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Lightroom Vs. Aperture
Nonu writes "Adobe has officially released its Aperture killer, Lightroom, and the reviews are starting to come in. Ars looks at Lightroom and concludes that it's a better choice for those without bleeding-edge hardware. 'Aperture's main drawback is still performance as it was designed for bleeding-edge machines. On a quad Core 2 Duo Xeon, it is very usable but Lightroom just feels faster for everything regardless of hardware. Since Aperture relies on Core Image and a fast video card to do its adjustments (RAW decoding is done by the CPU), it's limited to what the single 3-D card can do. Lightroom does everything with the CPU and so it is likely to gain more speed as multicore systems get faster.'"
'Aperture's main drawback is still performance as it was designed for bleeding-edge machines.
Bleeding edge, literally. As in, they require removal of an arm and a leg.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This sounds like a driver problem. Any signal processing that can be implemented sensibly against a 3D API ought to be able to run on the GPU or CPU depending on what is fastest for the CPU and GPU combination. Something written only for the CPU cannot easily migrate to the GPU, but the opposite should be easy. It is like having an "intrinsics" library... in fact, the work ought to be able to be spread across both CPUs and GPUs in one of these complex multi-core configurations that everyone is talking about for the future.
This is something useful... Real photographers often don't have the cash to shell out for a top-of-the-line graphics processing server. Something like this should make it easier for smaller photography businesses to get into digital tech. Less actual film, less darkroom time/space/supplies, faster turnaround... all good for the little guy.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
I haven't used either program, but I read most of the review, especially the part about performance.. but their test hardware was a macbook pro and a g5. Neither one of those can have a particularly stellar video card. They don't specify the g5's video card, but I'm guessing it's as out of date as the machine. and the x1600 in the macbook pro isn't a screamer.
I'd be interested to see what a system with a 7950 or (if/when they're supported) an 8800 would do with aperture. All this talk about how fast video cards are these days at doing things other than playing games intrigues me. I think aperture may have gotten it right. Those if Lightroom supports multi-core well, then it'll probably do ok going forward, as well.
I've been using LightRoom since the beta's and 1.0 since it came out (link to my walk-through in the sig).
It's a really nice program. As a developer, the structure of the program it self, gives me a warm fussy feeling. More programs should be written like this - it's clear that Adobe has given a lot of though to responsiveness and threading. They haven't perfected it, but most of the time, the program responds very quickly, by starting on something that shows you that it's working on what you wanted it to do - like you can see the details in your thumbs-images get better and better and suddenly it's there. But the important thing is - the interface is still responsive, if you can click on a thumb and have that image load, even if the thumb is only halfway loaded (note: some people do have issue with LR performance, but it seems to be a specific issue for them).
As a photographer - well. As a work-flow program it does everything I want. As a "darkroom" it does most of what it should, but there's still some most have functions that are just not good enough (Noise Reduction/Sharpen/Clone).
Oh, and I badly miss dual monitor support!
TC - My Photos..
Apple obviously noticed that graphics card performance increases like CPU performance does, or even better. Aperture will have better performance in the long run since it uses both the CPU and video card. In my MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM, Aperture runs well. I've only got 128MB video card RAM too.
Adobe has officially released its Aperture killer, Lightroom,
Kill it?! I don't even know what it is!
Any chance slashdot editors could actually do some editing? So that summaries aren't just the spiel of the poster but also tell us *what* Lightbox and Aperture are? There's no mention. I had to guess it was something to do with graphics and maybe something to do with pictures....
The article mentions that Aperture uses the graphics card rather than the CPU -- in fact, CoreImage choses the fastest code path it can, so if you're graphics card is going to do something slower than the CPU, it will use the CPU. Secondly, they mention that it doesn't have a plug in architecture -- with Aperture the plug in architecture is much lower level, you can write plugins for CoreImage, making them available system wide, rather than just in Aperture.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the ways these programs are being marketed. First of all, why isn't this program the latest version of Photoshop? I've seen this happen in music products as well. They'll say X is the product to use if you're professional. Then a year later, a new program costing twice as much comes out, doing the same thing only better and they'll say but this is the program to use if you're really, really professional.
If you've been selling your customers a flagship product for editing digital photographs for years, why come out with a different product for editing digital photographs except to prevent your customers from expecting an upgrade version?
The capabilities of Lightroom should be part of the latest version of Photoshop. If it's a better interface, then that should be the new interface of Photoshop.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...Apple and Adobe have some kind of contract with the camera manufacturers, so that ist's sure that Aperture and Lightroom will support the next-gen, encrypted and proprietary RAW-format? othewrwise the software could be rendered useless when buying a new cam...
Can we please stop assigning the "killer" label to abso-freaking-lutely EVERYTHING? iPod killer, Flash killer, Aperture killer, ad nauseam. Have any of these so-called "killers" actually killed the product they were supposedly released to kill?
I guess the word "competitor" doesn't make for sensational copy.
http://www.mininova.org/get/591697
Enjoy the TRIAL before you BUY.
have there been any killers that killed yet? i take it with all the seriousness that comes on a 3rd grade playground.
bleeding-edge... you know, i bet i have an easier time reading english from the 1700s than people 100 years from now will have reading our interesting version here.
yeah yeah, guilty, i do it too. i guess when i read something that's as horrible sounding as something i wrote myself, i cringe.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Photoshop is old, they are now targeting these SKU's of Photoshop for specific markets such as Elements, LightRoom etc etc
Sure you can have the same power using Assembly but why when you can use C# or Java or Lisp etc? Same principle, Photoshop for the nitty gritty or if you want targetted solutions then use Lightroom etc, this way you get it catering for your "domain" specifically rather than a generic one size fits all product such as Photoshop.
Well I do use Aperture on a 15 months-old dualcore PowerMac G5 (2.3 Ghz) with 2.5 GB RAM and a 7800 GTX (512 MB) and it's still quite slow. This is not cutting edge anymore, but I wouldn't call it "out of date" either. It probably packs more power than the current Apple lineup except for MacPros with X1900 or better video options.
Note that the OpenGL drivers under OSX/PPC are known to be quite bad performance-wise.
Despite my config, I'm looking into Lightroom because of this performance issue.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Takes a bit of getting used to but lightroom is the way to go.
IMO the best feature is the ability to copy all or some of the transformations that you've applied to a particular pic and then run them on others in the library.
The fact that all the editing is non destructive is another boon.
Also, it watches folders and auto imports from them to a predetermined shoot - godsend.
In one sense, you are right, it seems as if a new major generation of video chips are released every year. In another sense, it's expensive to get a good video chip in a Mac, and expensive to get a machine that can get one. Lightroom would probably work far better on a regular MacBook than Aperture can.
I really can't believe it wasn't mentioned as a serious Con for Lightroom with so many video cards (especially those of photographers as well as Mac owners) being dual headed. Thumbnails and controls on one monitor and large full-screen views on the second for adjustments is a wonderful way to work. Viewing the Lightroom forums makes it clear that it is important to users.
I love Lightroom's "develop" controls but the productivity aspect is much more important. Simply allowing the Manage and Develop tabs to used as separate windows would have done the trick (not well, but "good enough").
That makes sense though. The MacBook Pro is a professional grade machine, whereas the MacBooks in theory are just your average, everyday user kind of machines. So wouldn't a professional photographer be using a professional/workstation grade machine?
the UI is still sluggish in the released version. alt tabbing back into lightroom you can watch everything redraw wheras every other app i own is instantaneous. I think the UI is written in flash/flex which is why its so damn slow. I just found a post on customizing the web templates (http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/07/nextgen_web_ galleries.html#more) and there are some mx: entries in the files, thats flex isn't it? btw my machine is a sony laptop i bought in december, core 2 duo 1.83 ghz, geforce go 7600, with 2gb ram. hardly underpowered.
also adobe likes to waste your screen real estate. on my 1400x900 screen in develop mode the collapsed headings down the right hand side take up about 1/4-1/3 of the vertical height of the page. thats before removing the black borders at the edges of the screen and the giant "Sync" and "Reset" buttons which seem to be designed to be read from the other side of the room. icons too large, too much padding. i want to get as much info into my screen as possible without sodding about with the scroll bar.
other gripes: the previews look blurred when they are small-medium in grid mode on my canon raw files. the method for selecting photos for print or web export is different. the scroll wheel doesnt use the system scroll speed, it defaults to about 10 pixels so its basically useless on the grid vie when your thumbnails are large. different from bridge.
another thing, when i scroll to a separate section of the grid view, the icons are all pixelated, like from a 50x50 image. then then resolve into the better preview. thats annoying. and different from bridge.
thing is for me is it better than bridge/photoshop which is more UI responsive, but makes you jump through a few hoops to do stuff, or use lightroom which UI annoys the sh1t out of me but is quicker to do other things. i dont know, time will tell.
oh and one other thing, i work on my photos locally on the laptop and back them up to an external drive, my laptop looking like a subset of the external drive. i may work on the local versions for a while, then need to push them back to the hard drive, so sometimes they exist in two places at once. dont know how to approach this with the 'library' system in LR
After recently picking up a Digital SLR camera, I started looking around at the photo processing/management options. I tried both Aperture and Lightroom on my MacBook Pro (Core2 Duo, 2.13GHz, 2GB RAM). Everybody says the performance of Aperture is bad, but I found it to be fine on my machine. Maybe I'm not pushing as much data around as a professional photographer, but it handled my 10 MegaPixel RAW files fine. Of course, the app could be whittled down a bit, it has a huge memory footprint, and obviously doesn't fare well on older hardware.
But, probably the main thing that I like about Aperture is the full-screen editing/viewing mode. iPhoto 6 also has this, and when you're working in the smaller real estate of a 15" laptop display, it makes a huge difference. Maybe if I had a 20-30" external display it wouldn't be such a big deal. But, for laptop users, full screen mode is a must-have.
Also, iPhoto 6 doesn't have all the capabilities for workflow stuff. But, it's a pretty good alternative for non=professionals.
What is a quad Core 2 Duo Xeon? :P
Apple gets a lot of things right, but it shows pure arrogance when it comes to fix its mistakes. It's obvious the approach of using GPUs to perform some computations is flawed in the long run, but you can bet Apple will *never* move into another direction, even if it's a dead end. They have been stubborn about poor and stupid decisions for a long time, yet fanboys keep transforming pain into features.
After spending all day in front of the computer, I just love going into my darkroom to make some real silver halide prints instead of staring at Photoshop. With today's bargain prices for analog photography, I encourage people to jump in! I got an enlarger for $75 at a garage sale. With 4x5" negatives from my large-format camera, the prints are stunning. (a 4x5" negative gives about 200+ megapixels of resolution).
I played with Aperture 1.1 but its performance was horrible. Aperture 1.5's performance is much better. I haven't messed with Lightroom so I can't say much about it. But I'm very happy with Aperture. It runs pretty well on my Dual G5 2.0ghz PowerMac. And thats only got an ATI 9600 card in it. I'd love to try it out on a new MacPro.
The MacBook Pro may be marketed as pro-grade, but the MacBook isn't necessarily junk. Outside the graphics chip, the chips in both of them are nearly identical. If a photographer can save $800 (assuming light room costs the same) and get a program that's designed to work well with his/her copy of Photoshop, I don't see why that would be a more compelling option. Established pros can easily pay more, but may not necessarily want to if they don't have to, and the up-and-coming are where the market shifts come from. Very often, they will stay with the software that they learned to use unless there is a significant reason to change.
I've used both applications, and found that Aperture does the job without getting in my way. It's typical Apple - really powerful yet deceptively simple user interface. As of version 1.5 Aperture really rocks.
For those who don't know, both of these applications are RAW-image-based, non-destructive photo editing and workflow tools. They are targeted at both pro and serious amateur digital photographers. They are not meant to replace Photoshop (although for digital photo management and editing parts of my job I find I no longer need Photoshop) - they are meant to fill a need that isn't currently being filled. And, both do it quite well.
Aperture is Mac-only, while Lightroom is both Mac and Windows. For the amateur with money, that right there probably decides it. But for the pro, being Mac-only is likely not a big negative for Aperture.
#DeleteChrome
I'm quite surprised Apple would release such a poorly implemented software product, especially considering its price and the 1.5 version number. After playing around with both products, I will be purchasing Lightroom.
I found myself spending way too much time in VMware, so I ended up replacing my Thinkpad with a new Macbook. I still run Linux as my workstation at home and work, but I have my Powerbook wherever I go. Bottom Line, if your semi-serious about Photography, Linux is not there yet.
My impression of Photoshop is that it has been a general purpose product aimed at the mass market (meaning everyone from your grandma who just wants to get rid of some red-eye to people who want to put horns and a beard on photos of George W. Bush). Professional photographers apparently have been using different software targeted directly at them or businesses that serve pro photogs. As the Ars article states, "Professional digital photography has been a reality for a while now but the big-name developers have been slow to catch up."
Wikipedia has a good definition of market segmentation as "the process in marketing of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs. Because each segment is fairly homogeneous in their needs and attitudes, they are likely to respond similarly to a given marketing strategy. That is, they are likely to have similar feelings and ideas about a marketing mix comprised of a given product or service, sold at a given price, distributed in a certain way, and promoted in a certain way." So your home Photoshopper and sports photographers are two different sets of potential customers, and what they are willing to pay for/expect out of software are two entirely different things.
My point is that Adobe and others have realized that "professional digital photography" has become a significant market, and therefore it makes financial sense to come up with products specifically targeted to this group of people whose needs and expectations regarding photo processing software are much higher than the mass of casual photographers (and are willing to pay a much higher price for a software package if it meets their expectations).
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Hence, I propose Bastian's Law to fill the gap:
Lightroom and Aperture are both $300 (Lightroom is on a discount until the end of April).
However Aperture has quite a few more features than Lightroom today, including an export API actively being developed for and real multiple monitor support with a number of options for making use of a second display.
Lightroom also suffers the problem of extension. Neither Lightroom nor Aperture are really meant to be standalone entities, you still need some editor like Photoshop from time to time. But Photoshop CS3 Bridge comes with all of the editing capability of Lightroom, meaning that you are paying $300 for a program for basically everything else but the editing abilities. The question is how many people are going to find Lightroom's features beyond the fairly nice editing abilities worth $300? It may be that enough people buy Lightroom and some cheaper standalone editor that Lightroom will still do really well, but for someone purchasing Photoshop already it seems like a difficult choice to pay $300 more.
Aperture is more complementary to Photoshop since there are so many non-editing features that are well-rounded, like the book creation, album management, and smart albums.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am using an older Powermac G5 1.8 DP. Aperture runs fine on this setup, with a somewhat older GPU (ATI Radeon 9800).
There actually is not that great a difference between Lightroom and Aperture performance on most hardware, I have found - the real difference is perception. Lightroom does, as noted elsewhere, respond instantly to what you are doing - you make an adjustment and right away you see it is doing something. However, it can take as long as or longer than Aperture to actually finish what it is doing - so in the end, both programs finish work about the same time.
I have not checked this in version 1.0 yet but this actually led to problems in the beta. When adjusting exposure for instance, any change to the exposure slider in lightroom instantly reduced the resolution by 4x or so (so the image looked very blocky at 100%). So the slider responded very quickly BUT you couldn't really evaluate what effect the exposure had on fine detail (single pixel highlights).
Aperture instead opts to respond in real-time to the full image. For careful changes to an image at 100%, this is a better model even if the slider behaves a little more slowly. As I said, I have not carefully looked over Lightroom 1.0 to see if this has been addressed, so they may have fixed it - I just wanted to note that speed may not be entirely beneficial in a UI if it comes at the expense of ability.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Lightroom does not perform the same functions as Photoshop. Some Photoshop functionality exists in Lightroom, but if you want to do per-picture editing, you need Photoshop. Lightroom is a workflow app, which is focused on handling large numbers of photographs.
That was true before Photoshop CS3. In CS3 Bridge, you now have access to all of Lightrooms Develop features (and I mean all). You have the ability to keyword and rate and stack. And it is much faster than previous versions of Bridge.
So to me, the line is far less distinct than it used to be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
20" iMac here, with Lightroom, and there's nothing I love more than working in full screen mode and "dimmed lights".
With Lightroom you are not using the full screen for editing though. In Aperture the image fills the screen edge to edge, and you can make use of a HUD overlay to make adjustments, you bring it up and hide it with a single keystroke. The filmstrip can be hidden as well so it only comes up for display when you move to a side of the screen (like Dock hiding).
The more the better, and I imagine that, though probably a trivial difference, perhaps the good performance you're experiencing is partly due to lower screen resolution. It could, as well, be due to the resolution of the files you're importing, though you didn't mention what camera you're using.
He did mention he had a 10MP camera. As for the resolution, I find performance to be fine even when a second monitor running at 1600x1200 is attached to the MacBook Pro. Really the need for a super-powerful video card is a myth partially fostered by slower performance before version 1.5. It can also run on a Macbook, and even a Mac mini and actually operates pretty quickly as long as you have a decent amount of memory and do not go too heavy on adjustments (that's where a better video card as in the Macbook Pro comes into play).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
DNG has been designed to support a wide variety of sensor configurations, from various Bayer filter patterns to sensors like the Foveon.
That is 100% Wrong.
The ONLY support DNG offers for Foveon is that you can do what is called a "Linear DNG", which is basically a glarified TIFF file. That means you are not holding RAW data at all, but a rendered version of your original RAW which goes totally against the concept of a digital negative (if better algoritms for RAW conversion arrive, you cannot make use of them). There is literally no way to represent the stacked photosites that the Foveon sensor uses. To make matters worse, almost nothing that supposedly supports DNG actually understands these Linear DNG files so you can't even use them if you wanted to.
Similarly for any really new sensor design that arrives (read: Non bayer) you are going to have similar issues. The Fuji sensor for example was not supported for some time, until they added a "rotation" flag into the format.
When your format requires updates like that for any really new sensor design, and can't even include one current RAW format, that means the design is fundamentally broken. It's not extensible, it's just a grab bag of attributes and data.
The only real value it offers is in easier storage of XMP within the file itself, difficult with most RAW formats since they were never designed to have extra data injected into them. That need however can still be met easily using sidecar XMP files and attaching XMP to rendered TIFF files (which is all DNG files are anyway, being a variant of TIFF EP).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And I have to wonder if at some point it might be cheaper for photographers to buy a relatively slow machine with a pair of screaming-fast video cards.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Adobe gets around this problem by offering to convert your random RAW files to DNG...
Which it cannot do if it cannot read them. Updating ACR to a version that converts a RAW file to DNG also means that Lightroom and Photoshop will be able to read the file directly.
Conversion to DNG can mean the potential to use other, older, programs that do not understand a particular RAW format. However that also means using an older demosiacing algorithm in said program to work with the image, which doesn't seem like a good idea when you are looking to have consistent behaviors across programs.
Furthermore, not all DNG files will be able to be read by all applications - Aperture for example can use DNG files, but only from cameras that they already offer RAW support for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Since Aperture relies on Core Image and a fast video card to do its adjustments (RAW decoding is done by the CPU), it's limited to what the single 3-D card can do." This really depends on where Apple decides to take CoreImage doesn't it?
Aperture's performance is fine for me, same hardware (MacBook Pro, 2.16 C2D, 2G RAM, 128MB graphics card). The (very individual) deciding factor for me was the interface- Aperture makes sense to me. Lightroom 's interface just isn't intuitive for my brain, I experimented with the beta versions as they came out and it was much more work to get it to Do What I Want.
Actually, Aperture never had problems with crashing really - the broad complaints were:
1) Bad RAW conversion
2) Poor performance
3) Master images had to be kept in library.
The first one was fixed within a few months, in version 1.1 of Aperture. The RAW conversion is on par with other RAW conversion engines like C1 and Bible and ACR, and some have said the Aperture colors are even a little better generally. You can also fine-tune the RAW adjustment parameters, which lets you really have a good conversion. It's also the only program that currently has a feature in place to let you control which version of RAW conversion to use with your images, so an update to the application can not accidentally cause changes to the ways images are rendered that you were not expecting (you can migrate images to a newer RAW version in a variety of ways or continue to use the older RAW renderer if you are OK with how it looks already).
The second item (performance) has been improved incrememntally with every release, where now I would say it's actually pretty good. It's quite usable on a Macbook for example, though heavier editing would bog it down some.
The last item was addressed in Aperture 1.5, which lets you keep images outside the library and adds pretty extensive offline support and preview images. This version has actually gotten really good reviews, just google around for "Aperture 1.5" and you should find some.
That was released a number of months ago, and we have not heard from Aperture since - so I am looking forward to PMA where I expect Apple to have some kind of update of progress to somewhat counter the Lightroom 1.0 release.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Aperture works OK on either a Macbook or a Mackbook Pro. For simple edits Aperture is fine, the need for a better video card comes only when you start adding more complex editing like shadows/highlights or a lot of spot/patch repairs.
For quick on-site editing, Aperture works well even on lower end hardware.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I use Aperture on my Macbook Pro for real work, and it is fine performance wise. It's not going to be quite as fast as a desktop but it's pretty good, even with an external monitor attached for spanning.
In a pinch I have even run Aperture on a Mac mini (only runs on the intel ones). It was actually pretty good on that platform, the only thing is that it starts slowing down if you have more complex adjustments added, like multiple spot/patch fixes and shadows/highlights correction applied. But if you were looking for image review/comparison (where Aperture really shines) and light onsite editing, a Macbook (not a pro) would be fine for Aperture as long as you added some memory.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was wondering what you think of the software with that edition of the printer, is it really worth paying that much more than the Amazon price for?
I don't mind spending money either on good photographic equipment and software, but I was suspicious of that package really being worth the extra you'd pay beyond just the printer cost alone.
I have an Epson R800 (very little brother in that it uses roughly the same inkset) currently and love the quality, but I have to send larger stuff all out for printing and I would love to have full control over larger prints.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
here
You can download a beta of CS3 right now, it will work for 30 days I believe if you use CS2 (3 days otherwise). Then you can explore the new bridge, which really is way improved, and use that information to make a more informed choice before the $100 discount on Lightroom expires at the end of April.
Come to think of it, I have to wonder if the end of the Lightroom discount is not timed specifically around the release of Photoshop so that people cannot make a full evaluation beforehand and tend to purchase Lightroom not realizing how much Bridge has improved...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's exactly backwards. GPUs are designed with much more parallelism than CPU, and their performance is improving at much higher rate than CPU performance, so if an algorithm is well suited for GPU execution, it will outperform a CPU implementation by ever greater margins.
The author of that sentence doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.
The other thing that I found interesting when I boosted RAM from 2G to 4G was that Aperture doesn't use it all; it peaks at pretty close to 2G no matter what I'm doing. That's nice in the sense that now I have basically half of my Mac for doing other things, so interactive performance while jumping between applications really never suffers, but I was somewhat surprised.
One thing that I find interesting is that a lot of people say that Aperture 1.5 is much faster than 1.1. That wasn't the case on my Quad; there was no obvious difference at all. That makes me wonder if Apple made it work well on the best hardware first, then worked backwards through their line. Even so, Aperture 1.5 had so many big improvements as to be a godsend.
I still want curves support, though, and I believe they can do much, much better on performance by caching intermediate product. It seems like they're performing a re-render of the whole image every time -- and if that's the case, it's a wonder that it's as fast as it is. While on the subject of stuff I wish Aperture did better, its printing support is almost laughably bad and so is its patch tool.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Aperture, to me, was where the value really came from. 1.0 had crummy rendering, and they didn't really get the package sorted until 1.5. Yet 1.0 was still worth every penny I paid for it because it cut my time spent winnowing out the money shots by something like a factor of five. It was an incredible win that has only improved as the other capabilities matured.
And its other capabilities did mature, much faster than I expected. Today I prefer its rendering in most cases to every other tool at my disposal. Whereas I used Capture One for almost all my rendering in the Aperture 1.0 days, and maybe one in ten with Aperture 1.1, it's like one in a thousand with Aperture 1.5. It got that good, that fast. Remarkable.
Regarding Aperture versus Lightroom, I despise the modal nature of Lightroom. They did a much better job of it than did Capture One (the second worst UI I have ever used, after Lotus Notes) but I still find myself hopping back and forth between Library and Develop way too often. Why aren't all the tools available in both places? Photoshop isn't like that. Nor is Aperture. On the other hand, Lightroom has the best printing interface I have ever seen. I hope CS3 gets it, and Apple copies it.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I am a videographer and consider all bitmap and vector graphics to be my tools including motion video. I've tested Lightroom but not Aperture. Wasn't impressed. Than I got a hold of Media Pro, now migrating from it's founder iView, into the Microsoft camp.
This is one sweet program and priced identically with Lightroom and Aperture it covers ALL the videographers digital cataloging needs. I don't think a catalog should be anything more than a catalog but their is such a panaply of uses for catalog software, including batch meta tags, quick access to off-line assets etc. that it is a most important category for those of us living in the "Age of Videography".
Bob
www.videographyblog.com