Aperture vs. Lightroom

If you’re a photographer who’s embraced the DSLR, you’ve no doubt heard of or work with RAW files.

I made the switch quite a while ago and have been working with them for some time now. The quality is unsurpassed in manipulating digital images. For a long while however, it seemed that the technology for working with RAW files was shoddy and turned many would-be-RAW-shooters right off. Including myself.

Enter Aperture. Enter Lightroom.

As a photographer who takes photos daily and publishes them on a few sites, working with RAW files and finding the correct tool is important. For a super pro photographer, I can only imagine this is tenfold.I delved into both Aperture and the beta of Lightroom. These aren’t exactly cheap tools, especially when one of them, up until recently, didn’t have a trial version. But the desire to work productively with RAW files is one that’‘s highly desirable by photographers of all kinds.

I initially used Lightroom in the very early beta. I liked it. But I wasn’t sold. Since it was in beta, I had nothing to complain about from a cost standpoint but plenty of suggestions as an application. Aperture released 1.5 and seemed to have fixed many of the bugs and eccentricities of the initial 1.0 release. They also dropped the price. I got on board. I forgot about Lightroom for a while and used Aperture exclusively, getting into the flow and it’s quirks. I realized pretty quickly, despite my 2GB’s of RAM and Intel Core Duo processor, the application was sluggish — compared to Lightroom. The application just wasn t snappy.

A friend of mine came into town recently and was using Lightroom. I took a glance at the last beta and it looked really good. I worked with it some and decided, on a key point (I’ll explain in a bit) that I was going back to Lightroom. 1.0 was out and I snapped it up.

I’m going to say this: if you’‘re a super pro photographer with a massive amount of screen real estate and with the processor speed to back it up, then Aperture may be best for you. If you’re a serious amateur who likes to take photos daily and work with them in a very straightforward, concise and simple-to-understand manner, then Lightroom is for you. I’m not saying that Lightroom doesn’t pack a punch, but like any software that appeals to me these days, it doesn’t get in the way and does what you need (and want) it to do.

Now that key point: To me this is a rather large quirk that I couldn’t live with and made my switch back to Lightroom easier. In Aperture, when you’‘re working with a high volume of photos and exporting them one by one, you have to wait while the application exports a photo before you’re allowed to work with another one. This can take 1-3 seconds. And then it pops up a message in another window to let you know this. In Lightroom, it does the exporting in the background — with a status bar and all in the upper left corner — and allows you to continue on your merry way and keep working with photos thus continuing that groove and momentum you have going. When time is sparse and patience even more sparse, this is a huge piece of functionality that matters.

In my book, Aperture: 0, Lightroom: 1.