PC users who want robust RAW workflow software with quality image processing have few options—in a relatively small field, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 3 is the standout choice. But Mac users have a compelling alternative: Apple’s Aperture 3.
Though the first version of Aperture was released before the first version of Lightroom in 2005, the two have been fighting it out ever since. Both appeal to photographers who do most of their shooting in RAW and want to use a single program for organization, RAW adjustments, and output.
Not only is Aperture, at $200 (direct), less expensive than the $300 Lightroom, it has more to offer DSLR shooters whose primary audience is their friends and family. Besides its great controls for making sophisticated edits of RAW files, it includes quick, built-in methods for making photo books, trimming video clips, and creating multimedia slide shows—all tools that Lightroom lacks.
I wished you would have written more about the differences between between Aperture and Lightroom regarding localized editing tools. It appears Aperture has much better functionality for cloning / patching than Lightroom. Isn't thatimportant to elaborate?
The biggest problem with Aperture is its poor performance. I am surprised that you made no mention of that. Functionality and user-friendliness are excellent in my opinion but things get infuriating when trying to do spot adjustments with the result that I have abandoned such actions completely and do them exclusively in Photoshop. Global adjustments like color and and curves work well enough, though still a bit sluggish. I have tried it on a top-of-the-line MacBook, so the problem is not outdated hardware. What amazes me is that Apple make the hardware, the Operating System and the application, so they have absolutely no excuse for this poor performance. Again, I don't see anything from Apple even acknowledging that such a problem exists. The other big problem is with user support. Lightroom which is the major competition has extensive documentation, tutorials, videos etc available for it. Aperture has hardly anything. In a situation like that, the vendor should jump-start the process to make those thing available, but what do we get from Apple? More silence. I upgraded from Aperture 2 against my better judgment, but if some improvement does not come within the next few months, I will bit the bullet and switch.
Happy with Aperture 3 upgrade. Like changes. Three months now, no serious concerns about performance -- actually seems improved. Yes, importing 200+ RAW files shows spinning processing wheel, but the first photos in string are immediately available for editing. Use iMac & 12 meg Nikon RAW. Can confirm three lockup instances while spot editing - (cropping and red-eye). Closed / re-opened Aperture, all good. Trained in Photoshop which has awesome stuff, just quicker to do majority of my edits in Aperture. Have not used Lightroom, heard good things.
Well, ...'if you want to make high-level RAW conversions'.... Not for my D3 NEFs, I think colors are far off comparing them to other rawconverters like ACR 6 or NX2
In my case Aperture 3 is a disaster.
The feature are great but the performances are really poor on large projects. The typical kind of thing i like is to show a diaporama of a project containing several hundreds pictures. This kills my aperture, and my mac at the same time, sometime asking 2 minutes or more between the action and the result of it ...
very very sad
I'm not surprised it's not a steller performer on a MacBook. It's not a consumer app. The sweet spot is running it on a MacPro in 64-bit mode with lot's of ram. It's amazing. I've got over 40k Nikon D300 raw images in my library. It rips through them; instant access to to any image in your library. The image converter and editing are quite good. I added Niks plug-in suite to round out my workflow. It's a solid addition to a strong image management solution.
I do have 8core, the most powerful Mac Pro.
But in front of Aperture, it's dead end :)
Poor performance and poor costomer support.
Seems like Apple get starts to resemble MS XP
Guys do not try to use keywords. If you import some files which already has its own keyword even though some of them exactly same keyword, it's getting bigger. I mean if you import same file 10 times, you get the disastrous results.
... same keywords... totally differently act...
Bottom line, do not use aperture ever.
These speed and performance comments and comparison to Lightroom are all meaningless with the Aperture 3.1 update. (I also suspect the Macs being used were not in good shape too. Aperture is deep in the OS and everything should be maintained with Disk Utility every month and Disk Utility on the start up DVD every few months.)
I went from Aperture v.1.x to 2 (and all its updates) through three whole new Mac machine updates as well, with no problems.
The last version of 2.X was working fine on a 2009 iMac (which I had moved from a work MacPro) but, I got the 3.0 version then updated to 3.1. Again, no problems.
MacCreate recently published a comparison of speed of Aperture 3 vs LIghtroom. Aperture ended up being much faster and that was giving all benefit to Lightroom (to be fair and beyond fair).
http://bit.ly/g03ry4
Also, the cons in this review are mostly gone now with the update to 3.1. (The review needs to be updated.)
The only negative I have with Aperture is the program is very powerful but that power is a bit tricky to know how to use. You can sort images and change meta data in incredible ways but you have to really know the program and think it through. I found the help menu offered in the program (basically a users manual) to be great. Also, join and use the Apple Aperture forums. If you have an iTunes account, you can log in with that Apple ID and password. If my question is not answered there, usually the responses get me thinking about new ways to solve the problem.
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I wished you would have written more about the differences between between Aperture and Lightroom regarding localized editing tools. It appears Aperture has much better functionality for cloning / patching than Lightroom. Isn't thatimportant to elaborate?
The biggest problem with Aperture is its poor performance. I am surprised that you made no mention of that. Functionality and user-friendliness are excellent in my opinion but things get infuriating when trying to do spot adjustments with the result that I have abandoned such actions completely and do them exclusively in Photoshop. Global adjustments like color and and curves work well enough, though still a bit sluggish. I have tried it on a top-of-the-line MacBook, so the problem is not outdated hardware. What amazes me is that Apple make the hardware, the Operating System and the application, so they have absolutely no excuse for this poor performance. Again, I don't see anything from Apple even acknowledging that such a problem exists. The other big problem is with user support. Lightroom which is the major competition has extensive documentation, tutorials, videos etc available for it. Aperture has hardly anything. In a situation like that, the vendor should jump-start the process to make those thing available, but what do we get from Apple? More silence. I upgraded from Aperture 2 against my better judgment, but if some improvement does not come within the next few months, I will bit the bullet and switch.
Happy with Aperture 3 upgrade. Like changes. Three months now, no serious concerns about performance -- actually seems improved. Yes, importing 200+ RAW files shows spinning processing wheel, but the first photos in string are immediately available for editing. Use iMac & 12 meg Nikon RAW. Can confirm three lockup instances while spot editing - (cropping and red-eye). Closed / re-opened Aperture, all good. Trained in Photoshop which has awesome stuff, just quicker to do majority of my edits in Aperture. Have not used Lightroom, heard good things.
Well, ...'if you want to make high-level RAW conversions'.... Not for my D3 NEFs, I think colors are far off comparing them to other rawconverters like ACR 6 or NX2
In my case Aperture 3 is a disaster.
The feature are great but the performances are really poor on large projects. The typical kind of thing i like is to show a diaporama of a project containing several hundreds pictures. This kills my aperture, and my mac at the same time, sometime asking 2 minutes or more between the action and the result of it ...
very very sad
I'm not surprised it's not a steller performer on a MacBook. It's not a consumer app. The sweet spot is running it on a MacPro in 64-bit mode with lot's of ram. It's amazing. I've got over 40k Nikon D300 raw images in my library. It rips through them; instant access to to any image in your library. The image converter and editing are quite good. I added Niks plug-in suite to round out my workflow. It's a solid addition to a strong image management solution.
I do have 8core, the most powerful Mac Pro.
But in front of Aperture, it's dead end :)
Poor performance and poor costomer support.
Seems like Apple get starts to resemble MS XP
Guys do not try to use keywords. If you import some files which already has its own keyword even though some of them exactly same keyword, it's getting bigger. I mean if you import same file 10 times, you get the disastrous results.
... same keywords... totally differently act...
Bottom line, do not use aperture ever.
These speed and performance comments and comparison to Lightroom are all meaningless with the Aperture 3.1 update. (I also suspect the Macs being used were not in good shape too. Aperture is deep in the OS and everything should be maintained with Disk Utility every month and Disk Utility on the start up DVD every few months.)
I went from Aperture v.1.x to 2 (and all its updates) through three whole new Mac machine updates as well, with no problems.
The last version of 2.X was working fine on a 2009 iMac (which I had moved from a work MacPro) but, I got the 3.0 version then updated to 3.1. Again, no problems.
MacCreate recently published a comparison of speed of Aperture 3 vs LIghtroom. Aperture ended up being much faster and that was giving all benefit to Lightroom (to be fair and beyond fair).
http://bit.ly/g03ry4
Also, the cons in this review are mostly gone now with the update to 3.1. (The review needs to be updated.)
The only negative I have with Aperture is the program is very powerful but that power is a bit tricky to know how to use. You can sort images and change meta data in incredible ways but you have to really know the program and think it through. I found the help menu offered in the program (basically a users manual) to be great. Also, join and use the Apple Aperture forums. If you have an iTunes account, you can log in with that Apple ID and password. If my question is not answered there, usually the responses get me thinking about new ways to solve the problem.