Why Aperture Wins Out for Me

Yesterday, Adobe and Apple seemed to square off and take center ring at Photokina with updated versions of their powerful, pro-level photo management and processing programs, Lightroom and Aperture, respectively. I immediately downloaded Adobe’s Beta 4 to replace the last version that I already have loaded with photographs, but I’m searching deep in my account book to find the cash for a copy of Aperture.  

The battle is definitely on between these two titan programs with Apple’s Aperture of course already having won a few rounds simply because it’s beyond the beta stage as a more stable program.

I’ve worked through two versions of Lightroom and found many features I like. For one, it’s a free program–at the beta level, anyway–and it in my view it combines elements of Adobe’s Bridge and its Camera Raw plug-in so that images referenced in the program can processed quicker than in Photoshop. The batch processing, the slide show, and Camera Raw processing features have been very useful whenever I’ve used them. 

But on the other hand, I’ve found previous versions of Lightroom very slow and it’s interface unattractive. The beta 4 version has been spruced up and it seems to run faster, even on my little old Macmini.  Nonetheless, my bets are still on Aperture, even though I haven’t used the program beyond tinkering with it a few times in a local Apple store.

From what I know about Aperture, I think it’s for now anyway a superior management and digital processing program. It takes off from where iPhoto 6 begins and soars. I’m still a heavy user of iPhoto and what I like about this piece of iLife software makes me want to upgrade even more to Aperture. 

Aperture’s new features include: “flexible library management” whereby you can finally store images where you want rather than Aperture doing it for you, integration with iLife ’06 and iWork “06 (as a heavy user of both these program, that’s another wager I have for Aperture over Lightroom), new color controls, metadata and batch processing presets that you can set up and customize, and enhanced AppleScript and Automator support–just to name a few. And oh, I almost forgot. Just like in iPhoto, a little API plug-in enables you to upload photos directly from Aperture and into your Flickr.com account. This will lead the way for possibly some other web related mash-ups for developers to create. 

Photo management seems to be one of Aperture strongest points over Lightroom. With its Smart Folders features, like you find in iPhoto 6, Aperture wins another round over Lightroom which only has a similar feature called Quick Collection which you have to manually update. Lightroom’s Shoots and Collections arrangement is very confusing because it’s simply not obvious how they work together or how you should use them separately. Aperture provides much creator control over album creation and management.

In terms of digital photo processing, I’m not as familiar with Aperture’s abilities as I would like, but I’ve gotten really good feedback from other users that you can get a lot of processing work done within the program without having to send your photos to Photoshop.

My only wishlist item for Aperture right now that Apple delivers better, more professional looking photo albums. With album creation being so easy to do in iPhoto and Aperture, providing options for laminated coated page covers with higher quality Matt or Glossy finish paper would make many other pro photographers go with Aperture over Lightroom, or similar programs.

While I’m not recommending that fellow pro Mac users and photographers avoid Lightroom, I do contend that Aperture has much to offer in its own right and it should only get better.