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Lightroom Vs. Aperture

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the snapshootout dept.

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.'"

2 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Do they know anything about Aperture? by beelsebob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. I prefer Aperture by tji · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.