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The Aperture vs Lightroom Discussion

Posted on April 12, 2011 // 33 Comments

Improve your Aperture Workflow

Aper­ture vs Lightroom

In most cases, I’d rather use my blog to come up with my own con­tent instead of reply to some­thing brought up else­where. How­ever, this topic of Aper­ture vs Light­room came up on The Grid today and Scott Kelby said some­thing that caught my atten­tion. Scott’s com­ment was that Adobe’s Cam­era RAW was the indus­try stan­dard for RAW con­ver­sion (I agree that it is), but he also stated he’d never read any­one say that Aperture’s RAW con­ver­sion was bet­ter than Adobe’s.

When I think about it, I really don’t recall read­ing that Adobe’s RAW con­ver­sion is bet­ter than Aperture’s…or any other RAW con­ver­sion engine. It just doesn’t seem to be a topic that gen­er­ally comes up in prod­uct reviews or dis­cus­sions of these products. I read on another Aper­ture user’s blog that he felt it cre­ated a bet­ter RAW con­ver­sion than Adobe Cam­era RAW, and he had some images to illus­trate his point. This could be sim­ply a mat­ter of taste, though. To be fair, Matt Kloskowski brought up a point on the show that some issues like this are sub­jec­tive — that we choose prod­ucts based upon a look that matches the photographer’s taste.

I decided to put this to a test. Actu­ally, I’ve done that before and pre­ferred Aperture’s con­ver­sion. That was prior to updates from both Adobe and Apple, so this seemed like a good excuse to see how the new engines com­pare. Both images were saved at the best qual­ity JPG, 72 DPI, sRGB color space. I didn’t make any adjust­ments to the images, so this is as close as I can get to show­ing you how they appear upon con­ver­sion and export.

I’m using cur­rent ver­sions of Adobe Pho­to­shop CS5 and Aper­ture 3 at the time of this post.

I man­aged to get a stun­ning, dirty-​blonde model to assist my test.

The Adobe Cam­era RAW Con­ver­sion Image

Zach, my Golden Retriever

Adobe Cam­era RAW Con­ver­sion — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

The Aper­ture 3 RAW Conversion

Zach, my Golden Retriever

Aper­ture 3 RAW Con­ver­sion — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

I pre­fer the Aper­ture con­ver­sion to the Adobe con­ver­sion. The Adobe image seems a bit more washed out and flat­ter than the Aper­ture image, but not by much. In fact, I’m pleased to see how much the Adobe ver­sion has improved since the last time I tried this com­par­i­son. Dur­ing my pre­vi­ous test, the Adobe con­ver­sion didn’t seem as sharp as the Aper­ture con­ver­sion. It doesn’t appear that way to me this time. To be sure, I zoomed in to 200% for a closer look.

Adobe 200%

Dog's eye

Adobe 200% Crop — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

Aper­ture 200% Crop

Dog's eye

Aper­ture 200% Crop — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

I don’t see a notice­able dif­fer­ence in sharp­ness in the Aper­ture vs Light­room RAW con­ver­sion com­par­i­son. I think the dif­fer­ences I detect between the RAW con­ver­sion may be due to slightly more Blacks in the Aper­ture con­ver­sion. That’s some­thing eas­ily adjusted in Adobe prod­ucts with a slider. I’m still hap­pier with the ini­tial image from Aper­ture, but I don’t think that the dif­fer­ences are as far apart as my pre­vi­ous tests. Either prod­uct can deliver a good RAW con­ver­sion and let you make adjust­ments to suit your taste. So if you hear some­one say­ing that Aperture’s con­ver­sion is bet­ter than Adobe’s, or vice-​versa, they’re blow­ing smoke. Both prod­ucts are really very close in con­ver­sion quality.

Also, I think that Adobe users should be happy with the com­pe­ti­tion pro­vided by Apple and oth­ers. That com­pe­ti­tion is what dri­ves these cor­po­ra­tions to improve their prod­ucts and we all benefit.

You’re Alone

The only com­ment Scott made that dis­ap­pointed me was when he told Aper­ture users that they’re all alone (or words to that effect). I don’t have any doubt that the Light­room com­mu­nity is larger, given that it’s avail­able on Win­dows and Mac plat­forms, and Aper­ture is only avail­able on the Mac. That said, I’m not sur­prised that Scott Kelby doesn’t see as much of the Aper­ture com­mu­nity. He’s invested in the Adobe com­mu­nity and I believe that’s going to dom­i­nate his per­cep­tion. When you teach work­shops ded­i­cated to one vendor’s prod­uct line, you may not get as much inter­ac­tion from users of another prod­uct. I don’t doubt that some Aper­ture users have asked for train­ing and now there are a pair of Aper­ture courses on Kel​by​Train​ing​.com. They’re good courses, but I don’t antic­i­pate any ongo­ing devel­op­ment of mate­r­ial for Aperture.

Scott shared a story about a man who was talk­ing about all the neat fea­tures of the Microsoft Zune, and how it was a bet­ter device than Apple’s iPod. That may be true, but peo­ple are buy­ing the iPod. His point in telling that story was that fea­tures aren’t always what sell a prod­uct. He’s right. We may dif­fer, though, on what aspect makes another prod­uct a bet­ter choice. It appeared as if Scott was sug­gest­ing Light­room was the bet­ter choice because of the com­mu­nity. I believe that Aper­ture is a bet­ter choice because of the user expe­ri­ence. Both are valid, so you have to decide for your­self which is more impor­tant to you when eval­u­at­ing Aper­ture vs Lightroom.

I use Aper­ture for my photo man­age­ment and Pho­to­shop for image fin­ish­ing. Both are excel­lent prod­ucts, but they serve dif­fer­ent needs. Aper­ture and Light­room are sim­i­lar enough that I can take con­cepts from one and apply it to the other. How much dif­fer­ence is there in key­word strat­egy between the two prod­ucts? When it comes to file man­age­ment, I think Aper­ture has a dis­tinct advan­tage with its data­base approach com­pared to Light­room Cat­a­logs (though Aper­ture lets you choose either approach). When I watch other peo­ple show me their work­flow in Light­room, it seems to me that they put a great deal of time into their file man­age­ment strat­egy to over­come the inher­ent weak­ness of using file names, folder hier­ar­chies and cat­a­log tech­niques vs. using a data­base. Then they put in more time to come up with backup strategies.

I have four Aper­ture data­bases. Yes, I can make projects and fold­ers inside, but I really don’t have to do any of that stuff. All I need to do is tag a few key­words and rely upon meta­data that comes from the cam­era to orga­nize my images any way that I want. If I want to backup my images, I push one but­ton and Aper­ture updates a Vault (another data­base) with the changes since my last backup. If I want to move my images from one drive to another, I drag & drop the data­base. There’s no worry about break­ing a cat­a­log. In other words, I spend less time think­ing about man­ag­ing my images because Aper­ture has the means to do that work for me.

Am I alone? Am I out in left field using Aper­ture while the rest of the world uses Light­room? I doubt it, but it wouldn’t bother me if that were true. I don’t fol­low a crowd for the sake of fol­low­ing the crowd. I per­ceive Aper­ture as the bet­ter prod­uct because its fea­tures allow for a bet­ter work­flow than I would have if I used Light­room. The other folks using Light­room may have more tips and pre­sets, but they appear to need them more than I do.

That doesn’t mean I don’t envy a few fea­tures in Light­room. It has much bet­ter noise reduc­tion than Aper­ture, and it has a few adjust­ments that are lack­ing in Aper­ture (e.g. Gra­di­ents). I like its inte­gra­tion with Pho­to­shop, but Aper­ture bet­ter inte­grates with the Mac OS X envi­ron­ment. When I get right down to it, the things that may be lack­ing in Aper­ture are avail­able to me in Pho­to­shop CS5, but the work­flow fea­tures that I like in Aper­ture are not avail­able in Light­room. In a world of com­pro­mise, I find Aper­ture & Pho­to­shop a bet­ter solu­tion than Light­room & Pho­to­shop. It’s not about the fea­tures, but the expe­ri­ence. Your mileage may vary.

Both prod­ucts have a lot to offer. Both have free trial ver­sions so you can decide which one works best for you. If you’ve already invested a lot of time in man­ag­ing your images in one, stick with it unless you have a very com­pelling rea­son to change. Peer pres­sure isn’t a com­pelling rea­son. Think about all of the images that you’ve mod­i­fied, adjusted, marked as a favorite, etc…then think about doing it all over again if you decide to switch. Now that’s a loy­alty pro­gram in itself.

UPDATE: This turned out to be a very pop­u­lar post, as many peo­ple are try­ing to decide the Aper­ture vs Light­room issue. So I decided to do some­thing that I hope is a bit more help­ful. I cre­ated the Aper­ture vs Light­room blog to look at the fea­tures of each prod­uct and com­pare them. Please stop by to check it out. If you have ques­tions or sug­ges­tions for com­par­isons, I’d love your feedback.

Filed Under: Aperture, Apple, Photography // Tagged: , , , , , , ,
About William

Author, Photographer and IT Manager. I have a fondness for chocolate. I also own Suburbia Press and Aperture vs Lightroom.

  • Craig Thoburn

    I own both prod­ucts and I find I agree, I love the Aper­ture Pho­to­shop combo the best. I would also add that if you pur­chase Aper­ture from the new Apple App Store it is a lot cheaper as well.

    • http://www.williambeem.com William

      Aper­ture is def­i­nitely win­ning on the price issue at $79. That puts it within reach of a much larger audi­ence. How­ever, Light­room wins on the plat­form side when you con­sider sup­port for Win­dows & Mac. I still think they’re both good prod­ucts. Since I’m on the Mac plat­form and have the choice, I think Aper­ture is a bet­ter fit for my work­flow expe­ri­ence. Hey, look. We’re not alone after all!

  • Tim

    Kelby has great mate­ri­als but they do have blind­ers on at times. Most I their train­ing and pod­casts are led by men. The new pho­tog­ra­phers com­ing up through the ranks are pre­dom­i­nately women. So you may see a day when shifts in the com­mu­nity impact more than soft­ware choice.

  • http://www.prooooof.com Keith

    I’m in the process of a switch now from Aper­ture to Light­room because the RAW pro­cess­ing is dogshit in Aper­ture. If you want con­trast just add that later in your looks, it’s bet­ter to start with a bal­anced, flat image. I can show you exam­ples in my con­cert pho­tog­ra­phy where Aper­ture com­pletely misses the mark and does some weird things with the magen­tas and blues that doesn’t hap­pen at all when you run the same RAW image through Pho­to­shop. Plus since Apple end of lifed Final Cut Pro I don’t trust them for a sec­ond not to do the same to Aperture.

    • http://www.williambeem.com William

      I agree with your premise, but not your assess­ment of Aperture’s RAW proces­sor. Based upon my tests, it does a bet­ter job than Cam­era RAW/​Lightroom. How­ever, you gotta do what works best for you and your images. I don’t have a large store of con­cert pho­tos, so you may be run­ning into issues that I haven’t experienced.

  • Dar­ren

    We would like to main­tain a cat­a­log of images in a net­work using mac soft­ware that’s user friendly and cre­ated for a network.

    I’ve heard that Light­room is not designed for a net­work but there are workarounds. Is any­one actively doing that?

    With the new release of Aper­ture it is net­work avail­able but our con­cern is with Apple’s long term com­mit­ment to that soft­ware. Has any­one heard what they might be con­sid­er­ing doing with Aper­ture after the lat­est release?

    • http://www.williambeem.com William

      Why is Apple’s long term com­mit­ment to soft­ware any more or less rel­e­vant than any other ven­dor? Apple does gen­er­ally does not pro­vide long-​term soft­ware roadmaps for its prod­ucts. If any­one tells you they know what’s com­ing out next — out­side of an offi­cial announce­ment from Apple — I would dis­re­gard it as rumor.

      As I see it, you have a choice between a prod­uct that meets your needs today and one that doesn’t. Will you dis­re­gard that because of fear, uncer­tainty or doubt?

  • http://www.haitiaction.net Ran­dall White

    Well, I’m still at the cross­roads here, I still use a ver 1 of Light­room and am now review­ing the upgrade, but I intuit that Aper­a­ture may be more of my pref­er­ence where it comes to actual workflow.

    What has intrigued me for some time is how to auto­mate a pref­er­ence to cre­ate a true DVD backup — in addi­tion to the work­ing file/​catalogue in my exter­nal drive — at the same time I import the images soon after get­ting back to my hotel room. The real key here is a true, non-​altered, NEF-​RAW file to ref­er­ence. I went to a work­shop at the Adobe HQ in San Fran­cisco recently and they do a bit dis­sem­bling when it comes to a dis­cus­sion of “non-​destructive edit­ing.” For some crit­i­cal images I like to go to using Nikon’s NX2 to get the opti­mal tweaks before sav­ing a new file. One app that respected the orig­i­nal file was Light­Zone — some­thing that I was very opti­mistic about five years ago.

    Light­room pulls the old MSFT trick of of push­ing you into their pro­pri­etary dig­i­tal work­flow. You can do non-​destructive edit­ing, but you have to hard­wire it, there’s no sec­tion in the man­ual to read and it’s non-​intuitive.

    So I’m spend­ing some more time look­ing at Aper­ture, I recently popped for Final­Cut X so I got to spend an inor­di­nate amount of time learn­ing rather than producing…

    • http://www.williambeem.com William

      Now that’s an inter­est­ing require­ment. Since I don’t use DVD backup, I can’t tell you for cer­tain that it meets your require­ments. There’s no men­tion of DVD in the Aper­ture Help, so I pre­sume you would have to cre­ate your own work­flow to export the mas­ters and burn them to disc.

  • http://www.haitiaction.net Ran­dall White

    Most of us sim­ply go with hard drive backup but I have the hard dri­ves fail on a reg­u­lar basis. DVD is a bit more sta­ble. It’s a good way to have a sec­ond or third “fail-​safe” copy. Blu-​ray is almost get­ting to the point will it will be eco­nom­i­cal enough.

    When you’re on the road you can also mail a few home if you want to be extra care­ful or if you wish the images to arrive sooner. Light­room sort of has a sys­tem, but forces one to go DNG.

  • Margie

    After using Light­room since the 1st beta, I have decided to end my invest­ment in it. I have been ask­ing Adobe for print pro­file and they’re response is for me to buy Pho­to­shop, there­fore mak­ing a big­ger invest­ment.
    I pur­chased Aper­ture last night and am very impressed, and finally have print pro­file. Now all I need is a raw update for The Lumix G-​3.

  • Eileen

    I am a very green pho­tog­ra­pher and was unsure which way to go as far Light Room, Pho­to­shop, and Aper­ture. I would like to thank all of you for help­ing me in mak­ing my final choice.

    • http://www.williambeem.com William

      I’m glad this helped. If you have ques­tions, let us know.

  • Josh

    For those of you talk­ing about backup to exter­nal disk or DVD you may con­sider drop­box or box​.com. Cloud back­ups that are always acces­si­ble on any device or com­puter and with ver­sion­ing and dele­tion pro­tec­tion are the new backup.

  • http://richberrett.com rich

    so, I own Aper­ture but have found the Apple one on one inad­e­quate to teach me how to use it, though they have been great in other areas. Cur­rently I use Bridge to orga­nize and store and Pho­to­shop 5 to process… Most of my friends either do not have an opin­ion or they rave about light­room. My choices are three, con­tinue to ignore aper­ture and not buy light­room, learn aper­ture (per­haps some of you have sug­gested learn­ing sup­port), buy and lean light­room… feed­back is welcome

    • http://www.williambeem.com William

      Rich, learn Aper­ture. Light­room is a good prod­uct, but I think Aper­ture is bet­ter. You’ll find there are things you can do in one that you can’t do in the other, and vice versa. How­ever, Aperture’s orga­ni­za­tional abil­i­ties seem to sur­pass Light­room. You don’t have to use a clunky modal inter­face where you can only access fea­tures in a given mod­ule. Aper­ture lets you do any­thing, any­where. Also, you have an option to use a data­base in Aper­ture that doesn’t exist in Light­room. It greatly sim­pli­fies backup and lets you move your images with ease. If you have Kel​by​Train​ing​.com, then look for an Aper­ture course from Rich Har­ring­ton. You can also find some good Aper­ture blogs and resources online with some searches. Get used to using key­words (I’ve shared my key­word hier­ar­chy here on the blog) and other meta­data to sim­plify find­ing your images as they grow.

  • Clive Sin­clair

    I have both the lat­est ver­sions of Aper­ture, Light­room and CS5 — run­ning on a Mid 2010 Mac­book Pro with 8gb RAM and Lion

    Light­room runs a lot faster than Aper­ture. I also like the way Light­room uses sim­ple fold­ers to store images — mean­ing I can copy, move easily.

    The major thing for me right now is cross plat­form. Cur­rently I am unem­ployed and should my Apple prod­ucts break (I also have a 2009 iMac), I sim­ply could not afford to buy another Mac­book Pro, but I could buy a Win­dows, PC and just copy my fold­ers over and view them using a vari­ety of software.

    So, if you will always use and be able to afford Apple prod­ucts, then Aper­ture is worth a look. IF how­ever you need cross plat­form use, then Aper­ture is not an option.

  • Bob Bran­non

    I have used both Light­room and Aper­ture. I like Apple Aper­ture the best. I actu­ally think that Light­room has a design prob­lem in that it pho­tos can become dis­con­nected from your cat­a­log for a vari­ety of rea­sons. When I talked to one of Adobe’s specialist’s on the Scott Kelby Team, he explained that this can hap­pen for a vari­ety of rea­sons and he listed them all. I actu­ally think that despite the program’s weak­nesses, Light­room gets a great deal of pub­lic­ity through NAPP and Scott Kelby Train­ing sites. I do not want to con­vert any­one to Aper­ture. Let pho­tog­ra­phers find out and make deci­sions on their own. I also am not biased against Adobe. I think Adobe Pho­to­shop is the best post pro­cess­ing edit­ing pro­gram avail­able. I use it for any nec­es­sary advanced edit­ing when I am done with my edit­ing in Aper­ture. Bob

  • Steve

    Thanks, all, for the great com­ments and insight. I’ve pretty much moved to mac for all my photo pro­cess­ing and have, until now, used iPhoto. I down­loaded trial ver­sions of both and liked fea­tures of both, but the argu­ments for Aper­ture are becom­ing clearer and clearer. Light Room is more expen­sive, but that doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally make it bet­ter. And Aper­ture is cer­tainly a nat­ural choice for a mac/​iPhoto user.

  • Rita

    I’ve just started learn­ing Aper­ture to help my brother on his mac. Sup­pos­edly Aper­ture uses an “aggres­sive non lin­ear gamma cor­rec­tion” based on the cam­era model in the raw edit­ing which defaults at 100%. That could be part of the rea­son why your Adobe file looks slightly washed out to you. Like dif­fer­ences in gamma between Macs & PCs weren’t enough (I use a PC). My brother loves the asset man­age­ment part of Aper­ture. I have prob­lems with Apple’s “you don’t need to know” atti­tude. The “really large” but unde­fined (secret) color space of Aper­ture does not help with color man­age­ment. Right now my brother and I are com­par­ing edits of raw files in Aper­ture vs. Adobe Cam­era Raw and with prints made from either Aper­ture or Pho­to­shop CS5 with the goal of being able to pre­dict what the print will actu­ally look like. Lots of 4×6 prints with sharpie writ­ten notes.

    • Web­mas­ter

      Keep in mind that I noted the dif­fer­ences aren’t that huge any­more. There used to be a much larger dif­fer­ence in qual­ity between Aper­ture & Adobe Cam­era Raw con­ver­sions, but now the dif­fer­ence will only show up to the pixel peep­ers. Nobody is going to look at a fin­ished image from an Adobe prod­uct and say, “Oh, man. You screwed up by not using Aper­ture to con­vert your RAW files.” Other than a side-​by-​side com­par­i­son, it’s a neg­li­gi­ble dif­fer­ence now.

      Asset man­age­ment is the pri­mary pur­pose of prod­ucts like Aper­ture and Light­room. It’s nice that they do some photo edit­ing, but what really mat­ters is how they orga­nize your infor­ma­tion. I think Aperture’s Man­aged sys­tem is far supe­rior to the ref­er­enced cat­a­log used in Light­room, but Aper­ture can let you do that if you sim­ply “must” know where your files are in a direc­tory struc­ture. Both sys­tems are far above using Bridge, though.

      I don’t see Apple hav­ing a “you don’t need to know” atti­tude, if you’re refer­ring to the Man­aged sys­tem. As I men­tioned, you can use either approach. In any case, what folks think they know is really just an illu­sion. The direc­tory struc­ture of a file sys­tem is just a cat­a­log point­ing to files on the disk. You access those files through its inter­face. In that regard, Aperture’s Man­aged sys­tem is exactly the same. It’s just a pointer to files inside of a con­tainer and you access them through the Aper­ture interface.

  • Rita

    It’s the unde­fined color space that I ref­er­enced in Apple’s “don’t need to know” attitude.

    Aperture’s easy sys­tem of dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment has finally allowed my brother to con­sol­i­date, group, and tag his dig­i­tal images from stacks of CDs (old road store device), hard discs on old com­put­ers, and sev­eral Epson P2000’s. We are talk­ing about 7 years of dig­i­tal files –imported, sorted, key­words added — all in a few weeks. He had had Light­room 2 for sev­eral years, but never really used it. He bought a Mac and Aper­ture after watch­ing the ease with which a fel­low pho­tog­ra­pher man­aged his files.

    I prob­a­bly fit your def­i­n­i­tion of ‘pixel peeper’ but that’s O.K. with me. I was very happy to find your web site & posts because there just isn’t that much out there for Aper­ture (printed or web) com­pared to ACR. I guess Kelby’s obvi­ous bias is shared by some oth­ers. I’m sure that some of my issues with Aper­ture will fade away after I learn to speak Mac. My brother is a won­der­ful pho­tog­ra­pher, but he some­times needs a geek interpreter.

  • http://www.orlandolocal.com William Beem

    OK, sorry for the con­fu­sion. As for Aper­ture, it inte­grates with the Mac OS X Color Sync util­ity. So I don’t think it isn’t a mat­ter that Apple won’t tell you what Aper­ture uses for color space. It just uses what­ever you’ve defined for the over­all sys­tem. If you take a look at that util­ity, you’ll find a few dif­fer­ent color spaces avail­able. If I’ve mis­un­der­stood you again, please let me know.

    I def­i­nitely like Aperture’s orga­ni­za­tion abil­i­ties. For exam­ple, I may not need or want to review every­thing when I import it. That’s when I’ll use the color-​coding sys­tem. Orange is “to be reviewed.” Yel­low is “To be processed.” and Green is a fin­ished image. Once I color code the images, they’re very easy to find visu­ally. I can even build a Smart Album to see all of my “To be processed” images with­out hav­ing to wade through the entire library look­ing for a good one.

    As for the arti­cle, I’m glad it was use­ful to you. Kelby has a lot rid­ing on Adobe Pho­to­shop prod­ucts, so I under­stand why they con­cen­trate on those prod­ucts. That’s why I occa­sion­ally do my own com­par­isons and share the results. I will prob­a­bly do more posts on work­flow in the future, but please let me know if there are other RAW pro­cess­ing issues you’d like to see addressed. I try not to be a pixel peeper, but some­times the engi­neer inside me wins the battle.

  • Trisha

    What a great dis­cus­sion. I’m ready to upgrade from iPhoto. Have been com­par­ing Aper­ture and Light­room for weeks, lean­ing towards Aper­ture for all the good rea­sons described above. Today, though, ama­zon has a great price on Light­room so con­sid­ered get­ting it. But decided to read up on both again before order­ing. So glad I found your site. Going with my gut and get­ting Aperture.

  • trisha

    So glad to have found this dis­cus­sion. I’ve been ready to upgrade from iPhoto for a while. Over the last sev­eral weeks I’ve com­pared Aper­ture and Light­room, lean­ing towards Aper­ture. How­ever, today Ama­zon is offer­ing Light­room for a great price and am tempted. How­ever, I decided to search a bit more and do some more read­ing. I plan to go with my gut and get Aper­ture. Thanks again. Great help here.

  • Ask_​B

    I’m not sure I agree on that Aper­ture let you choose re data­base approach. The prob­lem with Aper­ture is that it doesn’t let me choose not to build a large cache. It may be bet­ter if you let Aper­ture run the show, but I use other pro­grams as well. I use Photo Mechanic to import and tag images, and I pre­fer a folder struc­ture by date. Light­room is much more friend­lier in this regard, and when I add pho­tos from a dif­fer­ent cam­era to a folder I can just synch this folder in Light­room. In Aper­ture I have to reim­port the folder and make sure it goes to the same “project” in the Aper­ture data­base. I typ­i­cally get each days as a project.

    I want to under­stand Aper­ture and make it work for my work­flow and DAM, but I keep going back to Lightroom…

    • http://www.orlandolocal.com William Beem

      When you import into Aper­ture, one of the Import Set­tings panes gives you two items to fill out. The first is Des­ti­na­tion to iden­tify the project. Even if you don’t use man­aged mas­ters, Aper­ture still uses the project to keep track of ver­sions, albums, etc. Light­room does the same thing with a Cat­a­log. The sec­ond item is Store Files. You either store the mas­ters in the Aper­ture Library (man­aged), or you choose another file loca­tion (Ref­er­enced). That’s the choice I’m discussing.

      If you wanted to add files to an Aper­ture library, you don’t need to import the entire folder — whether you use a Man­aged or Ref­er­enced work­flow. You have two options. First, only select the files that you need to import, rather than select the entire folder. Sec­ond, you could select the entire folder and check the box under the Des­ti­na­tion item that says Do Not Import Duplicates.

      You can assign other pro­grams to edit mas­ters from within Aper­ture. That lets Aper­ture track what’s hap­pen­ing to those files. As for the date file struc­ture, I think that’s unnec­es­sary and a bit of a red her­ring. All of the date infor­ma­tion is inside the mas­ter files, so it’s avail­able to use for search queries. The name of mas­ter files inside of an Aper­ture data­base is really super­flu­ous. There is plenty of meta­data infor­ma­tion that’s avail­able to search and orga­nize your mas­ters, not to men­tion that you can add other meta­data of your own.

  • anonn

    very glad i found this. i only tried aper­ture and started to get curi­ous about LIGHTROOM and its work­flow since every­one in their mother who does raw around me only uses LIGHTROOM.. i am quite new to RAW edit­ing and work­flow pro­cess­ing, how­ever i have exten­sive use with PHOTOSHOP dat­ing back to my high school days.(I’m 30 now) I’m pretty much self taught and have an entire MAC /​APPLE backup data­base sys­tem so nat­u­rally i would do my entire RAW edits on APERTURE. i agree since its late to the party that i find fewer peo­ple will­ing to switch over or leave adobe to try it out. but for the new­bies like myself start­ing with aper­ture 2⁄3 and con­tin­u­ally build­ing on it, i love it! its an amaz­ing sys­tem, espe­cially if you are used to IPHOTO/​ITUNES database/​organization ( its very intu­itive) … also the APPLE ONE ON ONE instruc­tors are sim­ply clue­less when it comes to fully uti­liz­ing the poten­tial of the pro­gram, do your­self a favor try it out trial and error, read the man­ual front to back 100 times over, and watch every youtube tuto­r­ial on tips and tricks as you can. you will be a self taught mas­ter in no time! GOOD LUCK!

  • Klein3351f

    As a new Mac user, I’m only get­ting into iPhoto and have yet to use Aper­ture, but regard­ing your com­ments about man­ag­ing pho­tos with a data­base as opposed to direct file and folder man­age­ment… I feel less secure with this. I’m try­ing to just live with it, but I hate not inter­fac­ing directly with my photo files and also what hap­pens if the data­base becomes cor­rupted or lost or some­how the links between your pho­tos and the data­base is broken?

    Also, doesn’t this lock you into Apple/​iPhoto or Aperture/​Time Machine for­ever? I mean, that’s great for Apple, but what hap­pens one day if I want to trans­fer my photo files to another hard drive and the new photo edit­ing pro­gram doesn’t rec­og­nize iPhoto cre­ate databases?

    It kind of makes me feel like I have a bunch of pos­ses­sions, for instance DVD’s, in another room and I’m not allowed to see them or touch them or play them, but I have a but­ler who will han­dle all that for me any­time I want. What if the but­ler dies? 

    • http://www.orlandolocal.com William Beem

      You’re not the only one who feels that way. For­tu­nately, it’s a false insecurity.

      Load­ing your pho­tos into Aper­ture does not lock you into the data­base. Not any more than load­ing your pho­tos onto a file sys­tem locks you into Mac OS X or Win­dows. Essen­tially, those file sys­tems are just data­bases, too. You inter­face with them through soft­ware in the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Aper­ture is the soft­ware that inter­faces with pho­tos in its Library. At any time you want, you can export the mas­ters to use in the file sys­tem, with another pro­gram, or to move to a dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tem. As you can see in the com­ment just before yours, some­one talked about export­ing his pho­tos from Aper­ture into Light­room 4 with­out any problems.

      The odds of the data­base being bro­ken are no dif­fer­ent than the odds of your file sys­tem being bro­ken. Again, they are both data­base sys­tems. They have direc­to­ries that refer to entries. For­tu­nately, they both have tools to rebuild the data­base to cor­rect errors. In any case, such errors are extremely rare, and that’s why we keep back­ups. It’s more likely that your entire drive will fail than your database.

      You CAN see and touch your pho­tos. As I said, Aper­ture is just a dif­fer­ent inter­face than using the Finder. Both are just soft­ware pro­grams that refer to data files. At least Aper­ture has a bet­ter inter­face and built-​in tools to backup your data.

      Trust me, I wouldn’t put my own images at risk if I had any qualms about stor­ing my pho­tos in an Aper­ture Library. If you’re wor­ried about cor­rup­tion, that’s much more likely to hap­pen with a ref­er­enced approach than a man­aged file.

      • Adam Læssøe

        Hi William. 

        “The odds of the data­base being bro­ken are no dif­fer­ent than the odds of your file sys­tem being bro­ken.“
        I’m con­vinced you’re wrong in this regard. Think about it for a sec­ond: The file sys­tem and its man­age­ment is the back­bone of the entire sys­tem. The Aper­ture data­base is just a data­base man­aged by and for a sin­gle appli­ca­tion, whos user­base is tiny com­pared to that of the file sys­tem. Which do you think under­goes the most rig­or­ous test­ing and bug fix­ing? 
        Also, my per­sonal expe­ri­ence tells me oth­er­wise. I have had a lot of trou­ble with Aper­tures data­base. First, there was a crop-​bug in an update. This caused the posi­tion of the crops to be moved, so all pho­tos in my library, that were cropped, now had the same crop applied but at a dif­fer­ent loca­tion. Some­times even out­side the image bound­ary. Whats worse, it was a bug that caused changes in the data­base itself, and so when the bug was fixed in the next ver­sion, it didn’t repair the old crops.Later, Aper­ture lost con­nec­tion to a host of images. It sim­ply seemed to for­get their loca­tion and dis­played the “Miss­ing” badge. The mas­ters were still there inside the library, but since they were man­aged, there was no way to tell Aper­ture where to locate them. The only option was to rebuild the library. This caused all the miss­ing mas­ters to pop into the auto-​generated Recov­ery project. But of course now they were miss­ing any and all adjus­ments! So I man­u­ally copy-​pasted the adjust­ments from the ver­sions with miss­ing mas­ters (no repair or rebuild recon­nected them). To clean out my library, I then deleted the ver­sions that couldn’t find their mas­ters. Prob­lem is: Now the mas­ters (that Aper­ture refused to find) got deleted right along­side with the ver­sion, so now all the reed­ited ver­sions lost their mas­ters. This time for real! So I had to start all over again with reload­ing a 100GB library from Time Machine.This buggy han­dling of the data­base (and even worse with the actual files) has made it very clear that Aper­ture must not be trusted with han­dling the files them­selves. Most of these prob­lems could fairly eas­ily have been solved if the Library was only ref­er­enced. So now it is.Also this friv­o­lous han­dling of my dig­i­tal assets has led me to look into switch­ing to Light­room, and yes the expe­ri­ence is much more PC-​ugly. But at least it feels robust. Some­thing a larger user base will also help ensuring.

        • http://www.orlandolocal.com William Beem

          Sure, the file sys­tem is the back­bone. It’s still just a data­base. It’s just as sus­cep­ti­ble to errors as any other data­base. For­tu­nately, most sys­tems are built very well and don’t fre­quently have errors. When the file sys­tem does have errors, we have util­i­ties to cor­rect them — just as Aper­ture has util­i­ties to rebuild its database.

          Rig­or­ous test­ing doesn’t mean you won’t have errors. When a drive has a phys­i­cal prob­lem, it affects all the data on those sec­tors. The file sys­tem suf­fers from drive errors just as much as any other appli­ca­tion data format. 

          I’m sorry you have prob­lems, but my expe­ri­ence is the oppo­site of yours. Aper­ture libraries have been won­der­ful and I’ve never lost any data. That doesn’t mean I don’t keep back­ups in case of a poten­tial error or drive fail­ure. In that regard, Aper­ture makes it MORE likely that I’ll have a suc­cess­ful recov­ery from one of its Vaults than if I used a Ref­er­enced approach — caus­ing me to split-​up my backup efforts between the Library and the ref­er­enced mas­ter files.

          If any­thing, your com­plaint against Time Machine shows that the OS isn’t always the best solu­tion. You say that Aper­ture lost con­nec­tion to a host of images. Those would be Ref­er­enced images, right? Never had a prob­lem like that with Man­aged images because they were in the Library. There was no con­nec­tion to lose. Light­room users go through the same thing with their Cat­a­log gets broken.

          The prob­lem I’m see­ing in your descrip­tion isn’t with the integrity of the man­aged mas­ters in a Library. It seems you’ve taken the ref­er­enced approach and had the same com­mon prob­lems that affect other users (and prod­ucts) that use that kind of system.

          Again, I’m sorry you had prob­lems, but I don’t think we’re talk­ing about the same thing here if you were going with a ref­er­enced approach.

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