Now here is the deal, given that I hate to spend time in post and have twiddled away far far too many hours in Photoshop since the mid-1990′s doing things to people that I have no taste for (Is this supposed to be a photo or a cartoon?) but hey the customer is always right. I will do anyting I can to minimize spending time fiddling with images on the computer, maybe I am just old but I have way more fun doing what I can while shooting than afterwards. This is one of the reasons that I really like the Picture Control concept that Nikon has developed. I know exactly what I am going to get right out of the box – hey that gets me half way there. Heck the results are nearly identical if I apply the same Picture Control to two different cameras, say one from 5 years ago and one that I just got today. Cool. Very Cool. You can even make your own. Enter Adobe’s camera profiles for DNG (they work on your NEFs and CR2s as well) – these take the whole picture control thing to a whole new level. They give you a set of tools that let you pretty much map any camera RAW to any rendering so theoretically if I wanted to do the work I could make a camera profile for say a Canon 5D that matched a Nikon D3 using a Nikon “Portrait” picture control. To prove that it works Adobe gives you the same exact renderings that Capture NX2 supports with the camera profiles for all of the supported Nikon NEF files – and they are very very close.

Ok so back to Aperture and why this is a pain in the a$$ for lazy people like me. Well I happen to like to know what the color is going to look like when I am shooting and not have to fuss with it afterwards (much). The way Aperture deals with color/WB info makes this a federal case. I wouldn’t mind at all if there was a stock set of adjustments that I could just slap together and use for every shoot but that is not the case. The adjustments are way different depending on the camera you shoot with, the color temperture of the light sources, and the WB that you set on the camera (preset, fixed, auto, whatever) add to that that I like to gel my lights with CTBs and CTOs while manipulating my film (preset WB) and you have a different set of monkeying around that you need to do for every situation. Like I said I am lazy and I hate things that slow me down.

Here is an example (a simple one) of what I am talking about.The following images rendered from my trusty old D2H with the default camera settings (all flat – normal, normal, normal, you get the idea) rendered from left to right by NX2 with camera settings, NX2 with portrait picture control under the develop settings, and Aperture:

What was the camera setup? Like I said all flat and the camera WB was set to 6300K to warm it, sort of like a 85B filter back in the old days. Want to try it for yourself – Here is the NEF RAW file – DSC0106 RAW NEF (349). Go ahead match the colors. It’s a challenge for you. Let me know how long you spent or if you gave up. – not just one of the colors all of them. If you need a reference download Nikon View NX and use the portrait picture control under develop, it’s free. I am not saying that you cannot get good results, you can it just takes a bit of fooling around, actually a lot of fooling around – get a new camera – fool around some more.

Did it take longer than 5 minutes? Was that a piece of cake, ok here is another one for you to take a crack at if you are up to the challenge, I just added a color or two to the equation. Again from left to right – NX2 camera settings (same as last time), NX2 portrait picture control, Aperture. Here is the RAW NEF – DSC0029 RAW NEF (339).

Hey where else and what other photographer would let you see his NEF files? Only here. If you care about this, I implore you to let apple know what you would like to see in Aperture3. How about just using Adobe’s DNG spec? License the whole thing? RAW processing plug-in architecture so that maybe you could someday choose the manufacturer’s engine, DNG, Adobe’s, Apple’s little experiment (or big one) What are your thoughts?

RB

Ps. I did gild the lily a little bit – I took exactly 6.3 seconds and added one little tiny embellishment to the center image in NX2 besides choosing the rendering intent. Can you see it? Special prize to the first reader to get it right.

• 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

I will speak only from a Nikon shooter’s perspective but if you change the names the same kind of thing is true no matter what you happen to shoot. Once upon a time if you wanted your RAW processing to look like the JPGs produced by your camera with various in camera settings you really needed to use Nikon Capture, not a pretty piece of software but getting much better over the years. Still it is backwards and cumbersome compared to Aperture or Lightroom. With Adobe’s release of Lightroom2 in combination with ACR 4.5 and the beta of DNG camera profiles plus profiling software this is not true anymore.

I just got done downloading and doing a quick compare of Lightroom2 RAW conversions using the new DNG camera profiles versus Nikon Capture NX2 RAW conversions with “picture control” settings with the same names and could not believe my eyes with respect to how close the conversions are. This is friggin’ great if you happen to like the RAW conversions and in camera produced JPGs that your camera happens to make and want to use them as a starting point. Huge time saver compared to starting with the same old flat RAW conversion that Aperture makes and then tweaking it from there. This tweaking usually takes multiple adjustment blocks and is not quite the same for every single image (probably due to white balance). What’s more is that Adobe has a free DNG camera profile editor and instructions on how to make your own camera profiles. This is totally great if you like to do that sort of thing or happen to shoot RAW with a camera that happens not to be a Nikon or Canon, you are now not out in the cold anymore. I can imagine that some dedicated non Canon/Nikon shooters out there will produce a bunch of profiles for their companions, if not do it yourself.

You can find the new tools here <——. I did a really quick comparison on the Nikon profiles for a D200 verses NX2. Check it out here <—–. The captions under the images represent the software and profile or Nikon “picture control” name for the conversion. For beta software I really think that it’s amazing. If you are a RAW shooter and are still using the clunky camera manufacturer’s software because of the RAW tone curve and color characteristics you may want to rethink that or at least try it out for yourself. I know what you are thinking – ‘DNG conversions and all are a pain’ but guess what, you don’t have to do anything, the camera profiles work without converting your native NEF’s or CR2′s or whatever, they just work.

There are plenty of things I really love about Aperture compared to other products but the brilliant implementation of local adjustments, keyword synonyms, truly useful output sharpening, and now camera RAW profiles are starting to make the grass look greener and much more saturated over there on the Lightroom2 side of the fence.

RB