Poll Results

Many thanks to all those who participated in my January poll.  The results of the survey are as follows:

Q. What software do you use to manage your photo workflow?

50% Aperture
15% Lightroom
15% Other
10% Picasa
10% What software?

Nobody was using Photoshop Elements.

Amongst the other answers: Capture One 4 Pro, Expression Media and Imatch.  A new poll will be up this week; thanks again for participating.

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.

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.

HDR Max – New HDR software.

Love it or hate it, but High Dynamic Range Images are here to stay.  The ability to create a composite image with a higher dynamic range than a single photograph can capture (and thereby creating images closer to what the eye sees) and then tonemap the result was a technique that excited me no end when it first appeared in mainstream software like Photomatix.

The problem is that it is now so easy to create absolutely awful photos and call them HDR, as such HDR imaging has become something of a pariah amongst serious photographers.  There are plenty of examples of the super-saturated, overly sharpened, cartoon cutout type HDR pictures on Flickr and the like and there are some people who are getting rather irate by the whole business.  In the end it’s about personal taste and I’m not going to hob-knob about saying what you should or shouldn’t like.

There is a new contender on the block in the HDR creation space and I think they’re worthy of serious attention.  HDR Max is a simple to use and powerful product which seems to hide a lot of the complexity of making an HDR image yet retains enough control to produce beautiful and more importantly, realistic HDR images.  The image below is one I sent off to the Ariea HDR photo challenge for a bit of fun (Ariea is the company which makes the HDR Max software).  What I found really impressive is that the image was composed of 3 hand-held photos (no tripod involved) and the software did a really good job of sticking the exposures together.  It is worth noting that Photomatix completely bungled this one – especially the grass which ended up looking like a shaggy lime-green carpet.

New Poll – Photo Management

So the results of the last poll showed that the majority of you, the readers of this journal, prefer a mix of photography related content which thankfully means I’m on the right track with my writing interests aligning with what you like to read.  I will start bringing more of the technology into the mix in 2009 and look to provide more of the story behind my pictures.

Here is a new poll which I’m going to leave up until the end of January.  It will tie in nicely with a post I have in the workshop on my dilemma in choosing between Aperture and Lightroom.

(Q) What software do you use to manage your photo workflow?