Aperture vs. Lightroom

LR4 Beta Now Available

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1306301/

Lightroom 4 beta now available:
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2012/01/lr4betanowavailable.html

Lightroom 4 beta resources:
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2012/01/lightroom-4-beta-resources.html

I would suggest waiting for the final LR4 release, and then considering switching. Lightroom stores all of your photos as accessible folders on your hard drive, so you wouldn't need to manage your InDesign files separately - you could even consider using Publish Services to keep those exported files in sync.

There's lots of flexibility there, so you can adapt it to your workflow, to a large degree. And of course, we're always here to help!

DavidVilla08 said:

I would suggest waiting for the final LR4 release, and then considering switching.

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The final version of LR4 has been out for a month and a half.

Since this thread got bumped back up again, it's worth pointing out that Apple has inexplicably pulled the trial version of Aperture:

Apple Discontinues Free Trials of Aperture and iWork

The general consensus in this thread has been to "try both and then buy the one that fits your style". Unfortunately, you can't try Aperture anymore without actually shelling out the $79 at the MAS.

Personally, I prefer Lightroom over Aperture. I currently have LR4 and CS5 installed on my MBP. I've tried Aperture on a friend's iMac, and I wasn't really that impressed. I mean I only tried it out and didn't work in it extensively. I am used to LR since I've used it since it was first introduced. It's really about personal preferences.

I used Aperture for over a year, just gone back to Lightroom.

I find Lightroom much more friendly to use and seems faster.

I used Aperture for years. I recently was forced to use a Lightroom 3 trial to meet a deadline (Mac was unavailable). Now I'm never looking back.

Just purchased Lightroom 4 as part of Adobe's new creative cloud service. Holy smokes it's awesome. Now if only I could bring all those Aperture adjusted RAW photos with me.

Cathode said:

I used Aperture for years. I recently was forced to use a Lightroom 3 trial to meet a deadline (Mac was unavailable). Now I'm never looking back.

Just purchased Lightroom 4 as part of Adobe's new creative cloud service. Holy smokes it's awesome. Now if only I could bring all those Aperture adjusted RAW photos with me.

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How did you get Lightroom as part of CC? I thought they hadn't announced how that'll work yet?

Cathode said:

I used Aperture for years. I recently was forced to use a Lightroom 3 trial to meet a deadline (Mac was unavailable). Now I'm never looking back.

Just purchased Lightroom 4 as part of Adobe's new creative cloud service. Holy smokes it's awesome. Now if only I could bring all those Aperture adjusted RAW photos with me.

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I know I've said this before, probably in this very thread, but why would you need to? When Lightroom 5 comes out and Adobe introduces Process 2014, are you actually going to reprocess every one of thousands of images done in Process 2012 under Lr 4? Maybe a few images here or there that might benefit, but everything? I don't understand why more people don't export their keepers to TIFFs or JPEGs for their portfolios.

Comeagain? said:

How did you get Lightroom as part of CC? I thought they hadn't announced how that'll work yet?

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Sorry, I should have mentioned: I'm using the Lightroom 4.1 preview. Only for the fact that the official released version does not yet support my Canon 5D Mark III.

John.B said:

I know I've said this before, probably in this very thread, but why would you need to? When Lightroom 5 comes out and Adobe introduces Process 2014, are you actually going to reprocess every one of thousands of images done in Process 2012 under Lr 4? Maybe a few images here or there that might benefit, but everything? I don't understand why more people don't export their keepers to TIFFs or JPEGs for their portfolios.

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No, you're right - I likely won't. However, it's nice to be able to have my photos all organized together. I use Aperture/Lightroom for showcasing photos and keeping them organized as much I use it for editing.

I think both have their purposes. Personally, I use Aperture for all my portrait clients and all around studio work. When I'm out playing around shooting landscapes though I will often pull those into Lightroom just for the built in grad tool .. sometimes.

Comeagain? said:

How did you get Lightroom as part of CC? I thought they hadn't announced how that'll work yet?

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It is not part of CC but is available for a discounted price of $99.00 when you sign up for CC. I have CC but decided not to add LR4, I did the LR3 vs. Aperture 3 comparison sometime ago and went with Aperture.

An "analog" photography veteran friend recently decided to start retouching his slowly growing digital photo collection. He bought a 27" iMac and came to me for advice. He originally wanted to buy Photoshop, not knowing about the non-destructive workflows of Aperture and Lightroom. I got him to look at both and he decided to go the Lightroom 4 route.

Having myself used Aperture since 2, I kind of discovered the software alongside him just to get him going. I'd tried the demo of version 3, but not for more than dozens of minutes at a time. Once the purely file management issues aside (where I find Aperture far outshines Lightroom), I was smitten ! Lightroom 4 is a wonderful photo editor, miles ahead, unfortunately, of Aperture. Grad filters, adjustment brushes, lens distortion and color fringing... I was stomached that I have 10 000 shots in my Aperture library.

Anyways I've kind of decided that I'll hold out until Aperture 4 or X is announced to see what it offers, but if it falls short then I'll buy Lightroom and start using that. I still have Apple to thank for pushing this family of software, but Adobe knows digital retouching and photography like no one else, and Lightroom 4 is a brilliant proof of that.

I guess my dilemma is which to pick through the MAS. Aperture is $80 and LR4 is $150. If I also purchase the NIK software suite (about $300) and use it with Aperture, will I be able to have the full array of features that LR4 + NIK software suite could offer?

Reason I ask is that a $70 price difference is a bit harder to swallow right now. I would purchase the NIK software suite sometime in the future, but not immediately. To me, it almost makes sense to go the Aperture route given the type of editing I do on LR3 currently. Mostly, I just adjust the curves, contrast, sharpness, and apply preset filters.

cmdrmac said:

I guess my dilemma is which to pick through the MAS. Aperture is $80 and LR4 is $150. If I also purchase the NIK software suite (about $300) and use it with Aperture, will I be able to have the full array of features that LR4 + NIK software suite could offer?

Reason I ask is that a $70 price difference is a bit harder to swallow right now. I would purchase the NIK software suite sometime in the future, but not immediately. To me, it almost makes sense to go the Aperture route given the type of editing I do on LR3 currently. Mostly, I just adjust the curves, contrast, sharpness, and apply preset filters.

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If all you are doing or those basics, then you could go either way. LR4 does do a better job at them than Aperture IMHO, but getting similar results in Ap isn't impossible.

If you have Photoshop as well, then you have even more reason to just pick whichever one you want. For the longest time I never toned in Aperture or Lightroom. My workflow was super locked into Photoshop, so I just picked the one that had the best asset management at the time which was Aperture 2.

Now, that I do tone outside of PS, I've fallen in love with the way LR3 and LR4 adjusts images, but still find their asset management to be a little tooth and nail compared to Aperture.

Dornblaser said:

It is not part of CC but is available for a discounted price of $99.00 when you sign up for CC. I have CC but decided not to add LR4, I did the LR3 vs. Aperture 3 comparison sometime ago and went with Aperture.

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It is now part of CC. I downloaded it again (I had the trial version).

If you have a Nikon, and you are a pixel peep, NX2 is the only serious solution. It has some features still unmatched on the Adobe camp (not even talking about Apple), and it delivers the best RAW conversion for NEF's.

The biggest plusses:
- The basic settings of a loaded NEF make it match the JPEG perfectly. You can start right from the JPEG settings in camera
- It does perfect no-brain removal of lens faults. Removing CA in Adobe app X is just foolish compared to how NX does it. Vignetting, distortion and CA are all taken care off by default in perfect quality if you have it turned on for JPEG in your camera.
- It offers very easy and accurate grey-point adjustment in a way not offered by Adobe and co (who came up with a silly eye-dropper for that!!!)
- Very accurate exposure adjustment allows you to correct light measurement mistakes with easy.

blanka said:

If you have a Nikon, and you are a pixel peep, NX2 is the only serious solution. It has some features still unmatched on the Adobe camp (not even talking about Apple), and it delivers the best RAW conversion for NEF's.

The biggest plusses:
- The basic settings of a loaded NEF make it match the JPEG perfectly. You can start right from the JPEG settings in camera
- It does perfect no-brain removal of lens faults. Removing CA in Adobe app X is just foolish compared to how NX does it. Vignetting, distortion and CA are all taken care off by default in perfect quality if you have it turned on for JPEG in your camera.
- It offers very easy and accurate grey-point adjustment in a way not offered by Adobe and co (who came up with a silly eye-dropper for that!!!)
- Very accurate exposure adjustment allows you to correct light measurement mistakes with easy.

Click to expand...

I am a Nikon user and at the moment I have NX2 and also running aperture ... light room also and trying to decide what I'm more comfortable with.... Been running them for a while now and I'm still trying to find my way through.

I've found that LR has superior noise control, I'm waiting to see if Aperture gets upgraded and that upgrade includes better noise control.

I think for the most part the Aperture and Lightroom have nearly the same features. One does a couple of things better then the other. I've gone over to LR mostly because I get consistent updates with LR. With apple, aperture seems to sit there for long periods and then an update.

At this point I think an update to AP is a bit over due.

I've used Lightroom since version two but was freelancing at a portrait studio for 9 months and using Aperture.

After the initial adjustment to the workflow I found Aperture to be a much more Mac-like and pleasant experience. That said, LR has progressed so quickly that, even though I don't think the workflow is anything special, I'll stick with Lightroom.

If I'd gone Aperture years back, though - I'd probably wait a while longer to see if a new version appears before thinking about a switch. Aperture was updated for the Retina MBP so Apple are still nominally interested in it but there's some skepticism as to whether they are still competing with LR or just flogging an 'iPhoto+' to make a few easy bucks on the App store.

For those of you interested in Aperture, http://www.apertureexpert.com/ has a sale on their training videos. $32 for 22 videos.

I've enjoyed them and learned alot.

I'm in no way affiliated - just thought I'd share for those interested.

Cheers,
Keebler

LR 4.2 is now out.

Aperture 2 or 3?

Hi, i have a Apple iMac27 with the following specs’ 3.4Ghz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 16GB 1333Mhz SDRAM – 4x4GB 2TB Serial ATA Drive + 256 Solid State Drive AMD Radeon HD 6970 2GB GDDR5; Two Thunderbolt ports Mini Display Port with support for DVI, VGA, and dual-link DVI One Firewire 800 port Four USB 2.0 ports SDXC card slot Slot-loading 8x SuperDrive with 4x double-layer burning Audio in/out Mac OSX Snow Leopard 10.6 and i want a photo application that can manipulate a photo image, i want to change the skin tone of the subject (from pale/white to brown/tanned) without changing the rest of the image & subject so can you please recommend a software application that can do this?

I was thinking of trying out Lightroom. I've done a lot of geotagging in iPhoto, would those tags be imbedded in the photos themselves or are they exclusive to iPhoto/Aperture?

blanka said:

If you have a Nikon, and you are a pixel peep, NX2 is the only serious solution. It has some features still unmatched on the Adobe camp (not even talking about Apple), and it delivers the best RAW conversion for NEF's.

The biggest plusses:
- The basic settings of a loaded NEF make it match the JPEG perfectly. You can start right from the JPEG settings in camera
- It does perfect no-brain removal of lens faults. Removing CA in Adobe app X is just foolish compared to how NX does it. Vignetting, distortion and CA are all taken care off by default in perfect quality if you have it turned on for JPEG in your camera.
- It offers very easy and accurate grey-point adjustment in a way not offered by Adobe and co (who came up with a silly eye-dropper for that!!!)
- Very accurate exposure adjustment allows you to correct light measurement mistakes with easy.

Click to expand...

Yes, beautiful RAW conversions of Nikon's RAW NEF format in NX2..... But if you have thousands of photos to import, it will take forever. The problem with Nikon NX2 is that it is soooooooooooooo slow........ Nikon needs to improve their software or sell it to or collaborate with Adobe or Apple or Phase One to improve it.