Reason #1: Enjoying the Digital Darkroom (this was reason #1 from Marco’s article)
I’ll go head-to-head with this one because I think Lightroom is better here. One big reason is that in Lightroom (the LR3 beta) we have Collections in the Develop module which keeps me from bouncing back and forth (something I found myself doing a lot in Aperture). And when it comes down to it, the only difference is tabs in Aperture compared to modules in LR. Aside from wishing the Develop module had Folders and Collections in it (like I said, LR3 beta has Collections now), I don’t find myself cursing the modules in Lightroom. If its not a module I need to use then I simply just don’t click on it. And the reason why LR has more modules than A3 has tabs, is because Adobe has located two key areas (slideshow and web) there instead of a menu up at the top.

There are a few issues at play here. The first is that Lightroom is what’s called Modal and Aperture is Non-Modal. That’s a geeky programming/workflow term to refer to the fact that Lightroom has different modes (Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, Web) that have to be entered in order to perform a different function. Some people like this, some do not. The drawback, from a programming point of view, is that modal programs require a switch in activity to perform a task. If you’re organizing and then you want to print something you have to switch modes.

The fact that Aperture groups activities under tabs doesn’t make it modal, by virtue of the fact that you can perform tasks using the Inspector or a HUD or even perform tasks in different modes. Open the HUD up to the Adjustment tab and open the Inspector up to the Metadata tab and you’re doing two things at once. Inherently non-modal.

The other thing of note about Aperture’s non-modal interface is that you can work on images even if you’re organizing them. For example if you’re setting up a web gallery, you can still adjust the image without having to jump back to a Develop module. This is very convenient if you happen to have a number of images in a gallery (or Album or Smart Album or Book or….) from different Projects and want to adjust a few of them. No need to leave a module to do this.

Lightroom’s collections function similarly to Aperture’s Albums, you can combine virtual copies of your images from anywhere in your Library. Folders works similarly to Aperture’s Folders. The only difference is you don’t have to switch to a Library mode to access these in Aperture.

Matt, the article’s author is fine with the mobile interface and doesn’t find himself "cursing at the modules in Lightroom" though does wish that the Develop module had Folders and Collections in it. In other words, he’s fine with the interface, except that he doesn’t like the interface.

Reason #2: Camera Calibration, Effects, Collections, History panel, tighter Photoshop Integration, Vignettes and other stuff
Remember when Camera Calibration profiles came out for Lightroom? You should because everyone absolutely loved them. It’s one of my favorite panels in Lightroom. But it’s not in Aperture. Lightroom has tighter integration with Photoshop and the Graduated filter. Lightroom 2/3 beta has better effects when it comes to adding grain and vignetting. The History aspect of Lightroom is way better. And in the article referenced above, he dings Lightroom for not having “Books, Loupe, Light Table and Full Screen Mode”. Books definitely go into the win column for Aperture (see #3 below). But Lightroom does have a Loupe view. Even though its different, it still does the same job. Light Table…. eh, its cool but is it worth switching for? And of course we do have Full Screen mode in Lightroom. Just press the F key.

I think that camera calibration profiles are great! After all, they’re part of Aperture’s RAW engine. Wait, what? Well that module in Lightroom that everyone loves, the one that adjusts the shadow, hue and saturation of an image based on the camera model, well that’s handled in Aperture in the RAW Fine Tuning brick, and has been part of the way that Aperture processes images since 1.0. Lightroom and ACR handle the profiling of a camera as a post-process as opposed to a pre-process. The settings in the Camera Calibration box are in the Color dialog box in Aperture.

Saying that Lightroom has a "tighter" integration with Photoshop is a stretch. When it comes to editing images, they both to do the same thing. They create a version of the image that opens in Photoshop. Aperture does that too. In the screenshot above I’ve got my images set to open in Photoshop CS4 in 16-bit PSD in the Adobe RGB color space.

What Lightroom does do better is have an Open as Smart Album choice for Photoshop editing. I like that . The other features (to open as HDR and open as PhotoMerge) can already be done by selecting multiple images in Aperture, opening them in the external editor and using the Automate command.

What I want though is less time spent in Photoshop. I don’t want better integration (if it were in fact better) what I want is more tools that keep me from having to switch to a destructive image editing program that costs nearly a thousand bucks and has an interface that even the designers admit is Byzantine.

Lightroom does have a great noise adding effect and a graduated filter. Props to that. It does not have a better vignetting tool.

The Loupe tool that Matt refers to here is nothing more than a magnifying glass zoom. Adobe added the Loupe to LR 2, because Aperture had that name, but it’s not the same function at all, nor does it do the same thing. That’s like saying you’ve got a car and you’re going to paint it red, and so it’s really a fire truck because they both drive down the street and can both show up at fires.

Aperture’s loupe provides pixel-accurate sampling of a specific portion of the image while leaving the main image in the normal zoom mode. It allows you to see color values and to change the zoom ratio of the Loupe while the surrounding area stays the same. It’s also a great way to preview an effect.

Aperture 3 adds to the Loupe tool by adding a variable zoom rate from 25% to 1600% that functions independently of the Loupe’s zoom amount. "Even though it’s different it still does the same job," isn’t accurate.

When the original article being cited here said that Lightroom doesn’t have a Full Screen mode, it should have been more specific. Lightroom does have a mode called Full Screen, which essentially just resizes LR to hide the OS X menu bar. This can be combined with the Lights Out mode to darken the interface. But it doesn’t work the same as Aperture’s Full Screen mode. Here is Lightroom’s mode above.

And here is Aperture’s. Full-size image on a 30" Cinema Display. As opposed to an image with 6" of space on the sides in Lightroom used by palletes.

Again, just because Adobe gave something the same name, doesn’t mean they gave it the same features.

Oh yes, you can also do this in FullScreen mode in Aperture 3

And this.

And this, which is Aperture’s Fullscreen mode spanning dual 30" Cinema Displays with the Browser on one side and the Viewer on the other.

But Lightroom’s got a button called Fullscreen that makes the menubar go away. Must be the same, right?

Reason #3: Printing
This is one of those areas where you can argue either way but I think Lightroom makes a stronger case. Lightroom has custom print templates (in LR 3 beta) and an entire Print module, that you have to admit, is one of the most robust in the industry. Aperture has books but that’s about it. They’re both important. Some portrait and wedding pros swear by Lightroom’s Print module and some folks swear by the great looking books in Aperture. Which is more important? That’s up to you. Personally, I’ll take the Print module in Lightroom. I can still print books elsewhere, but I can’t get Lightroom’s Print module anywhere else. Do I wish Lightroom had both? Yep. But it doesn’t so I have to make a choice.

By this point in the article I’ve realized Matt hasn’t actually tried out Aperture 3. To say that "Aperture’s got Books but that’s about it" just doesn’t have anything to do with the reality of the situation.

Aperture’ 3’s printing was rewritten from the ground up. There are presets in Aperture 3’s printing that allow you to do different layouts for different outputs. You can create multiple of the same image on a page, multiple of different images on the page, contact sheets, sequences and more. The options in Aperture 3 allow you to set the border, color profile, resolution, brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, margins border, logo, watermark, and metadata for any preset. You can change the size of a photo in the Print dialog box without having to crop your original image.

In this screenshot I’ve created a file to print that’s got a black border, log, watermark, metadata below it, and has the name and caption for the file under it, along with an area for my client to make comments. And I’ve saved that as a preset so I can come back to it time and time again.

Of course that brings me to Books, the major, impressive feature that allows you to create custom books yourself, from Apple or from third-party book creators. It’s a tool that brings significant revenue to wedding and event photographers. That’s a incredibly major and impressive feature set in Aperture that’s not available in Lightroom.

Matt opines that he wishes Lightroom had both, I wish that for him too, because then his software would be as powerful as Aperture 3.

This one definitely goes in the win column for Lightroom. If you look at Aperture 3’s feature list, it doesn’t even mention the word noise and as you know, noise removal is BIG. I ran quite a few images through the noise removal settings in both programs. Aperture doesn’t even come close in my opinion. Two things I noticed when comparing them: 1) The noise removal (luminance and color) is noticeably better and the edges seem more crisp as opposed to blurred in Aperture and, 2) Lightroom photos retained more of their color even after cranking up the Color Noise removal setting pretty high.

Basically, when it comes down to reading the raw data and doing something useful with it (demosaicing, sharpening, and noise removal), my money goes to Adobe. You’ve gotta realize that being the best at raw processing has to rank up pretty high in Adobe’s priority list. I’m not so sure where it would rank with Apple.

Matt would be sure if he took a look at Aperture. Remember earlier when I said that Adobe likes to do corrections after the fact in post and Aperture likes to do it in Pre? Here’s one of those cases.

First, I’ll point you at this article, which details some of the reasons why Lightroom has to make such a big deal about noise reduction—it does it very poorly in the RAW conversion.

I was going to demonstrate this with LR 3 beta and the Nikon D3s, but LR 3 beta doesn’t support the D3s.

This is one of the areas of discussion I don’t usually like to get into with a beta product. It’s one thing to compare a set of organization tools and another to discuss RAW conversions as they’re not usually finished until the shipping version is out.

However, I’ve done the same tests as the ones listed above, and I agree that the default LR convert is sharper (that’s not necessarily better mind you, as sharpness is added and it is destructive) but I completely disagree on noise issues between the two.

But with regard to noise reduction, Aperture has two tools, a noise slider in the Raw Fine Tuning and a Noise Reduction tool. The best place to remove noise in Aperture is in the Raw Fine Tuning tools. I’m not sure why Apple didn’t list the new RAW engine as part of their features, but the noise reduction in Aperture 3 a big part of the program. The reason that the Noise Reduction tool wasn’t mentioned though is because it was introduced in Aperture 1.0, so it’s only a new feature to Lightroom.

Here’s the Apple Tech Note about the new RAW noise reduction.

Reason #5: This isn’t an “I’m in the mood for…” game
I’m going to directly disagree with #5 from his list (supporting competition) and say ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, NO WAY! As a consumer, your (and my) job is not to support competition. It’s to support the best product out there and to reward that product by opening your wallet. Your job is to pick the best tool for your job regardless of whether there’s 10 companies that do the same thing or none. Here’s something to chew on. This isn’t a game. Your photography workflow shouldn’t be “sure, I’ll use Lightroom today but maybe Aperture tomorrow”. There’s always going to be features in one program that you like better than another. It happens in every aspect of our lives. Ever buy a car one year only to find out the next year’s model (or a competing model you looked at previously) has something really cool you wish you had? Do you go out and trade your car in for a huge loss and get the new model? Some of you do I’m sure. But it’s surely not economical to do so, and it takes a lot of your time, energy, and money to play that game. The rest of us, are happy enough with our existing car and we work with it. Your goal is to pick the program that works best for you at the time you’re looking for one, and then stick with it. Whether you’re a working pro or an avid hobbyist, nobody has the time to play the “switcharoo” every 18 months.

Matt and I partially agree here and partially disagree here. I agree that people shouldn’t just switch applications because a new one is out. There’s a lot to be said for a workflow one is comfortable with. But I think the analogy here to a car is vastly off point.

First, a car costs in the order of $5000 to $150,000 (if you’ve got that Ferarri I’ve always wanted) and most of us "make due" with our cars because there isn’t a tremendous advantage in a new car, because the technology doesn’t change radically. Lightroom costs $300, Aperture costs $200. It’s not the same as switching cars annually. This is a better analogy for the workflow behind the programs, as those are larger investments.

However, in the days before Toyotas were speeding out of control down the highway, many people switched to the Prius from their existing car because they ended up with radically better gas mileage and peace of mind. In that case, the switch between models was due to a new feature set, not a slightly improved console layout.

If you feel that the difference between Lightroom and Aperture is a console layout choice and not a functionality choice, then naturally not-switching is the right choice. Working in Lightroom and working in Aperture aren’t diametrically opposed to each other, they’re similar in terms of what the photographer wants. The question is one about maximum time saved and maximum image quality. Lightroom and Aperture both turn out a good looking image, so photographers need to think about their workflow and what the long-term version of that might look like. I totally agree that switching every 18 months is just too detrimental to a workflow to be feasible.

But to state that photographers shouldn’t or don’t switch based on technology flies in the face of the market data. In my years of covering photography I watched as legions of Nikon shooters switched en-masse to Canon, because they got better images from the Canon gear at the time. Now we’re watching people switch back to Nikon as Canon faces some marketing and hardware issues.

Personally I don’t think that "happy enough" is a good rationale for using a piece of software that touches everything I shoot. If my workflow shaves a few seconds off of working on an image, and I’m importing tens-of-thousands of images a year, that’s a big savings. If I’m an occasional photographer doing a little bit of retouching work, I don’t care at all.

What I do care about is the facts, and while this article is better reasoned than most, it still left out some of the facts about the programs, and it doesn’t do either much justice because there are untouched parts of each program that haven’t been mentioned at all in either of these pieces (the Lightroom one or the Aperture one it was based on).

One of the neat things that Aperture 3 does is automatically detect faces. In this example, you can see that Face detection has begun and is running on the imported images. You can get to this mode by selecting Show Activity from under the Window menu.

The blog posting also gives good information on Faces tagging with Facebook.

Symptoms
The pixel dimensions for some RAW images in your library may be slightly different after you upgrade to Aperture 3.

Products Affected
Aperture 3.x
Resolution
Aperture 3 more accurately calculates the pixel size of RAW images for certain cameras. As a result, you may notice very small differences in image size after upgrading to Aperture 3, if you reprocess existing masters. If you have cropped the affected images, the crop may also be slightly affected. The difference is typically less than 8 pixels in one or both directions. With Aperture 3, RAW and JPEG masters will be identical in size in the cases where they were shot full-sized and uncropped.

RAW images from these cameras may be affected:

New Pixel Dimensions in Aperture 3
Camera    New Pixel Size
Canon EOS 1D Mark II    3504 x 2336
Canon EOS 1D Mark III    3888 x 2592
Canon EOS 1D Mark IV    4896 x 3264
Canon EOS 1D Mark IIN    3504 x 2336
Canon EOS 1Ds    4064 x 2704
Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II    4992 x 3328
Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III    5616 x 3744
Canon EOS 5D    4368 x 2912
Canon EOS 7D    5184 x 3456
Canon EOS 30D    3504 x 2336
Canon EOS 40D    3888 x 2592
Canon EOS 50D    4752 x 3168
Nikon D3 – FX Mode    4256 x 2832
Nikon D3 – DX Mode    2784 x 1848
Nikon D3 – 5:4 Mode    3552 x 2832
Nikon D3s – FX Mode    4256 x 2832
Nikon D3s – DX Mode    2784 x 1848
Nikon D3s – 5:4 Mode    3552 x 2832
Nikon D3s – 1.2x Mode    3552 x 2368
Nikon D3X – FX Mode    6048 x 4032
Nikon D3X – DX Mode    3968 x 2640
Nikon D3X – 5:4 Mode    5056 x 4032
Nikon D80    3872 x 2592
Nikon D200    3872 x 2592
Nikon D300    4288 x 2848
Nikon D300s    4288 x 2848
Nikon D700 – FX Mode    4256 x 2832
Nikon D700 – DX Mode    2784 x 18

The first thing you’ll want to do to remove a brick is to have a brick to remove, naturally so in this example we’ll add a new Add Enhance adjustment brick by selecting it from the dropdown Action menu (the one that looks like a gear).

Again, for this example we’ll go overboard on this Enhance adjustment, throwing our image into the nether regions of poorly-edited images.

We could simply de-select the second Enhance setting and all the changes would be deactivated, or we could click the Reset button (which looks like a return arrow) but that still leaves a useless brick around.

The solution is to simply click on the unwanted brick (and it will turn grey) and then hit the Delete key. Whoosh, adjustment removed.

We’re involved in the Mobile Social, the big bicycle-ride/party/schwag giveaway that’s produced by Bike Hugger. Join the MacCreate crew as we help host the best gathering at SXSW. Details about this killer event are available from the link on Bike Hugger, but it’s open to registered guests. If you don’t have a bike to ride in Austin, no problem, you can still stop by our starting area and get a wristband to come join the fun at Mellow Johnny’s, the bike shop owned by Lance Armstrong. Food, music, giveaways, what more do you need?

While we’re not producing it, we are planning to attend the Capital Macintosh user group’s Photo Walk. It’s not on the calendar yet but it’s scheduled for 6:30pm Friday Evening meeting near 6th and Congress. Look for all the folks with cameras. You can follow the CapMac director Alex Suarez on Twitter @alex_suarez for more info.