Bagel Belly Blog

Aperture vs. Lightroom

I have been less than pleased with Apple's Aperture as a replacement for iPhoto, as my very brief review may have indicated. I found it to be incredibly slow, so much so that I was actually avoiding photo processing, since it was making my entire machine crawl and the endless spinning pizza wheel was a common sight. I also found it somewhat obtuse to use (even after reading through the manual and watching the DVDs). I kept having recurrent problems with RAW files from my Canon 350D not being recognised properly. Combine this with the somewhat botched iPhoto import (which gives duplicates of any photo I've adjusted in iPhoto, since it doesn't hide the originals) and I was less than satisfied overall. It didn't seem like the slick, polished application I'd hoped Apple would ship.

All this meant that pain and frustration became associated with photography - which as a result meant I ended up taking less photos, having expensive kit lying around and a hobby I was annoyed with. Clearly something had to change.

So I started playing with Adobe's Lightroom a few weeks ago, to see if it had improved from the horribly buggy and unusable beta I tried out ages ago.

The short story is that I shot and processed some 400+ photos over the Easter break, and found Lightroom to be a dream to work with compared to Aperture. First and foremost, it's blazingly fast. It remains to be seen whether this is a result of only having a few hundred photos in the library as opposed to the 12,000+ sat in Aperture. I'll try migrating my archive of photos over the weekend and report back.

Another bonus is Lightroom is much more intuitive. It does pretty much what I'd expect (even though I never learnt my way round other Adobe products like Photoshop), and although there's a few things that bug me (cumbersome keyboard shortcut to switch between "Develop" and "Library" modes, hacks and third-party software to do flickr uploads), I'm already zooming round the interface and using keyboard shortcuts that I somehow never mastered in over 6 months of owning Aperture.

Friends have assured me that Aperture is not that bad, and that I must be having teething troubles - but I'm on a Mac because I'm not interested in fighting through teething troubles any more. I expect my software to do the right thing, to get out of my way and to let me be productive (whilst gently pushing me in the direction of best practice when needed). Clearly Aperture is falling down somewhere in that area, at least for me.

So anyone messing with digital photography but finding iPhoto too restrictive or Aperture too painful might want to look at Lightroom. I'm now cheerfully considering cutting my losses, forgetting my financial investment in Aperture and forking out another $200 to buy Lightroom instead. And when you realise that's $200 of my lens-buying budget, you'll see what a serious proposition that is!

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