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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 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'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.
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....
Isn't that the point? Not all of us have screaming fast computers or even top-of-the-line video cards, but I, for one, have a C2D iMac with a x1600 video card. Photographers, as a post above me pointed out, like to shell out the big bucks for important items like cameras, lenses, filters, and tripods; processing equipment doesn't need to be top of the line. The point is that Aperture is pretty painful on a slower system, but Lightroom looks to work well on mid-range systems, which is what people (like me) are excited about.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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.
Lightroom doesn't do the same thing as Photoshop (although there is a fair amount of overlap). Photoshop is primarily editing photos with a tiny bit of management on the side, whereas Lightroom is the other way round; primarily for managing your photo collection with a bit of touching up on the side. Of course, if you want to manage a library of 10,000+ RAW photo's with Photoshop, thats up to you!
...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.
Because this isn't the latest Photoshop. If anything this is Bridge on steroids (in fact, if you use the CS3 beta, Bridge has inherited a lot of the features found in Lightroom). Lightroom is a digital equavelent of the darkroom (geddit?...ha). You 'develop' your raw file...adjust things, take out spots. When you want to be cloning things, merging things, changing the colour of aunties hair....then you use Photoshop. I can't understand how people can't see this distinction...it's black and white.
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").
a real "pro" (i.e the camera is already $15k+)
except that if the real pro is shooting sports, then the best camera + system for them would be the 1D MkII N - that's only $3k. and to really have to go $15k+, you need to move into MF camera + digital back territory. the truth is that most of the $15k+ camera pros don't do their own post processing, but work with a specialist, and those specialists know about video cards and raw processing and so on.
and i can pretty much guarantee that the number of pros working with $3k cameras exceeds the rest of them 10 fold.
You have obviously never bought lenses, my friend.
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.
I would agree with most of what you are saying. However, I am seeing more and more pro-photographers doing the post processing themselves. Several that I work with have bought Aperture, a newer high-end Mac (MacBook Pros, mostly) and easily paid for it by not having to hire a tech to do the grunt work (grunt work which costs a lot of money). Those who do fashion/"on location" stuff have really shaved a lot off of their budget. Hiring a good tech was costing them thousands per day on the shoot. Now, they do a lot of the post processing themselves, and they are very happy with *both* Aperture *and* Lightroom.
Now that Lightroom is a fully-fledged commercial product (as opposed to a Beta downloadable for free) I have a feeling they will drop the ducats to get it. $200 is nothing when you are billing $5000-$7000/day. Even if you are just shooting sports, the time savings and saving the use of a tech or lab makes it almost instantly pay for itself.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
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 look at it this way...and it's the way I've been using it in beta. Lightroom is just the replacement for Bridge. It's can't produce a finished photo (for me at least as it's noise reduction and sharpening are laughable), but it processes the RAW data, then pipes it to Photoshop to finish up and output.
So it's basically (again, for me) just a $200 Bridge upgrade.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Not being available on PCs is not a disqualifier for professional photography software. Windows has no effective system-wide color management, so color correction will always be a hit-and-miss proposition. Apple has had ColorSync in place since the MacOS 8 days, and it is a very effective system. If you are doing professional photography on a PC then you are wasting your time, that sounds harsh but it is the way things are.
I the hobbyist space this is not such an issue because you are not going to spend the money for a printer that con reproduce color reliably, and you are not going to buy the color matching hardware to make sure your output everywhere is consistent across the full spectrum.
I spent some time supporting graphic artists and working on ColorSynced workflows, so I do have experience in this area.
Do you care to explain how using a specialized processor that has the ability to do certain calculations orders of magnitude faster than a generalized CPU is a mistake? Especially when the same system decides on-the-fly which computation resource would best perform the calculation?
To give you a hint: Apple's current system already is setup to do what you say they will never do. If your CPU would better do the job, then your CPU will do the job. If it would better be put to your SIMD unit (Ativec or MMX/SSE2/SSE3/SSE4) then it will go to that unit. And if the graphics card is sitting idle and can better do the job... well...
While I don't doubt that there are many great photographers on slashdot, I'd be surprised if there was a single regular poster (or lurker) here who depends upon photography on a professional level, as his/her only source of income.
As someone who has spent much time working with pro photographers in my past life as an art director, I guarantee you that any *PRO* photographer will not think twice about plunking down some serious dough for a the latest and greatest mac, chock full of ram and sporting the best video card it will support. Computer hardware is among the *least* expensive financial commitment that a pro photographer will make:
Take a look at how much some decent digital backs for a hasselblaad will run you.
Add to that the many lenses that you need to have on hand as a pro. (Hint: this is the expensive part).
Add a bunch of fast, high-capacity memory cards.
Add a nice DSLR (or more likely, a few) and lenses for that/those camera(s) as well.
Add lighting equipment of various types to that.
Add a large studio space to that, in addition to mobile facilities.
Add makeup artists and assistants.
The costs involved in professional photography are high. A fast mac, chock full of ram with an excellent video card and a 30" cinema display costs *peanuts* in the grand scheme of things when it comes to the operating costs of a professional photographer. Aperture is a pro app, and that's why it makes the assumptions that it does about hardware. Lightroom is more accomodating for tinkerers and semi-professionals, the two occupy different segments of the market.
-JoeBoy
The old generation of photo editors - Photoshop, PaintShop, The GIMP - use a bit editing model, where you directly alter the bits, and once you do, you save the new bits, and the original info is lost. This was fine for working with scans.
The new generation of photo editors - Lightroom, Aperture - do not act directly on the bits. They layer non-destructive correction instructions on top of the original bits, and don't actually change the original bits. This is called nondestructive editing. When you want a JPEG, it exports a copy with the changes, still leaving the original intact. The changes are stored in a central SQL database, or in metadata files that travel with the originals. These new editors also place an emphasis on volume processing, because of the much larger volumes of photos generated by digital cameras. If you shot 200 photos in a consistent environment, it's going to be much faster to use Lightroom or Aperture to 1) cull that 200 down to the 100 keepers and 2) apply the same set of initial corrections to the 100 keepers. You simply copy the same metadata to the other 99 images and you are done in seconds. Much, much faster than if you tried to use Photoshop or GIMP to construct some macro to do it through pixel alteration. You can then fine-tune each image individually. When you're done with all your corrections, you then export files of altered pixels.
These programs do not make Photoshop or GIMP obsolete. While Lightroom has some cloning and healing tools and some excellent selective correction tools, some problems can only be solved by direct bit editing, masking, painting, etc. In the future, the old and new apps must and will coexist, or be combined.
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
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
Aperture and Lightroom are photo management programs. The are essentially pro versions of Apple's iPhoto and Adobe's Album software. When you download your photos from your camera, you do so into these programs. You store your photos in them, organizes them, do minor modifications, all to figure out which of your photos you want to bother to take into photoshop and do more work on. For the serious photographer who can easily shoot 500+ digital images in one shoot and shoot ever day, the ability just to organize your photos as well as look and judge them quickly is something worth spending money on. Album or iPhoto fulfill these needs but typcially do not handle the thousands of images that quickly build up, nor a way to back them up easily. These two products also have more powerful tools such as the ability to store and read RAW data which is the original data from the cameras sensor. From that a photographer can do lots of work such change white balance. Once they have the 5 or so photos out of 500 they took that they want to do post-production work on in photoshop, they call up the serious photoediting software and do it. These programs also do version control, so you always have your original as well as your modified files in an easy to find format without the worry of losing prior versions.
Hope that helps.
Lightroom is a great interface for color correction, and photomanagement. HOWEVER It is a very specific application that works with photoshop.
.tga .pcx .pic .png .sgi .exr .hdr etc. It only handles images related to digital cameras.
Lightroom only handles camera image formats in its database. It's not going to organize
Lightroom is a shooters app. You bring it on set with your laptop... If you're in a studio, you'll have your lappy hooked up to a nice large screen...
You basically will shoot your shots, and in the field use lightroom to organize and review them with the very common "star" rating system. You pick the ones you love, and you can use the color correction tools to tweak the colors really fast.
NOW this is not a finished photo. Often there will be things that need to be airbrushed, stamped out etc. That is when you right click on the file and it'll open it in photoshop.
Whats nice about this is that Lightroom is non destructive. It will not overwrite your original images while editing the color etc in lightroom, and whne you export to photoshop, it copies it to a tif, and you edit that in ps. It then keeps that tiff back in the library when you're done.
It is not meant to replace photoshop. It is mean to be a quick and easy way to color correct, crop, and organize your pictures in the field. If you're a serious photograper, you'll be retouching them in Photoshop in a studio when you can sit down for hours on end.
It's a great application that filled a void. Its color correction UI is very good and i like it compared to PS's color tools because its easier to work with and its all pretty much upfront.
But it wont replace Photoshop anytime soon.
I have been using Bibble Pro on Linux and have been very happy with it. It has great workflow support as well as being multithreaded and able to take advantage of multiple cores. It does all its processing in 16bits per color and has excellent raw support for Canon, Nikon, Pentax and others. The workflow support works quite well for me. There are also numerous plug-ins available and they provide the API to 3rd party developers.
They also are fairly good about releasing new versions with new features and support for the latest cameras and lenses. Usually they release a new version every 2-3 months.
It runs on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows, which makes sense since it was based on the cross-platform QT library.
The raw converter in Bibble is very good, being based on dcraw. Similarly, it has many other plug-ins like a single click lens distortion correction based on Panarama, Noise Ninja and many more, all being very easy to work with. Of course it has all the tools for manipulating color, white balance, contrast, curves, shadow and highlight recovery, sharpening and many other features. The evaluation version is free to download.
As far as features, the only feature that I know of that does not work on Linux at this time is teathered shooting. All of the other features now work. Earlier versions did have issues with some features not working on Linux, but they have addressed that.
I did have issues with printing a while back, but it looks like it has been addressed.
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