Aperture 3 - resource hog?

[tortex]

Hello.

I've read so much about this, but I wanted to ask a sensible crowd of people. Is Aperture 3 a resource hog, compared to Lightroom?

I own Lightroom 3, and I like it, and it does everything I want - apart from making real duplicates of images in favour of cascading styles in some kind of text file. That I don't like, I want the changes I make saved into the image. Hence Aperture as a consideration. But I read a lot about it being very resource heavy. I have a unibody MBP 15", 8GB RAM, i5 2.4 with Force 3 SSD and 27" Cinema Display.

Is it really that resource heavy? Lightroom can sometimes stall when changing modules. Photoshop is slick, in fact the rest of the Adobe CS5.5 suite are super fast, Lightroom is a bit clunkier.

I shoot on Nikon DSLR's and a Fuji X100, adding the X1 soon. My library will be stored on a GTech 3TB drive, backed up to a second identical drive, then onto a server at work.

So, Aperture users, have you noticed chunkiness and resource hogginess?

I'd download and try a demo, but I don't have time.

 

[Mr.Noisy]

you really should give the demo a try, I don't find it a resource hog, but then it's on a mac pro with 12gb of RAM and it seems to like that, but there have been more reports of it being RAM hungry, but i'd try it to see what you think, but considering the cost I find it value for money and very good at what it does, I'm looking the other way, now LR4 is released i'm thinking of getting that now.......... I may run it alongside aperture, not sure yet

 

[OreoCookie]

Is Aperture 3 a resource hog, compared to Lightroom?

No, I think they're both about the same.
The reason is simple: just loading a folder/project/album with, say, 100 RAW photos is going to take a substantial amount of RAM. The RAW files of my D7000 weigh in at ~20 MB each. Take that times 100 and you need 2 GB to just load and store the photos in RAM without doing anything to them. Those images still need to be processed.

Since up until recently, hard drives were among the bottle necks (with SSDs it has gotten a lot better), Aperture and Lightroom use different strategies to hide this from the user. So in essence, you need at least 4 GB RAM, better 8 GB, otherwise you won't be happy. (According to your first post, you do, so you're all set.)

That I don't like, I want the changes I make saved into the image.

Then you won't like Aperture either since it works exactly in the same way. Aperture and Lightroom never touch the original, but only write changes to small »text« files which are then used as »recipes« to render the original. And that's a good thing in my opinion, the reason why Aperture/Lightroom are as successful as they are is because they never touch the original and all edits are non-destructive. All you need to do is export a photo from Aperture/Lightroom to have the alterations to the original rendered into a file.

 

[ndpuckhead]

I'm using the trial version (hoping the new version comes out before my trial runs out) with a 13" MBP and 4GB RAM. Its a little slow, but useable. I ordered an 8GB RAM upgrade, hopefully it will speed it up a bit.

 

[CrackedButter]

I'm using the trial version (hoping the new version comes out before my trial runs out) with a 13" MBP and 4GB RAM. Its a little slow, but useable. I ordered an 8GB RAM upgrade, hopefully it will speed it up a bit.

I have 8GB on the previous generation of MBP (2.1Ghz i5). Aperture runs fine.

 

[maflynn]

I also have 8gb of ram and it runs fine on my 2010 MBP. I'd say that if you have sufficient amounts of ram, it performs well. I don't notice any performance issues, it runs as fast as LightRoom 3. It actually may be a tick faster the LR in generating previews

 

[tortex]

Hello.

So it seems Aperture should run ok on this system.

@oreocookie - I was under the impression Aperture would make duplicates of the original, so that's always the digital neg, but then writes the work you do into the TIFF duplicate. I didn't think it handled things the same way Lightroom does. I guess I could save out new masters, which to me seems much safer for longer term storage. But then either software will do. So I guess Aperture wins because iCloud etc is becoming more important to me.

Thanks for the responses.

 

[OreoCookie]

@oreocookie - I was under the impression Aperture would make duplicates of the original, so that's always the digital neg, but then writes the work you do into the TIFF duplicate.

That's not how Aperture works.
Aperture works as I described. The tiff files are only created if you edit files in an external editor such as Photoshop. Then Aperture will render a file to tiff (or psd, depending on your prefs), serve it to the image editing application. Once you save the file in the image editor, Aperture will start using the edited file. However, once you make a single edit in Aperture on top of this edited file, it is once again done non-destructively. There is no difference to Lightroom in that respect.

What you probably have in mind is the integration between Lightroom and Photoshop, given that the versions of both apps are compatible. Then Lightroom does not need to render the edited file to a tiff, but it can give Photoshop the original file and the »text file« which contains all the edits the user has done on top. The reason this works is because Photoshop and Lightroom both use the same RAW processing engine.

 

[tortex]

Gave the demo a go, seems sluggish when editing. I'll try it for a solid day then decide.

 

[tortex]

Gave up, back to LR for me. Aperture was very sluggish, oh well.

 

[ndpuckhead]

I'm using the trial version (hoping the new version comes out before my trial runs out) with a 13" MBP and 4GB RAM. Its a little slow, but useable. I ordered an 8GB RAM upgrade, hopefully it will speed it up a bit.

Just an update- I installed the new RAM and it's much faster now.