Lightroom provides the capability to group an arbitrary combination of image adjustments together and give that group a name – these are image adjustment presets. Aperture provides the ability to create a preset for an adjustment “block” (exposure, enhancements, etc) and give it a name – so the groupings are not arbitrary or combine-able. With Lightroom you can apply an image adjustment preset to one or more images at various stages of your work-flow in a couple of different places in the application, one of them being when you import the images. Aperture does not provide this capability directly. What Aperture does provide is the ability to “Lift” a set of adjustments, fine tune it if you would like, and then “Stamp” those adjustments to any number of target images. Lightroom guys (or gals) will say “yea but that’s not a preset you have to go in and spend like time making the adjustments to one image”. Aperture guys/gals will say “uhhhh yea so?” Actually what they mean is it is ridiculously easy to copy any image whatsoever to a project called “presets” or multiple projects holding different categories of presets as templates to lift from if you really, really want to have some laying around ready to go.

Personally I find both methods are about equally efficient in applying frequently used groups of adjustments to a bunch of other images if that is something you have a need for. The real question is what is the difference between the two. In the real world I find the only difference in speed and efficiency is if you want to try out a bunch of adjustment presets on one image just to see how they look. Not something I do, call me old fashioned or whatever but I usually have an image treatment in mind before I even take the photograph. If you like to have a bunch of adjustment combinations laying around and like to try them all out on a single image then Lightroom can be more efficient at doing that, otherwise – a draw. Maybe next time I will take on a comparison of the actual images adjustment capabilities.

RB

First the similarities between Lightroom and Aperture. Both applications can group images together either manually or automatically by the date and time stamps on the original images. They both automatically put new versions/virtual copies in a stack with the original master image. You an move images “up” or “down” in a stack or move an image right to the top. Images at the top of the stack are the images that represent the stack when the stack is closed and there for provide an easy way to select only the images at the top of stacks when all stacks are closed.

The big difference between Aperture2 and Lightroom2 is that stacks are inherent and visible no matter where you are looking at an image in Aperture. When using Lightroom you only have access to stacks and the related stack functionality when looking at images in the library module and then only when clicked on a folder (the closest thing to an Aperture project) view. For instance if you drag an image in a stack into a collection that image shows up in the collection but there is no indication when viewing the collection that it is part of an image stack. There is no stack functionality at all when viewing a collection with one exception. If you create a new virtual copy or version of an image in a collection it will automatically be added to a stack with the original image when viewing that image in a folder. In aperture it is apparent that an image is in a stack no matter where you are looking at it, in an album, a smart album, the project, etc. This may not seem like a big deal but it is huge in terms of a streamlined work-flow. When combined with the functionality of “album picks” in Aperture, the ability for different images to show up at the top of a stack in every different album or album like thing is a huge time saver for creating and managing various versions of an image for different output purposes. Take for example the need for different image crops for standard paper sizes. In Aperture you can close all of your stacks, select all of them (or filter based on whatever criteria you want) create a new album with those. Hit one key to make a new version and then apply an 8×10 crop to all of them at the same time. Just the act of doing this causes the new versions created in the context of the album to show up at the top of the stack in that album. Don’t get me wrong there are ways of accomplishing this in Lightroom with much less fanfare than the way we all used to do things like this but Aperture’s stacks/stack picks/album picks are major work-flow efficiency tools when used to their best advantage. The Light room equivalent is more like go to the folder, close all the stacks, select all images or filter/select all images, create virtual copies, create new collection, drag collection to collection set, select all images in collection, apply black and white preset. Not a big deal but here is the big deal but longer and clunkier.

The other thing that is different is what is almost a total lack of short cut keys to manipulate stacks in Lightroom. WTF, once you have some experience using an application and you are whizzing through your work-flow using short cut keys and one or two are missing for what you want/need to do it’s like hitting a brick wall going 90 mph. The same applies to the lack of short cut keys for Lightroom compare mode. If you get proficient using both Aperture2 compare features and Lightroom features you will feel like you are in slow motion, mouse move point, click, hell in Lightroom. Talking about compare features for a moment, Lightroom has a workable compare mode and just enough keys to make you want the ones it does not have. Lightroom also has absolutely no connection between it’s compare features and it’s stack features. The big missing key as compared to Aperture is the set compare item key. Don’t think this is a big deal? You should have seen the seizures and conniptions that the experienced Aperture users had when Apple removed not that key but the short cut that put you into compare mode and set the compare item at the same time due to newbie users accidently putting themselves in compare mode. The speed of compare mode, short cut keys and stack mode are deal breakers when comparing Aperture2 to Lightroom2 for a lot of people. Stack mode in Aperture2 is like compare mode but tied to image stacks. A summary is that the right/left arrow keys only move the candidate image within the stack, they won’t go beyond. The up/down arrow keys move from stack to stack. When changing stacks the “stack pick” or image at the top of the stack is automatically set to the compare images. Last but not least, ta da… there is a shortcut key/function that replaces the compare image with the candidate AND makes it the stack pick.

It’s also kind of nice to do a search or use a global smart album and know that an image that shows up is part of an image stack, in other words has other versions or similar shot variations. Even if the other version do not meet the search or smart album there is a grey box around the image along with a badge indicating the number of images in a stack that the image is a part of.

The bottom line stacks, compare mode, and their relationship to versions/virtual copies and collections/albums are workable in Lightroom and better than anything we had a few years ago but Aperture2 blows the living crap out of Lightroom2 when it comes to stack functionality when looked at in the context of an overall work-flow.

RB

RB

Name changed wrote:

I use both applications both on almost a daily basis. If this is your number
one reason to switch I see you switching back and forth and to and fro
to just about anything that comes along. This functionality is
replicated using other Aperture features in a heartbeat. Good luck
saving a ton of time with this one.

Keyword synonyms are nice I totally agree that this is really cool -
esp for multilingual photographers or publications. Bet you you will
see Keyword functionality beefed up in the next Aperture release it’s
been about the same since v1 (long before LR was even a glimmer in
Adobe’s eye)

Aperture can do the same thing with one caveat that there are several
scripts make work (namely putting the hierarchy in the exported version)

“Non Destructable” is this a new technology that I missed or didn’t quite
fathom. Anywho – the localized adjustments are nice and Aperture’s D+B
plugin is a joke but not a deal breaker for most folk especially with
tools like Viveza. and disk space is cheap anyway.

I have 300,000+ images in my main library – no issues. Maybe it’s you
or your hardware, or something. LR has a database – don’t count your
chickens so fast.

Agreed way better DNG support and the new camera profiles and profile
tools that not many people even know are out there are a game changer -
Apple needs to think about this and hopefully do something similar or
better yet open up the RAW processing engine and let other people do it.

As for noise – get a D3 or D700 all noise reduction *****.

Bye
We’ll miss you over here, can’t wait to see you in the LR forums. Have
fun don’t worry about us idiots over here we’ll get along I hope
without all of you wonderful contributions.

RB

Ps. 100 shots? Save your self some time spent in learning a new app use bridge or finder.

Aperture gives you two different ways to manage your original “master” image files. The first way is the managed masters method. Using managed masters Aperture pretty much completely insulates you from having to manage your images files at all. Aperture imports the images into its Library and figures out where to put them for you. This is great for libraries that are not of a massive scale, like on your laptop. Using managed masters pretty much frees you from having to make decisions about where to put the images that you download from your camera. One thing that I need to clear up about managed masters and the Aperture library is the unreasonable fear that a lot of photographers have about Aperture somehow squirlling their images away in some super secret, unintelligible, highly complicated, weirdo structure that is just waiting for the slightest breeze to blow for them to be lost and gone forever. Let me put you at ease right now, this is not the case. The Aperture library is pretty much a folder/directory with a special flag that makes it look like one big file when viewed in the Finder. Don’t believe me? Fire up a terminal (command line) window and cd to ~/Pictures and then do an ls on the “Aperture Library.aplibraryls”. Look Ma, I can see all the stuff in there. Yup, and guess what. Aperture automagically does the exact same thing you would probably do manually it creates another directory inside for each project and puts your original master images in there. I think it is hilarious how many people I see mirror the exact same structure on a single disk manually instead of letting Aperture do it for them for irrational fear of….Nothing?

This brings us to the second way that Aperture gives you to manage your original master images. That way is using “referenced masters”. Using referenced masters allows you to put the original master images anywhere you like. The only really good reason to use referenced masters with Aperture is to allow you to use more than one drive to store your images. This is really simple, the interesting part is you don’t have to decide one way or the other. With Aperture you can mix and match both when you import and down the road. For example let’s say you only have one machine and it’s a laptop with one internal drive. You could easily have all of you active projects use managed masters and then use Aperture to relocate them as referenced masters onto an external HD that you leave behind. If you need them active again just use Aperture to consolidate them back into the library if you want. The big thing with Aperture and major difference to Lightroom is that Aperture pretty much abstracts file management from the rest of your work-flow. When you look at your projects and their organizational structure inside of Aperture you have no indication of where your files are, nor do you care. If you want to manage the location of your files there are a couple of functions that allow you to do this but it has nothing to do with the way that you organize your projects or images within Aperture. The important functions are Relocate Masters, Consolidate Masters, and Manage Referenced. Relocate moves your original master images file to wherever you specify, including from managed to referenced. Consolidate takes whatever masters you have selected and moves them from being referenced to being managed back inside the Aperture library, neatly into a corresponding folder to the project that they live in. Last but not least Manage allows you to do a ton of really powerful things like re-hook the images versions to referenced masters when you move them on purpose or by accident somewhere different. I am talking way different because if you just rename the folder they reside in Aperture deals with that automagically.

I have dropped a couple of hints so far about this but here is the deal, there does not have to be any relationship at all between what Aperture project an image lives in and where the corresponding original master image resides on disk. In fact if you wanted to some of the images can be managed masters, some can be referenced from a different HD, and some can be referenced from a DVD if you want. Not only that but you can select what ever images in any combination you want, a whole project, a couple of images in a project, the whole library, etc, and then use the file management functions that I described on that set. You don’t have to do this, you can get involved as much or as little as you would like to in where your images are stored and it has no bearing with how your projects within Aperture are organized.

The reason that I spent so much time on how Aperture does things is because it makes explaining how Lightroom does things really easy. In Lightroom your folder/directory structure is your project structure, end of story. The on disk location of your originals images and how they are divided between folders is the way they are organized in Lightroom. What disk and what folder they are in is in your face and not at all abstracted from you at all. The only thing that you can do is move the folder around as a whole with all of the images in it, even to another HD and then tell Lightroom what you did. The other thing that you can do is move images out of one folder to some other folder and then tell Lightroom where to find them but that changes the way that your project structure in Lightroom is organized. Bottom Line – Aperture original master image location and project structure are completely independent. In Lightroom original master image location is tied directly to project structure and organization. The way that Lightroom works is a very special case of the way Aperture can work.

A coupe of other minor things to note that can be considered file management. Both Lightroom and Aperture generate JPG preview images of RAW files that are imported. The previews allow you to view your images and perform metadata, organization related tasks, slide shows, etc. even when the RAW master files are “off-line”. Previews also help speed some things up in both applications when there is no need to render the RAW file over and over. Aperture gives you a finer degree of control over the size of the previews generated and when they are generated. You can generate them automatically or completely manually with Aperture. You can delete any subset of image previews that you would like. This comes in handy when using a replicated library approach to dealing with a portable version of your library.
For the esoterically oriented Lightroom and Aperture handle things a bit differently when and if you shoot RAW+JPG. When you import RAW+JPG into Aperture it looks like you have only one image, the RAW file. Behind the scenes Aperture is managing both of these files as a sort of compound master images. By default you will be looking at and working on a version of the RAW file. To see the JPG version you will have to right click and choose “new version from master JPG”. In Lightroom the default is to alegidly use the JPG as some sort of preview but I have not seen any indication that this is happening and personally wouldn’t because that would probably be really confusing. Once they are imported into Lightroom it will never show you the JPG again but the image is politely labeled RAW+JPG. The other option in Lightroom is to set a global option to import them as two separate images in a stack.

Whew that was a long one but I thought it deserved to be tackled given how much confusion and misinformation is out there on the subject. My vote in terms of overall file management capability has to go to Aperture for overall flexibility and Lightroom for simplicity. Some photographers just like the comfort level of doing things the same way they always have in terms of organizing their files and like that the location of them is brutally apparent. I like the abstraction of image file location until I really want to be involved with it.

As always let me know if you have any questions or comments.

RB

• Way better organizational capabilities that are not at all tied to the underlying file/directory structure.
• Completely do anything anywhere flexibility, you are not forced into a workflow in any way. If you want to bring up the adjustments HUD and monkey around with the colors while laying out a book, have at it.
• In general a less cluttered and more flexible user interface but this may be a matter of taste.
• Books – Aperture books are really, really, flexible, nice, cool, and, did I say wonderful. Not just the ones printed by Apple or just the templates supplied out of the box but the concept in general. If you take the time to figure Aperture books out you can make some really nice stuff really quick and have just about any service print it up. Too bad that there is virtually no documentation on how to really do advanced book things in Aperture. Almost anything is possible but also almost completely undocumented.
• Stacks, stack mode, compare mode, full screen mode, stack picks, and album picks…..Uhhh if you don’t really know Aperture than this means nothing to you so let’s just say once you figure out how stacking, stack picks, etc work you can improve your productivity by about 1000% if you shoot a lot of images and you need to narrow it down to a few. If you shoot tons of images Aperture shines at streamlining your ability to get through them and end up with the best of the best extremely quickly compared to anything else including LR2
• Customization. You can customize the user interface in ways that suit how you work, what metadata is displayed where, what keys do what, etc, etc, etc.
• Keyword hierarchies once you understand them.

Lightroom 2 pros:

• Local adjustments. No need to bounce your image out to an external editor to do really flexible non-destructive adjustments. Just make sure you have a really powerful machine to keep things speedy. Aperture’s out of the box dodge and burn plug-in is a joke.
• Way better standards support for metadata but still not perfect.
• Better print module, especially the output specific sharpening and the like.
• Adjustment presets.
• Windows (yuck) and Mac OS X.
• Fabulous DNG support (of course) and especially the camera model presets that emulate the manufacturer’s RAW conversion or roll your own with free tools. See my preview here.
• Out of the box more flexible web delivery but only out of the box (if you have tons of time you can make aperture do some amazing stuff but not for most of us)
• Better but not perfect integration with Photoshop CS 3
• Keyword synonyms.
• There are strong and weak points to the adjustment capabilities of both applications but overall I have to say LR2 nudges out Aperture’s adjustments by a hair.

Bottom line – Both applications are fabulous considering that neither of them existed just a few years ago. You can’t really go way wrong with either choice. I have highlighted what I consider to be the strengths of each application. Trying to quantify which application in superior overall for every photographer is pointless. If you are curious about a head to head detailed comparison on any particular feature that is really important to you and your photography shoot me an email or leave a comment and I will be happy to let you know what my experience has been.

RB

Update: Do to a lot of requests on some more detail I have started a series of articles with more detailed comparisons. I will continue to update this as time permits.

Aperture2 vs. Lightroom2 – File Management

Aperture2 vs. Lightroom2 – Stacks

Aperture2 vs. Lightroom2 – Adjustment Presets

Aperture2 vs. Lightroom2 – Keywords