Apple's Aperture vs Adobe Lightroom
Terry Runion
Are you trying to decide which workflow software package to go with? I was a while back, so I decided to try them out and here are my findings, granted your experiences may be different than yours, so if they are please feel free to drop me a line.
At first I went to the Adobe website and downloaded a free copy of Lightroom, this seemed liked a natural fit since I use Photoshop rather extensively. The version I was using was 1.x, 2.x had not been released yet. Before I get into the details of my experiences, let me tell you I am a MAC user , it is an iMAc 24" with 4 gig of Ram so it is a pretty new machine and software apps should run without issue, which most do. OK so back to Lightroom, I totally loved it , and began using it in my everyday work flow tasks. The only real drawback was the lack of plug ins, I am a plug in junkie and like to have a wide variety of options when it comes to plug ins. The other drawback was lack of any good way to add a watermark to the file, and what I would end up doing is exporting all the finished files, and then running an action in Photoshop on the finished files, it works , but it sure would be nice to click a button and select the watermark, and the watermark position, and apply it to whatever images you need to . If you don't want to alter the original files, the watermark option would allow you to create a duplicate version of the file. But alas in this version there was no functionality to watermark at the level. Perhaps in Lightroom 2.x they have added this functionality but I have only tried the beta version and cannot tell you.
So as I was using Adobe Lightroom, I loved it , and when the 2.x beta came out decided to try that out, so I downloaded that one, and used it for sometime, but Adobe had moved a bunch of stuff around for the navigation, and I know they never really put things back even in the final product. Maybe I am getting old but once I like a certain thing, I don't want it changed, this is why I hate Windows, I mean Apple comes out with an updated OS and you can barely tell, other than the new stuff there, when Windows releases they feel the need to more all the functions around, sometimes I think just so you think they actually did something to earn your upgrade money. Anyway I abandoned Lightroom at that point, the change in navigation and still even with 2.x the lack of plug ins, not to mention 300.00 bucks for it. I felt it was time to move on.
So on to Apple's Aperture, for 200.00 it was 100.00 cheaper, so that was a plus, not to mention all the vast amount of plug ins I could get. I downloaded the trial version and tested it out for awhile, and here is where I went wrong, I should have used it for at least 30 days, the full trial period, but alas I am an impatient person and gave it a couple of days. The program seemed to work great , the interface was great just like other Apple apps, so I figured I would buy it , I mean 100.00 bucks difference sort of made the difference for sure.
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The good news is I saved 100.00 bucks, the bad news is this program has some serious drawbacks, and is a dog. I am sorry Aperture Guys at Apple, but it is . One thing that I hate is once you import images the app has to build thumbnails of the images, that is not the issue, then time that the program takes to do this is painful! It takes so long for some of them I literally let the app run overnight and in the morning when I come back to check it is STILL not finished. The other major drawback is the amount of time the image takes to load once you are ready to work on it. Lightroom pulls up the image in a second or two, with Aperture, it could take as long as a minute, so for the most part I end up using the quick preview mode, but this is a pain to switch back or forth. The worst issue I have is the entire library became corrupt, and this was after I has sorted and classified all the images, and there was not a utility or really any way I could find to restore the library, so you guessed it I had to start from scratch, the saving grace here is I import my images from their current location, so none of the images were impacted. Could you imagine how angry I would have been if it had trashed all my images? Yea I have them backed up, but I have almost a terabyte of data now, and it would have taken me the rest of my natural born life to restore them.
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So what to do? i guess I could spend the 300.00 and get Lightroom, but I won't , I will just tough it out with Aperture, and hope for improvements in then next version. How much do you want to be the upgrade will cost 100 bucks? Kind of funny, when you try to skimp this is where you end up, so my advice to anyone that is wanting a good work flow package, download one , use it for the 30 days, then do the same with the other, and then make a good decision on the package.
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