Today I spent pretty much the whole day trying to figure out whether I should use Adobe Lightroom 3 or Apple’s Aperture 3.
Here’s what I want to ultimately accomplish:
- store my photos on an external drive
- be able to edit/retouch non-destructively select photos without being tethered to my external drive
- localized adjustments
- adjustment brushes for every type of adjustment, including curves (lightroom adjustment brushes “only” let you adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness, and color overlay; not that these options are limiting in any way)
- Faces detection and tagging
- Native GPS and location tagging (lightroom can achieve this with a 3rd party plug-in)
- More advanced slideshow options (e.g. multiple audio tracks which can be interspersed with arbitrary durations)
- Some superior editing features like noise reduction (very impressive) and lens distortion correction
- Physical folder management with the ability to synchronize to the contents of the physical folder (plays nice with manual copy/move operations you do in the file system)
- side-by-side comparisons with synchronized panning and zooming
- cross platform compatibility (but legally, you need 2 separate licenses to install on both mac and windows)
- Aperture is $79.99 from the Mac App Store vs. $99.00 for Lightroom (Education price; there is also a Student/Teacher edition which is $89.99)
- Aperture can be installed on numerous mac computers linked to your iTunes account (possibly more than 2)
- Lightroom can be installed on up to 2 computers with a single license (but again, must be the same platform)
- both are for personal/non-commercial use at the prices and licensing options listed
- One click for applying a previous photo’s adjustments to the current photo
- when performing undo, an overlay shows you what operation was undone – this is a very nice touch
- writing metadata changes directly to the master files (this is possible in Aperture supposedly, but seems like there’s a bug and you get an error if you try to write metadata changes to master jpg files)
- the keyword tagging interface
- a significantly smaller memory footprint (no rigorous tests performed, but when I had both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 open, Aperture 3 consistently took up much more memory). This is a pretty major bummer for me in choosing Aperture 3 instead of Lightroom. In practice, both ran smoothly on the macbook air, so hopefully it says that way after time.
- smaller catalog size vs. Aperture’s library size (this is mostly because Aperture generates more preview files, which can be turned off).
- a friend pointed out a rather good point: adobe is more trustworthy and more mature in this area than Apple