Comparing performance of DPP, Aperture, Capture One, Lightroom and DxO

[v3rlon]

Well, I can't expect software to see through our halloween costumes. We take that seriously around here. Then again, I didn't know faces was in at all. I was grumbling about that earlier.

I was really hoping for smarter albums, too.

 

[VirtualRain]

Well, I can't expect software to see through our halloween costumes. We take that seriously around here. Then again, I didn't know faces was in at all. I was grumbling about that earlier.

I was really hoping for smarter albums, too.

There are smart albums... Favorites is a default smart album and here's the types you can setup on your own...

 

[v3rlon]

There are smart albums... Favorites is a default smart album and here's the types you can setup on your own...

That is a start. Especially with keywords.

Maybe if you could flag documents/receipts/business cards to hide them from the default timeline view or something. I mean with things like CamScanner and CamCard, I sure do not want THAT in my photo album, but I DO want them to go to the cloud/my other devices.

If only all these raw processors would honor each other's edits.

 

[Rockadile]

This afternoon, I spent some time compiling a video that demonstrates the lack of performance in a lot of these photo adjustment applications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX7urEQhzM8
(watch in 1080p if possible)

It was both surprising and disappointing. Surprising because Aperture actually performs better than the rest despite it's reputation to the contrary. It was also disappointing to see just how bad some of these apps are on what is arguably a very powerful computer.

Admittedly, I'm running these on a 4K display which is a lot of pixels to update, so perhaps others will see better performance using displays with less pixels.

Interested what others are seeing on your system... Is it the 4K displays that is killing performance here, or are these apps just dogs?! 🙂 Anyone else running 4K displays or a Retina iMac that can comment on performance compared to what's in the video?

How's the performance on Adobe Bridge / Camera Raw? 😀

 

[skaeight]

I spent some more time with Photos today. It's really frustrating how incomplete it is. I did figure out how to show the aperture , shutter speed while editing though - you need to hit the info button before you you go into the editing mode.

VirtualRain - have you turned on the sidebar? You can create nested folders there. Not sure if it addresses any of your other issues though.

 

[HantaYo]

I can't remember where I read this, but someone said Photos felt like it was designed without getting feedback from actual photographers. It really seems like this is the case. I just can't get over not being able to edit and see info about aperture, etc at the same time.

Apple never asks for feed back. They just assume it is perfect and it is what you want 🙁

 

[skaeight]

Apple never asks for feed back. They just assume it is perfect and it is what you want 🙁

I would assume they'd have photographers on staff or via a consulting company they could check with, but I guess not.

 

[VirtualRain]

VirtualRain - have you turned on the sidebar? You can create nested folders there. Not sure if it addresses any of your other issues though.

No... Too busy today. To be honest, I've flipped the bit on it already. I'll use it for easy access to my iPhone photos when needed, but it's not going to get much more use from me.

 

[flynz4]

How is it as a DAM? Is a workflow like Photos to manage and something else to edit reasonable?

The vast majority of people here are talking about all of these products as photo editing applications. Personally, I am 95% interested in these as a DAM... not as a photo editor.

That is why I loved Aperture so much. I personally do not think that any other program came even close to Aperture when it came to digital asset management. I've owned LR for the past 3 years, and I believe it is vastly inferior as a DAM vs Aperture.

This (and this alone) is what leaves me feeling empty about Apple's direction. IMHO, they had the best DAM available (by far)... and they are leaving it in the dust. We have lots of options via plug-ins for photo editing... but I don't know any good alternatives to Aperture.

I suspect that I will hold my nose, and move my library to LR... with a lot of disappointment.

/Jim

 

[VirtualRain]

The vast majority of people here are talking about all of these products as photo editing applications. Personally, I am 95% interested in these as a DAM... not as a photo editor.

That is why I loved Aperture so much. I personally do not think that any other program came even close to Aperture when it came to digital asset management. I've owned LR for the past 3 years, and I believe it is vastly inferior as a DAM vs Aperture.

This (and this alone) is what leaves me feeling empty about Apple's direction. IMHO, they had the best DAM available (by far)... and they are leaving it in the dust. We have lots of options via plug-ins for photo editing... but I don't know any good alternatives to Aperture.

I suspect that I will hold my nose, and move my library to LR... with a lot of disappointment.

/Jim

Jim, sorry to quote your post for this inquiry... it's not aimed at you in particular as I've seen a lot of this kind of sentiment over the last month or so. But it is the latest post with a very polarized view on DAM capabilities, whether it's in favour or against one of: Aperture, Lightroom, and Capture One (Now, Apple's new Photos app is a whole different story - not talking about that here).

Now, I'm no DAM expert, but I have invested a fair amount of time into all three of these apps lately in my own research and from what I've seen, they are way more similar than different.

Despite different nomenclature, they all offer:

- A completely custom hierarchical organizational structure of albums and groups of albums.
- Dynamic views which are essentially saved queries like smart albums or smart collections.
- Keywords or tags
- Star ratings
- A myriad of other metadata

It seems to me that nearly any structure you can setup in one app, can be easily duplicated in any other.

So unless you work at the Smithsonian, I find it really hard to believe that someone can have fallen in love with one application's DAM capabilities and cursing another.

Have I completely overlooked something, or are some people just getting a bit irrational or resistant to change about this?

 

[maflynn]

So unless you work at the Smithsonian, I find it really hard to believe that someone can have fallen in love with one application's DAM capabilities and cursing another.

I wouldn't say falling in love, but Aperture's DAM capabilities were excellent. I also found Lightroom's fairly intuitive once I was able to grasp how things are done in LR. I can't say the same thing for Capture 1. I do think it has less capability, I also found it a lot hard to manage the DAM aspects of my work flow in C1. So to put it another way, I was cursing C1's Dam capability. Granted, I was using the trial but I spent a fair amount of time with it before coming to that conclusion.

 

[skaeight]

Jim, sorry to quote your post for this inquiry... it's not aimed at you in particular as I've seen a lot of this kind of sentiment over the last month or so. But it is the latest post with a very polarized view on DAM capabilities, whether it's in favour or against one of: Aperture, Lightroom, and Capture One (Now, Apple's new Photos app is a whole different story - not talking about that here).

Now, I'm no DAM expert, but I have invested a fair amount of time into all three of these apps lately in my own research and from what I've seen, they are way more similar than different.

Despite different nomenclature, they all offer:

- A completely custom hierarchical organizational structure of albums and groups of albums.
- Dynamic views which are essentially saved queries like smart albums or smart collections.
- Keywords or tags
- Star ratings
- A myriad of other metadata

It seems to me that nearly any structure you can setup in one app, can be easily duplicated in any other.

So unless you work at the Smithsonian, I find it really hard to believe that someone can have fallen in love with one application's DAM capabilities and cursing another.

Have I completely overlooked something, or are some people just getting a bit irrational or resistant to change about this?

I agree with this. LR is very capable it just took some time to learn how it use it. Honestly it's actually forced me to use the DAM feature in a "better" way. With Aperture you have to put everything in a project so by de facto thats basically how I organized my photos, essentially in folders within Aperture.

Now with Lightroom I can do the same thing (actually a few different ways), but I'm doing more everyday shooting his year and not just shooting of events, so why go though the trouble of setting up a collection (LR's equivalent of a project), the hardest part of which is coming up for a name for the 5 random pictures I took downtown one day. In Apertue I would have month misc projects, but with LR even this isn't necessary.

Instead I pick the ones I like, reject the ones that are garbage, keep the ones that are ok but not worth deleting as Unflagged. Then I rate all of these, geotag, and give them keywords. That way when I want to go back and find either a picture I like or a picture of a specific thing I filter across all my photos. I realize I could have done this in Aperture likely as easily as well, I just never did it because I got lazy and just used projects.

So long story short, I agree there's something else out there that will do the same things Apertures DAM did, but just in a slightly different way and definitely with better editing capabilities.