.0. I'm pretty sure Ars did an article on the 1.5 update, but couldn't find the link. If anyone wants to let me know what it is, I'll be glad to add it here.]