Aperture or Lightroom ??

[Chairman Bill]

No, why, would it interest anyone visiting my site?

My point was that you were indicating how popular the page on moving from Aperture to Lightroom is, but it is a pretty meaningless statistic unless we can compare it to those moving in the other direction

[sharperstill]

I have used both for about 3 years each. With Aperture, 3 corrupt libraries over those years. With Lightroom 0.
The corrupt Aperture libraries happened with both 'managed' and 'referenced' files. At least one was due to physical damage/bad sectors on the HDD (this was on a frequently moving-during-use laptop.)
The corrupted libraries cost a lot of hours and, in some cases, the irretrievable loss of original raw files.

Jon

[ario]

I have used both for about 3 years each. With Aperture, 3 corrupt libraries over those years. With Lightroom 0.
The corrupt Aperture libraries happened with both 'managed' and 'referenced' files. At least one was due to physical damage/bad sectors on the HDD (this was on a frequently moving-during-use laptop.)
The corrupted libraries cost a lot of hours and, in some cases, the irretrievable loss of original raw files.

Jon

No backups? No Time machine?

[john beardsworth]

LOL. First time I heard anyone say that about Apple.

Shorter attention spans? That is a really unfortunate comment. 

No. It was presented as much in jest / rhetorically as the other comment - as you would see if you quoted the whole sentence, noted the "So" at its start and the question mark at its end, and words "Not really" which began the following sentence.

However, there is a grain of truth there. LR's interface is explicitly designed to encourage a more orderly workflow - do your metadata, then do your adjustments, then prepare the slideshow or book. Aperture's allows you to do those tasks at the same time, and that's not necessarily a good thing, but it will have appeal to a certain character type.

[john beardsworth]

My point was that you were indicating how popular the page on moving from Aperture to Lightroom is, but it is a pretty meaningless statistic unless we can compare it to those moving in the other direction

Depends on what meaning you infer. The overall direction is obvious anyway, and LR > Ap is sufficiently easy that such a page might not be needed.

[sharperstill]

No backups? No Time machine?

All work was 'archived', though in JPG format and only, eventually, to optical media.
This was when I was a staff shooter on a large metro newspaper in Sydney Australia. They wouldn't archive Raw files due to the volume produced by 20 odd staff shooting 3-4 jobs per day.
I kept copies of my best work, but they day to day chaff I didn't bother with my own backups.
A corrupt library usually meant at least the loss of all metadata & adjustments. I still have folders full of raw files as they came off the camera. Slowly re-organising them.

[john beardsworth]

Still, I'm not sure Aperture is more prone to corruption than Lr, or vice versa. In each case, it's pretty rare.

Where you might make a comparison is that Lr can save its adjustments and metadata into xmp, automatically if you want, so you have a method of recovering much of your work. Aperture can't do that automatically, doesn't save its adjustments, and writes directly into proprietary raw files. 

[ario]

What about a back up of the Aperture library and of the raw files? This has to be a mandatory routine with every workflow no matter which SW you use. A useful recent copy of your important files , uncorrupted, should be always available. Any file can get corrupted at some time either due to the SW or to the HW.

[john beardsworth]

I don't think he wants a solution now - the thread is more about a comparison of Aperture with Lightroom.

[ButchM]

If you disagree or don't like Aperture then that is your choice, but why are you here on the Aperture section?

I think the answer to your question is quite evident, if you had taken the time to read my initial or subsequent comments in this thread.

For my specific workflow requirements, Aperture satisfies those requirements more fully. I am also honest enough to admit, Lr is not without it's own set of merits. Neither offering can claim perfection or total superiority over the other.

The point is, there are many areas where Aperture is indeed far superior to Lr. There is no need to make false claims to advance that cause.

[jjj]

LOL. First time I heard anyone say that about Apple.

Apple give their OS and a lot of their software away for nothing. The reason being they are a hardware company and can afford to give it away as the stuff to run it on is rather expensive.

[jjj]

IMHO having to use Auto Hide and Show to cover something that it not necessary in the first place is just bad design. I find the Lightroom interface a dog.

What an odd thing to say. There are tools I personally do not use very much. But that does not mean they are unnecessary as many other users rely on those features and being able to have tools hidden until you need then is in fact very good design as it frees up space and allows you to have a lot more tools in the programme without clutter. Not to mention auto hide/show is one of several ways you can use the interface, it can be turned off if you want. Aperture however feels more like something designed in the 90s with messy floating palettes cluttering up the screen. Wouldn't be so bad if you could collapse or dock them. Calling palettes HUDs doesn't alter the fact that they obscure the image you are trying to work on or other parts of the interface. Moving bits of UI around the place is what we put up with 20 years ago. Things have moved on since then, well for most software.
If you want to talk bad design, a UI where tools you are not using cannot be hidden or need to be accesses via menus or making relocating moved files so painful, it's not worth the effort. And files do need to be moved, before you try and argue they should be left alone, as hard drives fill up/age/fail.
Aperture used to be a nice looking programme but now it's ugly and amateurish in appearance.

Something I should have added in regards to the Aperture price. It is an App in the App store and by comparison to most Apps, it is not cheap. The reason it should be and is a lot cheaper than Lightroom is that it doesn't need to provide raw converters, because that is all done in the OS, where it should be done. As new cameras come on line then it automatically supports them, without dropping support for older cameras like Adobe does.

Adobe add support, they do not drop it.
As for the price, it started out at over £500, but it was such a pile of crap that Apple ended up refunding people and had to drop the price, sharpish. And they keep dropping it to tempt people away from LR, yet it always has had a very low take up amongst pro photographers as it simply isn't a patch on LR. It also seems to have been left to rot and die as it hasn't had a point update for over 4 years, which really doesn't inspire confidence. In fact on the FB page  We want Aperture 4, it's mostly full of posts about people moving to LR.

[BobShaw]

Apple give their OS and a lot of their software away for nothing. The reason being they are a hardware company and can afford to give it away as the stuff to run it on is rather expensive.

Apple are not a hardware company. They are an integrated product company. They design something and then tell an engineer to go and make it. When Apple built the iPod it should have been relatively easy for Sony, who pretty much controlled the music industry with both content and players in the Walkman, to come out with something similar. They couldn't because they were organised in divisions. Apple have a single P&L and each section does not need to make a profit, as long as the whole thing makes a profit. The hardware and the software being made by the same company means that it will usually work and if it doesn't then only one party needs to fix it.

If you buy a PC then the hardware, operating system, applications, content and even the shops they they are sold in all have to make a profit, so quality is a compromise and there is no guarantee that they work together.

As for the stuff to run on it being expensive.
The operating system is free, and an upgrade from any operating system on most machines made after 2007 is also free. Compare that to Windows XP, 7, 8, 8.1. The operating system is also the full version, not a home version. (Companies who bought Windows Server 8.1 have just been told it's not going to be supported and you have like 90 days to migrate your enterprise. Fortunately most never went there.)

The backup system, raw conversion, virus protection if you want it is also free.
Pages, Numbers, Keynote (Word, Excel, Powerpoint like) and a whole pile of other apps like iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband etc are also free.
The most expensive applications I own are from Adobe and Microsoft.

I guess that makes me a fanboy, but one who has been in the IT industry for 40 year and used a PC 8 hours a day since DOS 6.1
Anyway, as I said, it's a personal preference so please do whatever you want, and I'll do the same

[martin archer-shee]

WOW

I started this discussion because I am truly interested in finding the best solution. There is no best solution but only one that satisfies oneself. I say this as it appears from the many posts that both LR and Aperture have many good points and neither is perfect. Obviously LR has an advantage in being useable in both PC and Apple platforms.I don't know if results from one can be easily moved to the other.
I must say the replies to this thread have been very interesting and informative ( and not too much blood has been spilt). I do not know where I will end up yet but will definitely have a serious shot at Aperture as part of my trying to switch (at least partially) from a PC platform. Who knows I might actually end up dropping the PC.
Thanks again Lawrence for the help when buying my MBPro and all of you for your thoughts on LR and/vs Aperture. I will continue to see what else is said. Thanks to all.

Martin   

[digitaldog]

Martin, the question is akin to Mac or PC, Nikon or Canon, Pacific or Atlantic ocean  . In the end, it becomes personal preference and hopefully that preference is based on sound testing of the two possible options. So you kind of have to aim the same group of raw images at both converters and see what you prefer. I know, it's a lot of work. But asking which product to select, as you've seen here is ultimately pointless. What works best for you isn't.

[RobSaecker]

Aperture however feels more like something designed in the 90s with messy floating palettes cluttering up the screen. Wouldn't be so bad if you could collapse or dock them. Calling palettes HUDs doesn't alter the fact that they obscure the image you are trying to work on or other parts of the interface.

Eh, what? If you don’t like the HUDs, don’t use them. I don’t.

[jjj]

Eh, what? If you don’t like the HUDs, don’t use them. I don’t.

Yup I choose not to bother with out of date software that looks like it was designed in the previous century.

[ButchM]

Yup I choose not to bother with out of date software that looks like it was designed in the previous century.

Then you must really dislike working in Photoshop.  

[RobSaecker]

Yup I choose not to bother with out of date software that looks like it was designed in the previous century.

Ah, I see. You’re just here to troll then.

[Gigi]

Can you change the color space (profile) for an image in either Aperture or Lightroom?