Eww — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

Zam Wes­sel and a Gammorean

I didn’t plan on post­ing another photo from the Hyper­space Hoopla so soon, but it kind of reminded me of the near-​constant debate of Aper­ture vs. Light­room. Both are capa­ble prod­ucts with legions of sat­is­fied cus­tomers and each does, for the most part, what the other one does. Each has a few fea­tures that the other lacks. Yet despite all they have in com­mon, I’m con­stantly see­ing exchanges where one side is pimp­ing their prod­uct and insin­u­at­ing the other is infe­rior. I’m no stranger to that con­ver­sa­tion. In fact, I think that Aper­ture has some fea­tures that pro­vide a supe­rior work­flow to Light­room. How­ever, I would never rec­om­mend some­one switch because of those fea­tures. They’re nice, but I don’t believe they would over­come the enor­mous effort involved in migrat­ing thou­sands of pho­tos from one sys­tem to another.

As I’ve said repeat­edly, the only rea­son to switch is if you find a fea­ture in the com­pet­ing prod­uct that solves a prob­lem for you. Yet, that doesn’t keep some folks from get­ting upset about issues totally unre­lated to their work­flow and using them as a basis to switch.

The Scott Bourne Post

Scott Bourne recently wrote such a post express­ing his frus­tra­tion with Apple and used it as a basis to ratio­nal­ize a switch from Aper­ture to Light­room. The gist of his post is that Apple is aban­don­ing the pro­fes­sional mar­ket. His basis for a switch isn’t that he can’t do his work with the cur­rent offer­ings from Apple, but that he doesn’t trust them to have his inter­est in the future. I can’t say that I agree with his posi­tion, but it’s his choice to make.

In my view, Scott is mak­ing his busi­ness deci­sion based upon noth­ing more than Fear, Uncer­tainty and Doubt (FUD). He believes Apple is head­ing down a path, but he doesn’t know. In fact, some recent news about the Mac Pro con­tra­dicts one of his com­plaints in his arti­cle. While he was dis­ap­pointed that it only received a per­func­tory speed bump this year, news reports ver­i­fied from Apple execs state that a more sub­stan­tial update to the Mac Pro line is due for release next year.

The very fact that Apple made such a state­ment also indi­cated another flaw in Scott’s analy­sis. Apple has tra­di­tion­ally kept silent about future prod­ucts, but here is a con­fir­ma­tion of a major update to the Mac Pro! Per­haps that news had not yet reached Scott at the time he wrote his post. Oth­er­wise, it seems to fly in the face of his major com­plaint. It shows that Apple hasn’t aban­doned its Mac Pro and has also started shar­ing infor­ma­tion about a future prod­uct release.

The Aper­ture Expert Post

On the other end of the spectrum, Joseph Linaschke of Aper­ture Expert wrote an insight­ful arti­cle of what the Aper­ture 3.3 release means to its users. He addresses the issues of frus­tra­tion expressed by folks like Scott Bourne and gives some insight as to what is really inside the new release. Aper­ture 3.3 rep­re­sents a two-​year devel­op­ment effort by Apple: hardly what you would expect from a com­pany that was ready to drop a prod­uct line. In fact, Apple added fea­tures that specif­i­cally address pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers and aren’t found in con­sumer prod­ucts. While Scott bemoaned the fact that Aper­ture and iPhoto now share a com­mon data­base for­mat, I see it as a code-​saving effort that increases inter­op­er­abil­ity and reduces over­all main­te­nance costs for Apple. As Jospeh notes, this change makes it incred­i­bly easy for users to upgrade from iPhoto to Aperture.

Apple adver­tise­ments for the new Mac­Book Pro with Res­o­lu­tion Dis­play promi­nently fea­ture Aper­ture. In fact, Apple has con­sis­tently put more empha­sis on pho­tog­ra­phy and video usage in its prod­uct line. Just as the Light­room 4 release added many fea­tures that were already avail­able in Aper­ture, the new release of Aper­ture includes fea­tures that already exist­ing in Light­room (e.g., brush con­trols for White Bal­ance, post-​crop vignette). Both devel­op­ment teams are keep­ing an eye on the indus­try and adding fea­tures to remain on par with each other.

Who Needs to Worry?

Right now, I don’t think that either Adobe or Apple cus­tomers need to worry that they are going to lose sup­port. Even­tu­ally, some­thing will change the indus­try. It always hap­pens in soft­ware. Adobe Page­Maker InDe­sign is the king in its field right now, but it used to be Quark. Visi­calc gave way to Lotus 1−2−3 and it yielded to Excel. That’s why suc­cumb­ing to FUD is, in my opin­ion, a silly reac­tion. Change is inevitable, but you don’t really know who will be the game changer. you can bet on Adobe or Apple, but I would put my money on some startup with a com­pletely new prod­uct. Until it comes around, or until I find a new prob­lem to solve, I’ll stay with my exist­ing dig­i­tal asset man­ager. I sug­gest you do the same.

For those of you who have switched from one to another, how did it go?