Aperture vs. LR vs. waiting for OSX Photos?

[roadkill401]

The photo management seems to be quite a puzzlement for me.

I do take photo's and own a DSLR and even shoot in RAW. But I see the side of photo management as a totally different process from photo development/exposure.

Think of it like the days before digital where you could take you photographs to a store to get the pictured printed for you. Or if you were a real buff you had your own dark room and developed you own pictures. After you get the photo's you put them into a photo album or the better ones you would print bigger and hang on the wall.

Now FF to modern times. You take your photo's. Now they are digital, you can view the right away. But the buff's in all of us shoot in RAW format and can tweak the photo's to get them better. Re-crop, adjust exposure, colour, saturation to get them looking just right for us. But in reality, that is a one time event (not saying you can't go back and do it all over again) to get out the finished print. In most cases, that comes out as a .jpeg file as we view them digitally on a screen, but some might send it out to a .tiff for printing, or real buffs have their own printing solution in house. But that part is still only the development stage.

You then want your own photo book management system. As you have done the hard bit of making the photograph look good already, all now you want is a program to catalogue an easily fine and view your photo's. Why does that need at all to be tied in with the development stage?

 

[robgendreau]

The photo management seems to be quite a puzzlement for me.

I do take photo's and own a DSLR and even shoot in RAW. But I see the side of photo management as a totally different process from photo development/exposure.

Think of it like the days before digital where you could take you photographs to a store to get the pictured printed for you. Or if you were a real buff you had your own dark room and developed you own pictures. After you get the photo's you put them into a photo album or the better ones you would print bigger and hang on the wall.

Now FF to modern times. You take your photo's. Now they are digital, you can view the right away. But the buff's in all of us shoot in RAW format and can tweak the photo's to get them better. Re-crop, adjust exposure, colour, saturation to get them looking just right for us. But in reality, that is a one time event (not saying you can't go back and do it all over again) to get out the finished print. In most cases, that comes out as a .jpeg file as we view them digitally on a screen, but some might send it out to a .tiff for printing, or real buffs have their own printing solution in house. But that part is still only the development stage.

You then want your own photo book management system. As you have done the hard bit of making the photograph look good already, all now you want is a program to catalogue an easily fine and view your photo's. Why does that need at all to be tied in with the development stage?

A very good question indeed.

There are some who say that storing your adjustment info in a database is fraught with peril; better to "develop" and put out the functional equivalent of a "print." You have your negative, untouched, and an export, usable most anywhere. But if you just store the data about those adjustments, you are beholden to the software that stores it.

But there are some people who make different versions for export to different media. Or maybe they have a client who demands lots of changes; being able to back up on pushing the highlights or increasing saturation or recropping or whatever is nice without have to start from scratch.

Or maybe you just wanna know what worked to get a result that you liked; LR has this cool History panel that'll show you all the adjustments you made. Or you can save snapshots, which can be handy if you are like me and you can't make up your mind.

There are photo browsers that don't do much adjustment themselves. After all, you can write metadata right to image files and store it there. They are sort of Finder substitutes optimized for photos; Graphic Converter has a good one. It doesn't have a database, but it does have an editor should you choose to use it, and some very nice metadata functions.

 

[shaunp]

Lightroom

If the majority of your photography is done on a DSLR then I would just go for LR now. Apple Photo's is very good for those who take photos on their Apple devices and want a way to edit and organise them across IOS and OS X.

I moved from Aperture to LR because of the lack of development and uncertain future for Aperture. Looks like it was the right move to make given how Photos is purely a consumer app.

 

[maflynn]

maflynn, do you like LR more than Aperture now that you've made the switch? Or, did you just make the switch because you knew Aperture was a dead/dying platform?

I like the tools better, I like some of the UI, though I prefer Apertures UI over LR's. There are things in LR's interface that I prefer. Overall though, thanks to Adobe's constant attention, its a very polished product with a lot of ability.

----------

If the majority of your photography is done on a DSLR then I would just go for LR now. Apple Photo's is very good for those who take photos on their Apple devices and want a way to edit and organise them across IOS and OS X.

I moved from Aperture to LR because of the lack of development and uncertain future for Aperture. Looks like it was the right move to make given how Photos is purely a consumer app.

I don't think camera type is the determining factor, I know a many folks who own DSLRs, and they would be happy with Photo's. Its really what you want to do with your images and how you edit them.

 

[roadkill401]

A very good question indeed.

There are some who say that storing your adjustment info in a database is fraught with peril; better to "develop" and put out the functional equivalent of a "print." You have your negative, untouched, and an export, usable most anywhere. But if you just store the data about those adjustments, you are beholden to the software that stores it.

To store what you have done with the "original" is a very smart idea. Back in the days of darkrooms, you would have your notebook that you'd manually scribble down all the adjustments that you would do to each of the negatives, then your challenge would be to find what notebook you used and what page it was on if someone handed you a picture. The blessing is now most profesional developers do print the id serial number on the back of the picture so you do have a start to match the photo to a filename or some index mark.

But there are some people who make different versions for export to different media. Or maybe they have a client who demands lots of changes; being able to back up on pushing the highlights or increasing saturation or recropping or whatever is nice without have to start from scratch.

Or maybe you just wanna know what worked to get a result that you liked; LR has this cool History panel that'll show you all the adjustments you made. Or you can save snapshots, which can be handy if you are like me and you can't make up your mind.

That comes all down to workflow. If you are going to make a new version of a print, or group of prints, then you need to come up with some form of naming or sorting convention to save that alteration under.

Where I get more confused is when people start going on about wanting a rating system for their photographs. Why would you ever want to put stars or some form of like/dislike to any form of negative? This is not starting to treat the raw footage as if it was a finished product. If you were cooking, do you put rating star levels onto the general ingredient to make your food? Like the strawberries get a ***** star rating but corn starch only gets a ** star. And what relevance would that have if this time around you are making roast beef where as last time it was desert?

A preference rating is more geared towards the finished product. I guess there is a point when you get into the apple view of photography using what we will essentially call a P&S camera (that elitist call the pos) where the picture taken is essentially to be used as the finished product in .jpeg file and yes you can crop the orginal and do some minor adjustments to the picture but you are really dealing with limited data for adjusting the colour as you don't have access to actual sensor data but a fixed pixel colour representation. Here is where the lines are blurred as you are not really developing a picture, more tweaking it.

iPhoto does a great job of simply displaying a finished product. You want to be able to see the groups of photos by any number of distinct search criteria. I have not used Lightroom all that much to know how much is stuffed inside. I know in iPhoto you can assign pictures to faces so you want to see all the photo's of uncle bob, you bring them up. I don't think that Lightroom is really designed to function like that. However I don't think that iPhoto has the capability to take a RAW picture and set a white balance and adjust for lens adoration. Perhaps do a bit of spot correction etc.. It is using the correct tool for the job that you are trying to do

 

[robgendreau]

I use stars for more than quality. I guess I could use labels or even keywords, but I've got other stuff going on there. A two-star for me, eg, means I have cropped and captioned but not otherwise changed it.

Interesting point about film developing. Some photographers did more than others in the darkroom, eg Ansel Adams. Some of that is hard to reproduce, and may even vary between prints. Does any digital artist certify the destruction of digital info so that a buyer is assuring no more exact copies will be made?

 

[glenthompson]

The photo management seems to be quite a puzzlement for me.

I do take photo's and own a DSLR and even shoot in RAW. But I see the side of photo management as a totally different process from photo development/exposure.

Think of it like the days before digital where you could take you photographs to a store to get the pictured printed for you. Or if you were a real buff you had your own dark room and developed you own pictures. After you get the photo's you put them into a photo album or the better ones you would print bigger and hang on the wall.

Now FF to modern times. You take your photo's. Now they are digital, you can view the right away. But the buff's in all of us shoot in RAW format and can tweak the photo's to get them better. Re-crop, adjust exposure, colour, saturation to get them looking just right for us. But in reality, that is a one time event (not saying you can't go back and do it all over again) to get out the finished print. In most cases, that comes out as a .jpeg file as we view them digitally on a screen, but some might send it out to a .tiff for printing, or real buffs have their own printing solution in house. But that part is still only the development stage.

You then want your own photo book management system. As you have done the hard bit of making the photograph look good already, all now you want is a program to catalogue an easily fine and view your photo's. Why does that need at all to be tied in with the development stage?

The one part of your film analogy that is missing is what to do with all the negatives you have. How do you keep track of them so you can make new prints in the future? That is the primary purpose of a digital asset management application. The editing process could be moved out of the DAM but there is a certain convenience in having the two merged.

I think Apple is moving towards having a better organizational tool with ok editing capabilities. If more editing capabilities are needed, they will be available as add-ins from 3rd party vendors. If you compare the Photos and Lightroom APIs, Photos has a lot more ability to add powerful tools.

 

[maflynn]

If more editing capabilities are needed, they will be available as add-ins from 3rd party vendors. If you compare the Photos and Lightroom APIs, Photos has a lot more ability to add powerful tools.

The APIs may be more robust but the simple truth is that Photos is not going to be more powerful then LR, and I do not want need to purchase a whole raft of plugins (or wait for them to be created), just to bring photo's editing capability up to par with LR. Why go through that process of waiting for something that might never come, and if it does, pay $$ when I can have all that now.

As for the organization abilities of Photos. Aperture has much more robust set of tools for organizing your images. Right now, this beta has far less, in terms of flagging, folders, projects, star ratings, etc. I'm not seeing how this can be considered better when there's less

 

[lostgear]

Hi,

I just bought a new rMBP and was doing a little research on Aperture when I noticed that Apple recently announced (last summer, I guess) that it was ceasing further development of Aperture and iPhoto in favor of a new app called Photos.

I've never used LR but I've heard people talking about it for years. Photoshop is way more than what I need. I'm a photo hobbyist but Aperture (from the description) seemed like a decent fit for what I am looking for in an editing and storage app for my photos. I'm also not a big fan of the LR subscription model (no thanks -- not interested in spending $10/mo) but I did see that you can buy a perpetual license of LR only; although it costs 2x as much as the current EOL Aperture.

Anyway, is it worth buying Aperture now or should I be patient, hang with the iPhoto app on my computer and leave any editing duties to my iPad until Photos is available for OSX?

-Eric

If all you ever do is snap photos with an iPhone, then iPhoto or the new photos app will suffice for you. However if you use dslr or even film, and want to push your photography into a hobby, then the only way to go is Lightroom.

If you have to ask the question "iPhoto or Lightroom" then you aren't ready to move to LR!

 

[SueEsponte]

If all you ever do is snap photos with an iPhone, then iPhoto or the new photos app will suffice for you. However if you use dslr or even film, and want to push your photography into a hobby, then the only way to go is Lightroom.



If you have to ask the question "iPhoto or Lightroom" then you aren't ready to move to LR!

I think you misread my question. I asked whether anyone thought I should just wait for Photos to be released and live with iPhoto as an organizing tool while I edit on my iPad. iPhoto as an editing tool is inadequate for my needs.

As a hobbyist, I have a DSLR along with a decent P&S and rarely ever take pics with my phone.

FWIW, I've been running trials of LR5 and Pixelmator. I haven't had the time to work with them as much as I'd like because of work so I haven't yet figured out which best suits my current needs. I can see why people say they are complementary though.

-Eric

 

[roadkill401]

The one part of your film analogy that is missing is what to do with all the negatives you have. How do you keep track of them so you can make new prints in the future? That is the primary purpose of a digital asset management application. The editing process could be moved out of the DAM but there is a certain convenience in having the two merged.

I think Apple is moving towards having a better organizational tool with ok editing capabilities. If more editing capabilities are needed, they will be available as add-ins from 3rd party vendors. If you compare the Photos and Lightroom APIs, Photos has a lot more ability to add powerful tools.

I guess you will need to use the same method that you would use to sort and find your other documents. Do you need a special program to keep track of your resume CV? They are a whole bunch of files and using a common sense directory structure, like <year> / <month> / <day> seems to work quite well. Again, it comes down to having the smarts to key in some tag inside your output to tie is back to your original. jpeg files do come with exif data embedding built right in. So I fail to see the need for the vast majority of people.

 

[craftytony]

Stay with iPhoto then switch to the new photos app if you are just doing basic editing.

If you do more advanced editing I would go with Lightroom.

Photos will probably give you more options for organization/finding photos, but lightroom isn't bad.

 

[robgendreau]

Stay with iPhoto then switch to the new photos app if you are just doing basic editing.

If you do more advanced editing I would go with Lightroom.

Photos will probably give you more options for organization/finding photos, but lightroom isn't bad.

I think the OP wants to separate editing from organization, hence LR isn't so hot. And there are a whole bunch of other editors that focus on that function and let something else do the organization.

You're right about using the organizational methods you use for other documents, but that get's limiting in the Finder when you've got bazillions. That's why I use either Filemaker or DevonThink to track them. But note that you could also use those for photos as well.

And images have a HUGE advantage over say a text file because they have a standardized set of organizational categories built in: exif, IPTC and/or XMP. It amazes me that so many people don't know that you can use Spotlight to find images by say aperture value, camera model, etc. Using a good utility that saves searches or use templates (I like HoudahSpot) can find images about as effectively as Aperture and better than iPhoto. You can even do it with Finder windows. Add keywords and you have an effective organization, although I do wish they were hierarchical. And matching XMP with RAWs is a bit more complicated.

 

[glenthompson]

I guess you will need to use the same method that you would use to sort and find your other documents. Do you need a special program to keep track of your resume CV? They are a whole bunch of files and using a common sense directory structure, like <year> / <month> / <day> seems to work quite well. Again, it comes down to having the smarts to key in some tag inside your output to tie is back to your original. jpeg files do come with exif data embedding built right in. So I fail to see the need for the vast majority of people.

Will you remember who you took pix of on a certain date? The ability to tag photos with keywords and names so you can find them later is invaluable when the number of pictures gets into the 10s of thousands. I have more pictures stored on my computer than documents by 2 or more orders of magnitude and that's with keeping all my records electronically.

I guess you could say the same about iTunes. Who needs playlists, artists, or albums when you can just throw all the MP3 files into some directory structure.

Some people need the power of programs like Devon Think to manage large document stores. It depends on what your specific needs are. Do you file your car insurance receipt under insurance or under auto? A good document manage,net system allows you do do both.