John Nack: Lightroom pulls further ahead of Aperture

Apple have really dropped the ball on this one! I guess the problem is with Apple is they are essentially a hardware company; Snow Leopard has shown that software is a value add for them.  Aperture 3 will be a big decider for a lot of photographers.  I for one made the jump to Lightroom a few months ago and am very very happy with the software – I'll take a massive intervention in the next version of Aperture to win back my loyalties.

Lightroom pulls further ahead of Aperture
via John Nack on Adobe on 21/09/09

The past couple of years at this time (see entries for 2007, 2008), independent research company InfoTrends has surveyed professional photographers* about their choices of raw image-processing tools. It's interesting to check in on how the competition between Adobe Photoshop Lightroom & Apple Aperture is going.

Among photographic pros using the Mac,

In 2007 Lightroom was nearly twice as popular as Aperture

In 2008 it was nearly three times as popular

In 2009 it's approaching four times as popular

By the numbers:

	2007	2008	2009
Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in	66.5%	62.2%	57.9%
Lightroom	23.6%	35.9%	37.0%
Aperture	5.5%	7.5%	6.3%
On the Mac platform only:
Lightroom	26.6%	40.4%	44.4%
Aperture	14.3%	14.6%	12.5%

You might notice some decline in the use of the Camera Raw plug-in inside Photoshop as more pros move to using Lightroom. Let me be clear in noting that Photoshop use among these pros remains in the 90% range, and that the decline applies only to Camera Raw usage. (That makes sense as Lightroom and Camera Raw share the same processing engine, and photographers are, as expected, handling more of their raw processing in Lightroom.)

 
 

What I’d need in Aperture 3 to make me move back from Lightroom.

When Aperture and Panasonic decided to invest in a round of photographic gut-barging and not support my superb little carry-everywhere LX3 I was forced to look to alternative solutions to process the RAW files flying off my card.  I have used both photo management systems extensively over the years but had invested in Aperture about two years ago to hold my metadata.  I just found Aperture’s interface far more intuitive and, although it came at a space cost *cough*, the tools ability to render and process standard darkroom adjustments still kicks the crap out of Lightroom.  Aperture was starting to show it’s warts however so the LX3 wasn’t the only reason for my move to Lightroom; the fact that Aperture handles referenced files like an enraged toddler with a bowl full of mushed veggies was an endess source of hair pulling, as was the fact that I needed a small data center to store it’s enormously bloated library file, squatting like a pregnant cane-toad with previews and thumbnails for every image I had.  So I took the complete plunge into a world of clunky windows, slower previews and wonderful gorgeous non-destructive edits and haven’t really looked back.

Nostalgia, and a love of the power of the Apple software (insert fanboy expletive here) still have me tinkering around in Aperture and there is still nothing like it for putting photo books together.  I also still have a whole lot of metadata in Aperture that I am happily putting off moving over – so I’m sitting on the fence yet again until the much rumoured Aperture 3 makes it’s secretive entrance from the locked down, hush hush Aperture development headquarters.  I do have a couple of basic non-negotiatiable requirements from Aperture 3, fail me on these and my search for the one photo tool to rule them all (sorry Mr. Tolkien) will be over.

1. Referenced file management:  I like to move my files around on the disk (or multiples thereof).  Aperture 3 will need to be able to synchronise folders without throwing its toys and all your adjustments out the window.  Yes I know you can re-attach images but it’s a pain.
2. Non-destructive edits:  This is a biggie.  I don’t want a 60Mb TIF file every time I do a little dodge and burn – it’s not fun so please could we take a leaf from the Lightroom school. en-oh-en-dash-dee-ee-ess …..
3. Smaller library: I’ll take the performance hit.  Libraries almost the same size as your image folders are not cool and there is no need to keep every preview forever; delete them if I haven’t looked at the picture in a month or two.
4. Better DNG support:  It’s pretty much an archival standard now.  I use it, a number of camera manufacturers use it, many many high profile photographers use it so please support it.  There are these cool new things call Opcode lists which store camera specific information for things like barrel distortion compensation; please look them up.

So that’s all really, not too much to ask from the Aperture development team is it?

Hello … can you hear me down there … hellllloooooooo!

Did someone remember to let the dev team out when Steve went on leave?

Do not convert LX3 RAW to DNG for now

I think this is a very important point when considering whether to convert to DNG on import (or round-trip to DNG in order to work with the RAW files in Apple Aperture which does not support the RW2 format yet).

In a nutshell, the RW2 RAW file contains additional metadata which  allows certain manufacturers to compensate for issues with their lenses; in the case of the LX3 it seems this information contains information to compensate for barrel distortion.  The DNG specification does not allow for this additional metadata at this time although Adobe has been very transparent about this and is planning on including it in future releases.  So when you convert your LX3 RAW file to DNG, essentially what it is doing is demosaicing the file and creating a linear DNG which explains the size jump of about 3 times the RAW file.

As this data is demosaiced, and therefor not a true reflection of raw sensor data; my advice if you are round-tripping your LX3 files to DNG in Aperture or have DNG conversion as part of your long term archival strategy is to keep your RW2 files.   If you demosaic the file you are losing information, this is fine post processing when you are happy with your adjustments however this is not an optimal thing to be doing when importing your file.

Here is a snippet from Adobe:

With the release of Camera Raw 5.2 (and upcoming release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom® 2.2), there is an important exception in DNG file handling for the Panasonic DMC-LX3, Panasonic DMC-FX150, Panasonic DMC-FZ28, Panasonic DMC-G1, and Leica D-LUX 4. For those who choose to convert these native, proprietary files to the DNG file format, a linear DNG format is the only conversion option available at this time. A linear DNG file has gone through a demosaic process that converts a single mosaic layer of red, green, and blue channel information into three distinct layers, one for each channel. The resulting linear DNG file is approximately three times the size of a mosaic DNG file or the original proprietary file format.

This exception is a temporary solution to help ensure that Panasonic’s and Leica’s intended image rendering from their proprietary raw file format is applied to an image when converted DNG files are viewed in third-party software titles. The same image-rendering process is applied automatically in Camera Raw 5.2 and in Photoshop Lightroom 2.2 when viewing the original proprietary raw file format.

In a future release, Adobe plans to update the DNG specification to include an option to embed metadata-based representations of the lens compensations in the DNG file, allowing a mosaic DNG conversion. In the interim, Adobe recommends only converting these files to DNG to allow compatibility with third-party raw converters, previous versions of the Camera Raw plug-in, or previous versions of Photoshop Lightroom.

Lightroom Presets

Here is an antique landscape Lightroom preset I put together this evening to emphasise the drought ravaged countryside in this photo, I made it available as a free download for Lightroom users.

Drop me a comment if you’d like me to keep releasing these presets in future.

Enjoy!

Is Apple’s Silence hurting Aperture?

It’s been months now, Picasa and ACDSee support the Panasonic Lumix LX3 but we have yet to have any love from Apple. Apple released some nifty new features in their consumer iPhoto 09, gimmicky but nice nonetheless. The silence has fallen over the halls of Aperture development however and the place seems shut up tighter than the dusty tombs of Moria. It’s kinda like Steve went home for a few months and left the Aperture developers locked in the basement.

Twitter, being the largest live database on the Internet at the moment is a great place to gauge the mood of photographers; try Aperture update or Aperture LX3 or Aperture vs Lightroom as search criteria and you can’t help but notice a strong undercurrent of frustration.

It’s not that I’m asking for a shiny new version of Aperture (which would be nice) but rather the simple plea that the program I love and have invested an inordinate amount of time getting to know at least keeps up with Picasa or ACDsee in RAW support. It’s the never-ending eternal secrecy that shrouds everything that Apple does which is what I’m sick of. Let us know there is a problem, or not – we’re big people, we can handle it.

I suppose I could round trip the RW2 files to DNG in Lightroom (which is getting a lot of love from me at the moment) but even with compression and not embedding the original RAW data into the file it seems to blow the file up from 12M to around 33M, an unacceptable 3x jump which I just can’t do at the moment in my limited land of precious HD space.

I don’t think Apple realises just how many people have made the jump to Lightroom recently because of their silence, or how many people are teetering on the edge.

Zen and the Art of Workflow Maintenance

I have received a number of emails asking how I manage the workflow of images from my camera to my library and how I go about protecting and backing up my photos. With this post I hope to share some of the tips (and pitfalls) I’ve discovered in trying to simplify, reflect, readjust and further simplify the way I manage my images.

First things first and this is the most important point before we continue; There is no right or wrong process when it comes to workflow! Every photographer approaches their workflow in a way which makes sense to the type of shooting they do and their own personal preferences. TWIP podcasts #62 and #63 on workflow illustrate how diverse each of the podcast members’ workflows are. I continually seek to refactor my workflow, looking for the simplest set of processes which meet the requirements I have for my images.

Antoine de Saint-Exuper once said:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

This is my ideal, thus this post encompasses a snapshot in time and, if I work hard and keep looking to simplify and improve further, it probably won’t be relevant in a month’s time – it will have changed into something which works better for me.

Setting the Scene

Initially I recommend getting a feel for what resources you have at your disposal. Do you have any external hard drives or USB memory keys lying about. What computer do you use? How many photographs and what type of photography are we talking about; are they family snaps or client’s wedding portfolios?

If you have a lot of photographs like I do then you probably have some of them on your primary computer and the rest floating around in some sort of disconnected storage; an external disk, a set of DVDs or some file host on the Internet. Questions I’d ask here are: Does your primary photo management software (be it iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Aperture or Lightroom) know where all the photos are? Are offline files referenced properly and can you search for information associated with them?

Do you have some way of keeping the important photos offsite? What if, God forbid, the house burns down or someone nicks your hardware in the middle of the night?

Do you have some sort of archival strategy in place? In 10 or 20 years time will those scratched DVDs in the drawer still work?

Below is a diagram of my hardware and storage situation. It may seem very complicated at first glance but it is a breeze to set up and is automated to the point where I can forget about it and get on with the business of taking pictures. I will talk through aspects of the diagram later in this post.

Getting my Photos off the Camera

This is the easiest part of the process. I pop my card into a reader and plug it into my computer. Aperture opens and asks where I want to save my files. I import all new files into the Aperture library. On import Aperture renames the files to reflect the date and time the image was taken and applies an import preset which stamps the files with basic metadata such as Copyright information.

Keywording

This is the next task I perform and I have it first because for me it is the most important way to find information about my photos and search across years of archives. It was the most neglected aspect of my workflow for a long time and the sweat and effort to keyword 4 years worth of photos taught me the valuable lesson ‘keyword on import’. If there are any recognisable events in the photos I can quickly bundle them up in a selection and use the Aperture album creation hotkey to turn the selection into an album to which I can refer later.

First Pass gut feel

 Next comes a quick pass over my import. I go into full screen mode and quickly move through the photos not paying too much attention to the details. I trust my gut feel here enough to know if the composition is good or bad. In Aperture I flag photos I want to mark as picks with a 4 star rating. Lightroom users can do the same or use the ‘flag as pick’ option to do the same. I prefer the star rating because the graduation means something to me which we’ll get to later.

At this point I can leave the process and carry on with it later if I like. I have my photos in a managed environment. They are keyworded, in albums as required and I have identified the couple which are important to me.

 I also usually click the button to backup my vault at this point. The vault backup contains my library (keywords, metadata, adjustments, file library and any managed files). As this process is a synchronisation rather than a full backup every time it is usually really quick and updates only the files/information which has changed.

Adjustments: Time to whip out the Loupe

At some point I’ll want to take a closer look at the technical aspects of the photos. I usually go through my picks with the loupe looking at the finer details and making minor adjustments to contrast, sharpness and exposure as required. Photos which I want to retain as picks but need more serious adjustments I will rate as 3 stars and then attend to them in a later editing session. The photos I will use for my portfolio I will rate as 5 stars. The rating system allows me very quickly to move between all the photos that need work (3), are part of the pool of picks (4) or are my very best shots which will make it into books or onto walls (5). The majority of my Online photos (Flickr, Ipernity etc.. ) come from my 4 star pool. At any point if you feel the photo doesn’t make the grade you can simply remove the star rating.

Second pass gut feel

As this step can happen at any time I recommend you leave a bit of time between your import and adjustments and the second pass on your non picks. In this workflow you will be working only with your picks for most of the time seeing the non-picks only when you look at the contents of an album for example. It is usually a good idea to take a little time at a later date, sit down and browse through photos you felt didn’t make the grade. I am constantly surprised by the little gems I find which then finally get to make it as a pick.

Non picks become referenced files, picks become managed

Photos I’ve selected not to be picks leave my laptop hard disk – there really is little point in them eating up my precious free space. In Aperture you can easily move files around using the ‘Manage referenced masters’ option. Select a group of pictures and put them on a drive of your choosing – in my case above my 1 terabyte drive. The files are still referenced by Aperture and you can still browse and search on the files. If I need to use any old files such as a group of bracketed photos for a HDR image then the ‘Consolidate masters’ option sucks the files back into my library (alternatively I can plug back into the big drive and export the masters to a local folder).

I have set up a couple of smart folders which make the identification of files that need to move easier:

• identify files to reference: looks at any file which has not been rated and exists on the local volume
• identify files to consolidate: looks at any file which has a rating > 3 and exists as a referenced master. This is useful in bringing any photo identified as a pick in the second guess gut feel back into my library.

So that’s really it, a simple set of steps which have ensure I have a set of photos sorted into albums and picks which are easy to browse and search on and are easy to backup.

Make sure your photos walk out the door

The last point I want to make is ensure you have some sort of offsite backup available. You can have the fanciest systems, terabytes of storage, a wall of Drobos but putting all your images in one place leaves them vulnerable to loss through natural disaster or theft.

I rsync (a sync command in Leopard or other UNIX based systems) my referenced photos to a seperate portable Hard drive and ensure that Aperture also keeps a vault on that disk. This disk goes everywhere with me, when I’m going out for the day it is either in my camera bag or in the cool centre console of my car. At work it lives in a bag in my desk drawer. I know that a meteorite can hit my house (in this scenario my family and pets are vacationing in Fiji) and that all my expensive computer equipment can go up in a ball of flame and I will not lose a single image. I can buy new furniture, I can build my house again brick by brick from the foundations but I cannot replace my wedding photos, or the pictures of my son or my portfolio.

Cloud Backup

 Call it simple paranoia but my portfolio photos are very important to me and represent a tangible emotional and dollar investment. These photos are usually converted to DNG as my long term archival file format of choice and a copy of the photo with keywords and adjustments are then saved as a full size JPEG. These files are exported to a local backup folder where a little piece of software picks them up and uploads them to secure cloud storage.

My cloud backup of choice is Jungle Disk. Jungle disk is part of Amazon.com’s S3 storage services. They allow you to create an encrypted drive using a key you provide. You can setup the software to automatically backup files from selected locations to your cloud drive. The main reason I like them as a provider is that you only pay for your files in transit (bandwidth is charged for upload and download only) and having the online drive encrypted means the files are totally safe from being viewed or stolen. I also use Jungle disk to backup my important documents putting them safely in a place where I can access them from anywhere.

Wrapping Up

I won’t hark on much more on this topic of workflow and backups, you have a good idea of one possible workflow which may work in part (or entirety) for you. I am more than happy to answer any questions on actual details of this workflow or my storage solutions; just leave your question it in the comments and I will get back to you.

Now stop worrying about backups and get out and take some photographs!

An Aperture Users Thoughts and Review on iPhoto 09

I am a long time user of Apple’s Aperture and have dabbled modestly from time to time in the iPhoto pond. Like many all over the world I bought into the iPhoto 09 hype and also fell for the clever Apple marketing scheme of putting a sufficient ‘salivary gap’ between the keynote and the product release.

Well I received my long anticipated copy last night and after installing it immediately got to work putting it through it’s paces.

Referencing the Aperture library

The first thing I liked was that, by disabling the iPhoto copy-to-library functionality in the preferences and then using the Aperture media browser, I was able to import around 15,000 of my picks into the iPhoto library in short order.  iPhoto references the photos in the Aperture library and only makes a copy in the iPhoto library if you do any adjustments on them.  A note here is that iPhoto uses the Aperture JPG preview of the photo rather than the original which makes it blisteringly fast and is  sufficient provided you have your Aperture previews set to a sufficient size; for what I would want to do with iPhoto (email, face tagging and the odd Facebook post) anything over 1000 pixels on the long edge is fine.  If your Aperture previews are too small you will need to reset their size in Aperture preferences and rebuild them.  I kept a healthy watch on my hard drive space during the import and was very pleased to see that iPhoto, used in this referenced way, was quite light on my precious free space.

Facial Recognition

This is the wow feature for me and the only one I hope Apple ports to Aperture pronto.  Click on a couple of faces and tell iPhoto who they are and iPhoto starts showing you photos in which they appear;  As you keep confirming, iPhoto keeps learning.  What really impressed me was that as I was selecting progressively earlier pictures of my son it kept recognising earlier and earlier photos of him which meant I was able to tag 8 years of photos of him in relatively short order; iPhoto essentially learned ‘how’ he was getting younger back through the years.

In Aperture I would like to see this feature integrate with keywords better and leverage off all the people I’ve key-worded in my main Aperture library – used in combination with existing tags or metadata, facial recognition would be a potent feature.

Geo-tagging Location information (Places)

I was very disappointed with the geotagging option in iPhoto.  I am a bit of a location nut and love embedding location data in my photos.  I use a GPS logger when I am out in the field and embed the co-ordinates into my photos in a batch process on import but I still have a good few years of photos which have no location data and I was hoping this would be the answer.

Sadly it is not.  The iPhoto video makes it look to easy but in my experience I found the process of clicking the photo, searching for the location, wading through all the business listings from Google, dropping the pin, naming the location and saving the data to be too much of a hassle.  If you’ve taken 60 pictures in one location it seems you’re out of luck because you can only tag one photo at a time. [update: select many photos and click the i button on one of them to set the location information for the selection, thanks Jim MacDonald]

I see no significant advantage over better programs such as the Aperture ‘Maperture’ plugin.

Flickr and Facebook Integration

These are in iPhoto for the consumer market.  I have similar plugins in Aperture which actually do a far better job and hook me into Facebook, Flickr, iStockPhoto, Smugmug and a heap of other online systems.  Apple would be really stupid to include these as a built-in option in Aperture.  I believe that a baked in solution here is silly, iPhoto should have rather leveraged off the development which has been done in the Aperture plugin space to integrate with already existing 3rd party plugins.

In Summary

I like iPhoto 09 and in combination with the other iLife enhancements it is a good upgrade.  The facial recognition is the only thing I’d want to see make it (in it’s current incarnation) into Aperture and only if it can leverage off all the hard work I’ve put into my tagging and metadata already.  I wasn’t blown away by iPhoto 09 and it certainly (for me) didn’t live up to all the upgrade hype. 

iPhoto 09 makes better use of my system resources and seems a bit snappier in some areas.  Its integration with Aperture was a pleasant surprise and there are a few new adjustment tools thrown in for general photo touchups.  There were a number of annoyances though – poor geotagging, the way the recommended faces move around as it prompts you for other faces which might match (which meant I was accidentally rejecting photos which weren’t under the mouse cursor a second ago) and a couple of performance slow downs due to the load iPhoto was under.

This is a good consumer level photo management upgrade to the previous version and a worthy contender to other applications like Picasa.  I am endlessly amused by the number of posts I see on the web by people trying to decide between iPhoto and Aperture (or Lightroom); my advice in this regard is ‘if you are asking the difference between the two then stick with iPhoto’.  New users who want an easy way to manage and share their photos – stick with iPhoto.  Any serious photographer who needs the heavy lifting in the adjustment and workflow department then Aperture is your baby. 

Now that I’ve played with it a bit (and because I am an Aperture user) I probably won’t use it again; other members of my family who aren’t power-users will love it because it makes general purpose photo management easy and fun.  From that point of view it scores a resounding 5/5.

As a final note, contrary to the general consensus, I am pleased these new features came out in the consumer product first – that way I can feedback to Apple as to what I would like to see in their pro-level software rather than the other way around.  ‘Yes’ to facial recognition and a definitive ‘NO’ to everything else.

Aperture to DNG to Adobe Camera Raw Workflow

I’ve just made a really useful Automator workflow for fans of Aperture. The workflow allows me to select any number of .NEF raw files (either managed or as referenced masters) and with a single click perform the following actions:

• Generate XMP sidecar files with all Aperture metadata and export them with the .NEF to a working folder
• Combine the .XMP and the .NEF into a .DNG using the latest DNG converter from Adobe
• Remove the temporary .NEF and .XMP files leaving only the DNG files
• Open a finder dialog, allow me to select one or all of the DNG files
• Opens my selection for editing in Adobe Camera Raw

This is important to me as it allows me to use all the power and flexibility of Apertures photo management and retain the use of ALL the brilliant non-destructive editing tools of Lightroom (which are all available in the ACR interface). Further heavy pixel pushing from ACR straight to Photoshop is a further button click away.

There is a little basic setup required.

• Go to this site, download and install the DNG Automator action.
• If you don’t have it yet, go to Adobe and download their free DNG converter. Install it.
• Go to my Skydrive and download my workflow (or application if you prefer), unzip it and run it.

You should see something like this:

The workflow should open in Automator. Replace the areas in the image above which say Adobe Photoshop CS4 with the version you have (if you don’t have CS4).

You can now either run the workflow directly from Automator or (from Automator) click: File > Save as plugin. Select ‘Script menu’ under the plug-in for section and choose a name. The script is added to your scripts folder in your taskbar and you can access it really easily when you’re in Aperture.

Done! The best of Aperture goodness with the heavy lifting of ACR and Photoshop for when you want it.

The Aperture vs Lightroom Shootout

11 Feb 2010 (update) review of Aperture 3

I have been caught in a frenzy of indecision regarding my photo management software for months now.  I have used both Aperture and Lightroom extensively and there are aspects to both programs which I love and others which could really do with some improvement.  They are so close in so many respects that it makes choosing between the two almost impossible; the problem with the indecision is that I’m probably not getting the most out of the one program or the other.

I thought it would be useful to share with you my [Dons flame retardant flack-jacket] view on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each program and then follow up with my selection.  This is not a post meant to start a flame-war between Aperture or Lightroom evangelists; I’m a lone photographer who has used both products extensively and has had to settle on the best fit for me.

Apple Aperture: http://www.apple.com/aperture/

Apple’s Aperture is one slick program; it just makes managing your photos so easy and I love it.  The interface is clean and uncluttered providing you excellent customisable visibility over the information that is useful to you.  The Adjustments palette is easy to use and provides all the standard camera RAW and photographic adjustments that Lightroom does.  I also find Aperture does a much better job at ‘hiding’ more complex aspects of itself until you need it – a good example of this is the metadata views and presets in Aperture which are very understated but an incredibly powerful feature whereas Lightroom seems to throw the lot at you in an often times confusing manner.  In my opinion, Aperture has some clear strengths:

Strengths

• Adjustments - Aperture provides a wide variety of easy to use adjustments which excel at allowing a photographer to tweak the photo.  In terms of standard features like white balance, contrast, levels, black and white point, vibrancy, sharpening etc… both Aperture and Lightroom are on a par with not much to choose from.  Lightroom has a few killer adjustments up it’s sleeve though.
• Photo management and work flow – It really doesn’t get better than this.  Tethered shooting, lightbox functionality, auto stacks, keyword stamping and a blisteringly fast set of views mean you don’t spend time waiting for the software.  Aperture is a clear winner for me here.
• Destructive plugin architecture – I’ve heard a lot of people punting a non destructive plugin architecture but the truth is that only gets you so far and then you need to go into a destructive environment like Photoshop anyway anyway.  Non destructive plugins are a lot harder to write, and not baking the changes into the image means there is a performance cost to opening photos with non-destructive adjustments.  Aperture has a lot of plugins written for it which include the fantastic suite of Nik plugins released as an Aperture bundle – good times.  Happy photographers when the software library is corrupted or lost – edits are burned into the output format (tiff etc).
• Export Options – Aperture’s export options are better than Lightroom.  You can easily create web galleries,  create print quality hard and soft cover books and send your photos to a virtual lightbox so you can play with combinations of photos and see how they work together.
• Integration with other Apple programs means your photos, albums and smart albums are available to your iPhone, MobileMe galleries, iMovie, Final Cut and a whole host of other programs.
• Vault provides an easy way to backup and manage all your photos.
• Speed – Faster than Lightroom, from moving between your photos to applying adjustments, it’s a lot faster.
• Managed mode - Photos are automatically imported into the library and managed there.  One click backup to multiple devices with vault.
• Metadata – create powerful metadata presets to append to existing photos or new photos on import.  Ability to add your own metadata information to photos.

Weaknesses

• Referenced Masters file management – Not quite as strong as Lightroom, Aperture still relies quite heavily on it’s library to know about file location.
• Raw Updates – they always come but invariable Adobe beats Apple to them.  Not sure if rushing to release new raw updates are a good thing.
• Big Library – The Aperture library is always bigger than the Lightroom one however as Aperture is 2-3x faster at rendering images and information the extra harddisk space is a small price to pay.

Adobe Lightroom: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/

With a big brother like Photoshop you’d be correct in thinking that Lightroom has some big guns when it comes to photo adjustments.  It doesn’t seem as  polished as Aperture and it’s nowhere (I mean nowhere!) as fast as Aperture;  I have subsequently learned that this is because Aperture stores all previews of photos (hence a massive Aperture library file) whereas Lightroom does the more space-friendly thing and stores only recent previews.

Strengths

• Adjustment tools – In addition to all the standard adjustment tools Lightroom has some additional ones which mean business.  The non destructive localised adjustment brush is outstanding; to be able to selectively modify local areas of colour, exposure and other parameters and apply them without having to apply complex photoshop masks is incredible.  Note: Aperture users can export to camera RAW in Photoshop CS4 (Photoshop can be set to open TIF files and JPGs in Camera RAW) and have the entire range of lightroom adjustment tools available.
• DNG - Easily convert RAW files to the digital negative format an excellent way to future-proof your photos.
• plugin architecture – non-destructive plugin architecture.  Has it pro’s and con’s – it’s all very nice to have 1000 beautifully edit photos and then have the library corrupt itself.  There are always library backups – in both Lightroom and Aperture make sure you backup regularly.
• Cross platform – Windows – clear advantage here.
• Integration with Photoshop – Seamless round-tripping to Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop.
• Smaller library - Good for the laptops.

Weaknesses

• Speed – Consistently much slower than Aperture in all areas.  Displaying of images and editing.
• layout has always seemed a little clunky. Collapse some of the side toolbars and there is this annoying on-hover expansion – Coming from Aperture I really think that Adobe need to have a serious chat with the people in the UI department.  The side panels which, once hidden, pop out at you on mouseover are terribly annoying.  The other thing which I don’t like is the seperate areas you have to go to for viewing and editing,  in Aperture once you’re looking at the photo you can view, edit, export, send to lightboxes and perform a whole host of actions on it.
• Export options, books watermarking – The export options are not as strong as Aperture.  There is no support for my book creation, my favourite Aperture export option.

MY CONCLUSIONS:

So after going backwards and forwards for months I have finally settled on Aperture as my photo management software of choice.  I love the speed, the workflow tools, the ability to print books, the integration with my various web services and gadgets, the metadata presets and the ability to add my own metadata information and having the one-click Aperture vault backup.  It is a deceptive piece of software with much of the complexity and power hidden under the hood which won’t overwhelm newcomers.  Advances with technology in the new iLife series like facial recognition in iPhoto ’09 means Apple is not sleeping on their hands but are busy making huge strides in all the areas which are important to me as a photographer.

In the end both Aperture and Lightroom are sophisticated tools for both photographic workflow management and photo adjustments.  There is no right answer in choosing between the two of them and a decision boild down to a matter of personal taste.  If you are undecided then try both (both have demo versions) and decide which aspects win out for you.

DNG – My long term archival strategy

I have settled on Lightroom Aperture (update) as my photo management software of choice and Adobe’s DNG format as my long term photographic archive of choice.

My Nikon shoots raw NEF files but those waiting for the recent versions of Adobe and Apple camera raw to support the D700 NEF files showed me that not all NEF’s are created equal.  Combine this with the fact that my Fujifilm shoots it’s own bizarre propriety RAW format (thankfully still understood by Lightroom) and I reckon there is an impending disaster lurking somewhere down the line.

Enter the Digital Negative (DNG) and it’s groundswell of support by software vendors (Apple, Extensis) and camera manufacturers (Leica, Hasselblad, Ricoh and Samsung) amongst others.

DNG is a RAW container format designed to hold RAW data and, more importantly for me, the file metadata.  This eliminates the need for me to have separate sidecar metadata files and it means that all my non-destructive adjustments, keywords and other metadata are available across all the tools I use.  The DNG conversion process, either through Lightroom or the free converter, is very user friendly and the original RAW file and the sidecar updates are combined into the one DNG file.

As DNG employs more sophisticated compression algorithms there is invariably a space saving when converting from a RAW format like NEF to DNG.   If you’re concerned about being able to open your original RAW image in the future in the proprietary camera software (like the dreadful Capture NX) then you can embed a bit-for-bit copy of your RAW data into the DNG which you can extract later.

I am in the process of converting all my NEF files (and other RAW formats) to DNG; this gives me some level of comfort that in 15 years time the files will still be accessible and relevant to the software of the time.

Read more about DNG on the Adobe website.