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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....
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.
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.
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").
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.
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
I've been a camera bug since I was a teenager back in the late 1960s and I still love to work with my film cameras. And yes, it's really great that since so many folks are trading in their film equipment for digital you can get some very fine deals. I bought the Hasselblad I've always wanted a couple years ago...second hand, but in cherry condition. I have almost all the great lenses for my Canon F-1s now that I just couldn't afford back when I was a kid. I love it.
But my darkroom is only for developing film now. I bought a Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED last Christmas, and I'm working on scanning in my entire library of negatives and slides. I'm using Aperture for its cataloging capabilities as much as for its great image adjustment tools. I use Photoshop mostly for dust speck removal (I have other non-photographic uses I put Photoshop to otherwise...I'm a cartoonist too). It's great not to have to deal with paper contact sheets. I can just scan my film in and have metadata linked to each image so I don't have to rummage through hundreds of contacts to find the shots I'm looking for. And now I can protect my images by storing backups offsite. I've always been afraid for my negatives and slides.
I never had the money or the time to invest in a full blown color darkroom, and nowadays I can produce great results, absolutely great results, with the Hasselblad, some rolls of Fuji Velvia, the Coolscan, Aperture and my Epson Stylus Photo R1800. And I can tell you for a fact that touching out dust specks in Photoshop beats doing it with a brush on the final print hands down.
Once you get the image into the computer endless possibilities open up. Yes, I still love film photography. I don't think I'll ever give it up. And, yes, I agree that large format black and white silver prints still beat what you can produce with even the best digital cameras and inkjet printers at the moment. They're absolutely lovely. If I wanted to I could probably still produce really fine black and white silver prints in my own darkroom. On the other hand, Kodak has stopped making black and white photographic paper.
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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