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More Lightroom – GET ORGANISED: LET THE FUN BEGIN

Posted by scottbourne on August 4, 2012
Posted in: Technique & Tutorials. Tagged: , , .

 
PART 2: CATALOGs: Sets & Collections
Guest Post & Photo by Stephan Bollinger – Circle Stephan on Google+
The process of cataloging our images is one of the most important (and daunting) parts of our daily life’s as photographers. Pixels are cheap, and we fill our memory cards with hundreds (if not thousands) of images on every shoot. All these images need to be managed and processed somehow, and a clever structure becomes essential.
Before I go into details and outline how I structure my Collections at my studio, please understand that my main goal is to be as efficient as possible. I’m a photographer and not an archivist, and I want to get the processing done (and the images delivered to my clients) fast, because I’d be much rather out and shooting again.
When reading through this article, some steps might sound time consuming, but in the long run, it will help you process faster, and make finding images, selections and delivered files easy and reliable in the future.
Let’s go through it, step by step:
Step 1: DELETE REJECTS
There is no point in keeping thousands of images from each shoot, so before I even go ahead to create collections and start sorting my images, I spend 5 minutes to go through the entire uploaded folder and mark all images I don’t want to keep (mark them as “rejects”). Once I’m through, I display only the rejected images, to double check I didn’t select an image I’d like to keep, and once satisfied, I delete the files from my system. Considering the amount of time I spend to create images, these 5 minutes are well worth it, it frees up quite an amount of disk space, and makes the following steps faster as well.
Step 2: CREATE THE COLLECTION STRUCTURE
For many years, we used to think in files and folders, and we were careful to not create duplicates of our images. Collections allow us to have our images in many places, without creating duplicates, since they only reference to the original file, on whatever hard-drive and folder they may be stored. For some, this requires a bit of re-thinking, in the long run however, it becomes second nature.
The structure you create is very personal, and there is no right or wrong. While “designing” your structure, keep in mind however that you might start to work with a team one day, a studio manager or assistant, and any organised chaos (which may make sense to you) can be quite challenging for others. I personally tried various approaches, and have found my way, which has proven to be very effective. Depending on the shoot and subject, I usually create not one but several collections.
Within Lightroom, we talk about “Collection Sets” and “Collections”, in Apple Aperture you’d call them “Folders” and “Albums”, in essence, they are the same thing. A “collection set” is simply a container, which holds sub-sets or collections, and a “collection” holds a selection of referenced images. To keep it simple, I will just refer to them as “Sets” and “Collections”.
First, we need an overall structure, a series of sets (and these are just suggestions):
> CLIENTS
> EVENTS
> LOCATIONS
> MODELS
> PROJECTS
Let’s assume we photographed the winter collection for a fashion designer, with 2 models on set, and we have just uploaded over 1,000 images from todays shoot. It is now time to create sets within our main structure.
Based on this example, we have one paying customer and possibly three more people requesting images: both models and  the makeup artist. You may extend this list with stylists, set decorator, property owner etc. For a wedding shoot, you might have many more, the bride and groom, the bridal party, the parents, the guests, the owner of the wedding venue and the fancy cake maker. For this article, let’s focus on 3, the client and the two models. They all require different photos from the same shoot, the designer is mainly interested in his gowns, the models want mixed images for their portfolio and the makeup artist requires close portraits. Our workflow has to allow us to find, organise and deliver these photos quickly, and down the track, we want to know exactly which photos we sent to each, hopefully with just a few clicks. Sounds complicated? If you think in folders and files, it is impossible, but it’s easely done with sets and collections.
Let’s start with our paying fashion designer, and create a set within our main structure “clients”:
clients > CLIENT NAME
Since we (hopefully) work with our client again, we treat every new client as a “returning customer”, and therefore create a first “sub-sets” for todays shoot within the designers set (and add further sets with every new job we create together). Considering that we might shoot the clients “winter collection” again next year, let’s use the current year and a descriptive name for our sub-set:
clients | client name > 2012 Winter Collection
It’s now time to go back to the folder with our imported images, select them all, and create our first “collection”. To keep my workflow fast, I call it “All images”, and create it within our sub-set:
clients | client name | 2012 Winter Collection > All images
There are several good reasons to create a collection with all images, even though it shows exactly the same files as your imported folder. After a while, your list of folders gets very long, taking up a fair amount of screen real-estate, and switching between folders and collections becomes a time consuming “scrolling operation”, even on a 30″ screen. Once I’ve created my “All images” collection, I have access to all files within my designers set, so I  can close the Folder structure, which eliminates scrolling up and down, and saves time. In the future, it also allows me quick and easy access to all photos produced today, without remembering exactly when the photos were shot, or where the files are stored on my hard drives.
Since we now work within Collections, we have to remember that some commands behave differently than in Folders. If we delete an image within a folder, the file is indeed deleted from the hard-drive. If we “delete” an image within a collection, we only remove the image (the referenced link) from our collection, the actual (original) file still remains on our hard-drive in our imported folder. If we flag, reject or rate an image within a collection however, these attributes are system-wide, and will be carried on to other collections which may hold the same images, as well as the original folders as well. This will play to our advantage.
Coming back to our designer shoot, and the 12 different dresses we photographed, we usually have quite an amount of images with the same dress, and the goal is to find the shots we like the most, and to select the images we’ll be sending to the client for review.
The easiest way is to create separate collections for each outfit, and since we’re already inside the designers set, this becomes a very speedy operation. Within the “all images” Collection, select all images with the first dress, click the + button in the “Collections” tab, enter a descriptive name, and hit “enter”. Lightroom will create a new Collection with the selected images and place it right next to your “All images” collection. Go back to “all images” (the images will still be selected), scroll down to the next outfit, select all those images, create the next collection, and so on. This might sound like a time consuming process, but in reality, it only takes a couple of minutes, even with hundreds of images. The benefits are well worth the effort. To be helpful down the track, I usually name these collections as “Look 1″ plus a descriptive name, and my Collection structure quickly looks similar to this:
> clients
> client name
> 2012 Winter Collection
> All images
> Look 1 – Red Cocktail Dress
> Look 2 – Blue Coat – on white
> Look 2 – Blue Coat – on grey
> Look 3 – Black Hat
I number the looks in the order we shot them. When clients come back to ask for certain images, they ideally refer to images by filename. More often than not however, they refer to the colour (or name) of an outfit, a certain gesture or pose by the model, or talk about “the second last one we shot on the grey background” (or similar). Good and descriptive naming of Collections can be of great help in such cases.
So far, I have not mentioned any sets or collections for the models, for a good reason, I will come back to this in step 4. And to come back to the wedding example from before, instead of “looks”, you’d have the different stages of the wedding day, starting with the bride getting ready, the groomsmen having a beer, the bride arriving at the church, etc, etc, bottom line the exact same principals apply.
Step 3: RATE FOR DELIVERY
It is now time to rate our images, and usually, this is the most time consuming part (besides retouching, of course). There is nothing more daunting than to go through large amounts of images and select the ones we like, but with our separate collections for each outfit, we have already narrowed down our amount of images, and the task to find the right ones becomes much more approachable. Since we already deleted all the “reject” shots in step 1 (and eliminated all the blurry shots, strange poses and closed eyes), we can now click through the images quickly, and apply our initial rating.
Aperture and Lightroom give us many tools to rate our images, 1 to 5 stars, flags and colour labels. It is smart to create a personal rating system, and to stick to whatever system you chose. For speed and consistency purposes, we use the following rating system for initial, individual and final delivery:
As a first step, we click through all the images in each Collection, with one finger on the “1″ key (to apply a 1 star rating), and one finger on the navigation keys (“next” button), to skip to the next image. Every image that might be a contender will get a 1 star rating, and we skip the “so so” images. Throughout our entire image library, all 1-star images are regarded as “pre-selected contenders”.
Once we’re through all images in our collection, we set the filter to “1-star”, and quickly skim through our selected images. From this (hopefully much smaller) amount of images, we look for duplicates (images that look very similar, same pose, expression etc), and apply a “2-star” rating to those images we will send to the client for an initial review.
In most cases, this is already the end of our selection process, and we export small jpg files of all 2-star rated images, and send them to the client (by uploading to our server or by email). We do so separate for each collection, giving our client a structured overview of the selected images. He will then return a list of images which should go into retouching. For other clients, and depending on the budget and agreement, we will already apply basic retouching to the 2-star rated images.
This brings us to the next type of rating: Colour labels. We use colour label as “indicators”, not for rating, and apply different colour-label to different stages of our workflow. Uncoloured images (generally raw files) have not been touched, images selected by the client for retouching are marked “yellow” (to be retouched), images with basic (initial) retouching are “red”, and final retouches and composites are “green”. This allows us to find the final versions of images instantly. And to keep things simple, we don’t use any other colours.
This system works, because at any given time, we can filter for all images we initially selected (1-star), which helps if a client is looking for an alternative version to an image we sent him, without going through all images again. We quickly find all images we selected as “candidates” (2-star), and we can filter for all images the client picked (yellow) etc.
So when do we use “flags”? We apply flags as temporary selection only, if there is a specific need for it.
Step 4: SECONDARY DELIVERY
Of course we didn’t forget our two lovely models, who are still waiting for their images. It’s now time to address secondary deliveries. We have invested the time to select our candidates (2-star) images for each outfit, received the final selection from the designer, have done the retouching, and will now deliver an agreed amount of images to our models for their portfolios. To document, which images we sent (as digital files or as prints), we proceed in the same way as we did with our designer, by creating a basic structure, however within our “MODELS” set:
> models
> model name
> 2012 designer xyz winter collection
> Look 1 – Red Cocktail Dress
> Look 2 – Blue Coat – on white
> Look 2 – Blue Coat – on grey
> Look 3 – Black Hat
Creating such “secondary delivery” structures makes sense, since they are done in no time, and keep track of any delivered files. If I shoot specifically for a models portfolio, the model becomes technically “the client”, however to keep my structure in tact, I’ll keep all images in a separate sub-set within the models set. This however will be the only difference, all previous steps will be the same.
So far so good, but the fun is not over, look forward to PART 3: THE POWER OF KEYWORDING.

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10 Tips For Those Migrating From Aperture 3.3 To Lightroom 4.1

Posted by scottbourne on July 7, 2012
Posted in: Tips. Tagged: , , , .

Please note this is a post about my experience. Yours may be very different. I am not saying this is the best or only way to do this. I am saying this is what I figured out for me. Treat it as a starting point for your own experience and go from there.

Step 1.  COMMITMENT – if you’re going to do this – do it. Commit to it. I tried once before and the biggest mistake I made then was trying to run both programs at once. If you’re going to use Lightroom and move your library there, then put away Aperture. Just work in Lightroom. Otherwise you will develop bad habits and fail to make the transition fully.

Step 2. STRATEGY – know this. Lightroom does not offer a managed library option. Instead it uses “referenced” files (an option in Aperture but mandatory in LR.) So you need to decide where to put your photos. You can leave them on the hard disk in your computer where you run LR but you will soon run out of space so I suggest an external drive. I am using a 12 TB drive so I’ll have plenty of space. Then create a master folder on that drive. It can be called “photos” or “Lightroom Master” or whatever you like. But create that folder because that is where all your images will eventually end up. HINT: Whatever strategy you decide now – be sure it’s sound. It will be a big pain in the you know what to change this later so pick a strategy and stick with it.

Step 3. BACKUP – backup everything – twice. Find your original files and back them up separately. Then use Aperture’s Vault to back up the Aperture library.

Step 4. TEST the backup. Test both of them. Make sure you can recover your images if need be.

Step 5. MOVE one of the backups off site – away from your main library. That way if you have a fire or other major problem your backups aren’t destroyed.

Step 6: PREPARE your master files for the smoothest transition possible. Go to METADATA and select Write IPTC Metadata to Original. This will make sure that Lightroom sees the metadata in the original file that it imports. You can’t import changes like color and contrast adjustments, but you can import metadata..

Step 7: MOVE your managed files. Go to RELOCATE ORIGINALS FOR PROJECT. Select the drive, subfolders, names, formats, etc and keep track of where you put them. These images will be what you import INTO Lightroom so it’s important that you know where they are.

Step 8: SELECT those images you want to move and those you don’t. This is how I’m approaching this. Since any image I edited in Aperture will no longer be in a non-destructive format once moved into Lightroom, I’m moving the finished product for any of my 5-star images and importing them as TIFFs or DNGs. I’ll move all my new projects right into Lightroom – completely bypassing Aperture. I’ll move the master files and unedited images into Lightroom a dozen projects at a time over a couple of months so it’s not such an overwhelming task. I’ll also always have them in Aperture so if something urgent comes up, I can go back to Aperture, find the master file, export it from Aperture, then import it into Lightroom. It’s like I have backups of my backups of my backups. You don’t have to move everything and you don’t have to do it at once.

Step 9:  Organize Lightroom as closely as you can the same way you organized Aperture once you bring your photos in to LR. This will delete the pain points associated with a whole new system.

Step 10: Be ready to start over. I had to do this three times before I figured out a correct way for me to live in the Lightroom universe. For that reason, I suggest you start small – experiment a while, and decide if you need to make any changes.

The concepts are all there, it’s just the differences in image management and learning new shortcuts that take the most time. So far, I have no regrets about making the switch except for some details I am still working out.

Good luck and have fun.

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Here’s Why I’m Seriously Considering A Permanent Switch To Adobe Lightroom

Posted by scottbourne on May 29, 2012
Posted in: Technique & Tutorials. Tagged: , , , , .

Okay – in short – I’ve had it with Apple. Ever since Steve passed, the company has seemed to be off course – not financially – but in regards to vision. Even before Steve passed, we saw the Final Cut Pro debacle – turning one of the most successful professional video editing applications into a glorified version of iMovie. While I am often mindlessly called an Apple fanboy, I have routinely called the company to task when I think they have made a mistake. And this is going to be one of those times.

Looking at what’s happened to the Apple Pro Apps division – one has to ponder – Is Aperture next? That’s the problem. I don’t know. And nobody at Apple will talk about it. For years I’ve defended Aperture and Apple for making such a great project. I think that was the right decision – then.

But as Apple has grown even more reclusive in its willingness to share its plans or talk to the media, they have forgotten that the people who aren’t getting the information are ultimately their customers.

I assumed we’d hear something about Aperture 4.0 by now. I was really confident in fact that there would be an Aperture 4.0 by now. I wrote an article not long back linking the timeline to releases and thought surely we’d have an answer by now. After all, Lightroom 4 is shipping and in every way it needed to, Adobe caught Aperture and in some cases passed it. But from Apple – not a peep.

I’ve used Aperture for more than five years for the simple reason that I thought it was the better product. As of the Lightroom 4.0 release, I no longer believe that’s accurate. I won’t go into too many details but I’ll mention just a few places where I think Lightroom has surpassed Aperture.

Let’s start with the raw converter. For years I’ve said that Aperture and Adobe’s RAW converters are both good – but different. I can no longer say that they are on par. With Lightroom 4.0, Adobe has released a raw converter that does a much better job converting files with low noise and accurate color than does the current converter from Aperture.. This is huge and it applies even more so to the new hot cameras like the Canon 5D MK III and the Nikon D4. Adobe has figured this out and Apple is silent. For the first time in five years I like the conversions better in Lightroom. That’s reason enough to switch. But other improvements in the highlight and shadow recovery, extended video support, the amazing (and I do mean AMAZING) clarity slider, improved develop module and much faster, speedier processing, Lightroom 4 has left Aperture 3 in the dust. Period. (NOTE: the aforementioned list was only a smattering of the improvements in LR4. For more information go to Adobe.com.)

Now if I knew Aperture 4.0 was around the corner and that Apple answered each of these new improvements with improvements of their own, I’d reconsider. But at this point I don’t know that and have no reason to expect it.

So if I can get my arms around the fact that I need to move almost 480,000 images and that I need to be able to master a new workflow involving referenced rather than managed files, I’m going to switch and if I do – I’m not going back – no matter what Apple does. Even if they do catch up because it will only be a matter of time before it’s deja vu all over again.

There have been a host of new bugs in Aperture (either introduced by OS or converter updates) that Apple has only recently addressed. They won’t communicate with their users and there’s no loyalty there. It takes loyalty to get loyalty so unless something happens in the next few days to change my mind, you can expect to hear me talking about a permanent change to Adobe Lightroom 4. I flirted with this once before when Aperture 3.0 launched because it was so buggy. But this time if I switch, I’m not coming back.

You might not know my history, but if I do switch it’s a pretty big deal. My history with Aperture is as almost as deep as you can get. I taught (alongside Derrick Story) the first live Aperture class taught anywhere at Macworld the year the product debuted. I also taught it there the following two years. I have been the technical editor on almost every Aperture book ever written (I worked on nine of them.) I was in the first Apple Train The Trainer (T3) class and was one of the first Apple-Certified T3 trainers. I’ve taught thousands of people how to use Aperture in seminars and workshops. I’ve also recorded training titles for  lynda.com (total three video training series) and I founded the first Aperture blog and podcast (Aperture Tricks) later sold to a third party. If Apple can’t hang on to someone like me, what does that say about their prospects for hanging on to the rest of the market?

You’ve been put on notice Apple. Put up or shut up. Lightroom 4.0, here I come.

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Adobe Lightroom 4 Beta – First Thoughts

Posted by scottbourne on January 11, 2012
Posted in: News. Tagged: , , .

Adobe released the beta version of Lightroom 4. Here are just some of the killer new features:

1. MUCH better video integration
2. Soft proofing
3. Better geotagging
4. New shadow/highlight controls
5. Photo books via Blurb – (Will this be the end of Aperture for Scott Kelby who primarily liked Aperture’s photo books feature:))
6. Improvements to the clarity tool
7. Improved DNG format
8. Burn to disk archiving
9. New toolbars in all menus
10. Better search filters
11. Better white balance tool

There are a few things you should know. This is a real Beta. It’s pretty solid but there are still issues and I don’t recommend using this version for any professional or serious work just yet. You also can’t import LR3 catalogs into LR4 as a precautionary measure. You will need to convert your LR3 catalogs at some point if you want to use the retail version of LR4 when it ships. This is similar to the change Aperture went through not too long ago. People who upgraded to the latest version had to upgrade their libraries as well. It’s not a big deal but you need to know about it.

I am and probably will be, an Aperture man until I die. But I recognize the community seems to prefer LR so I try to stay current on it. I am far from an expert, when it comes to Lightroom, but my pals at Kelby Media Group ARE experts and I suggest you visit their new dedicated LR4 website if you are interested in this latest version of Lightroom.

Oh and P.S. – Welcome Lightroom – at roughly three times the money you’ve now got features Aperture has had for five years :) (Sorry I couldn’t help myself – really – I’m getting counseling :))

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Three Ways to Keyword Your Photos in Lightroom

Posted by scottbourne on November 16, 2011
Posted in: Tips. Tagged: , , .

NOTE: Guest Post by Laura Shoe — Follow Laura on Facebook

Keywords let you assign terms that you can use to recall them later via search in Lightroom. For an ocean photo of mine, examples might be Oregon, Seaside, coast, seascape, sunset. Keywording your photos will make finding them so much easier and faster, so don’t skip it!

Lightroom has at least five different ways to keyword. I’ll discuss the most commonly used three. Experiment with these to find the way or ways that work best for you.

* Type Keywords in the Keywording Panel

The Keywording panel is on the right in the Library module. Select one or more photos in the grid, then type in the large or small box, separating keywords with commas. Hit Enter/Return to finish. (Note, you must be in Grid view to apply keywords to a group of photos!)

* Use the Painter Tool to Spray on Keywords

Click on the spray can in the toolbar at the bottom of the grid. If you don’t see your toolbar (shown below), type T to reveal it. If you see your toolbar but not the spray can, click on the downward pointing triangle at the right edge of the toolbar and choose Painter.

Next to where you clicked on the spray can, choose Paint: Keywords, and in the box to the right of this, type in the keyword or keywords you want to apply. Hit Enter/Return.

Finally, click on each photo thumbnail you want to apply the keyword(s) to. To remove the keyword(s) you applied, hold down the Alt/Option key as you click again to erase.

Why the paint can symbol? It’s a fun reference to graffiti tagging!

* Use the Keyword List Panel

This panel is below the Keywording panel. It shows you all keywords you have ever applied to any photo in your catalog. To apply a keyword already in the list to one or more selected photos, click on the little box to the left of the keyword to put a checkmark in the box. To remove a keyword from selected photos, click on the checkmark to remove it.

To add a new keyword, click on the plus to the left of the Keyword List panel name, and enter it as the Keyword Tag. Generally you can keep the options set to the defaults. If you don’t have a photo in the grid selected, the keyword will just show up in your list for future use. If you do have a photo selected, the dialog will have a checkbox to add the keyword to the selected photos.

Of course the next step is learning how to search for your photos based on keywords. I will discuss this in my next post.

The other two ways to keyword are to use the Keyword Sets and Keyword Suggestions portions of the Keywording panel — these will be covered in a future post as well.

Laura Shoe is author of the Digital Daily Dose Lightroom (and Occasionally Photoshop) blog.

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Intro to Lightroom 3 Lens Corrections

Posted by scottbourne on April 14, 2011
Posted in: Technique & Tutorials. Tagged: .


Guest Photo & Post By www.NatCoalson.com – Follow Nat on Twitter

One of the most exciting features introduced in Lightroom 3 is the new Lens Corrections panel. These controls allow you to correct optical distortion and other lens artifacts such as chromatic aberration and vignetting.

This is a big step forward in image editing. Until recently, to fix distortion in a photo you had to use pixel-based editing software such as Photoshop, which can significantly degrade image quality.
Lightroom uses metadata to perform all adjustments on photos. The original image data on disk is never altered, which allows you to make an unlimited number of adjustments to an image without affecting quality and provides for unlimited “undo’s”.

Note: I always capture in raw format, and I want to work with the raw images as far through my workflow as possible. With Lightroom’s Lens Corrections I can significantly improve the effects of lens distortion and artifacts directly on the raw image data. However, you can also apply the same lens corrections to any of the file formats that Lightroom supports, including JPG and even layered TIF files.

Defining the problem

Nearly all camera lenses introduce some amount of distortion to a captured image. The most common types of distortion are perspective distortion, which produces converging lines that should be vertical, and barrel and pincushion distortion, spherical distortions that make the photo appear to either bulge outward or pinch inward. These distortions are often caused by wide angle lenses and are most easily seen around the edges of the frame. With Lightroom 3 you can fix most kinds of lens distortion. See the above images for a before and after example.

Chromatic aberration (CA) is a lens artifact that results in color fringing around the edges of object. It happens when different wavelengths of light strike the camera sensor at different points. Some lenses produce much more chromatic aberration than others. Figure 3 shows severe chromatic aberration in the red/cyan channel. This is easily fixed in Lightroom.

TIP: When possible, check every image for CA – it’s present in more captures than you might expect. You usually need to zoom in very close to see CA.

Vignetting refers to darkening around the corners and edges of an image. Again, it’s most commonly seen in photos made with wide angle lenses.

Using the Lens Corrections Panel

With an image loaded in Lightroom’s Develop module, open the Lens Corrections panel, which is about halfway down the right panel group. There are two modes for the panel, Profile and Manual, shown in text buttons at the top. The default view is Profile. You can use one or the other, or both modes together, to apply your desired corrections.

Profile mode lets you choose a lens profile for Lightroom to automatically apply corrections specific to that lens. To start, check the box to Enable Profile Corrections. Lightroom uses the EXIF metadata in the capture to determine what profile to use.

Lightroom ships with profiles for many lenses, and new profiles are being created all the time. However, there are still many lenses out there that have not yet been profiled. If you check the box to Enable Profile Corrections and the dropdown menus below remain blank, it means that Lightroom could not find a profile for your specific lens. You can manually choose another profile if there’s a lens that’s similar to yours.

You can also make your own lens profiles but this is a very laborious process. Even so, many photographers are creating custom lens profiles and sharing them online. You can learn more about lens profiles and the Lens Profile Creator and Downloader applications at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lensprofile_creator/

Below the dropdown menus for profile selection are three sliders: Distortion, C. Aberration and Vignetting. These sliders let you adjust the amount of each adjustment being applied by the profile. They all default to 100; drag the slider to the left to decrease that adjustment or to the right to increase it.

TIP: use the tiny switch at the top left of the Lens Corrections panel to enable/disable the effects of the panel.

Manual mode allows you to make much more dramatic adjustments to the image. You can use Manual adjustments after applying a profile; all the settings work together to produce the finished result. The easiest way to learn how these sliders work is just to try them! Click and drag each slider to see its effect on the photo.

When examined closely, you’ll find that most captures will exhibit one or more of the problems described above. With Lightroom 3, you can dramatically improve your photos using the Lens Corrections panel. You can read more about Lens Corrections in my Lightroom 3 book.

Nat is the author of Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process.

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Why I Use Aperture Instead of Lightroom

Posted by scottbourne on November 4, 2010
Posted in: Opinion, Reviews. Tagged: , .

I use Aperture. There. I said it. I am an oddball I guess, since according to Adobe at least, three times more people use Lightroom.

Of course, if you are a Windows user, you have no choice. If it boils down to Aperture or Lightroom, Aperture doesn’t run on Windows machines so Lightroom it is.

Since I am a 100% Mac guy, I use Aperture. I have used Lightroom. I even took the time to learn a great deal about it. But when Apple updated Aperture to 3.1 and it stabilized, I moved 100% of my photo libraries back to Aperture. Here’s my short answer as to why. (Keep in mind as you read this that I have nothing against Lightroom, I just prefer Aperture. Also note that some of my personal preferences factor heavily into this decision. This is not a blow-by-blow comparison – this is simply a rundown of the features that make Aperture more valuable to me personally. Your mileage may vary.)

These are in no particular order:

1. Interface

I just happen to think that Apple makes the most beautiful interfaces around. And since I am already very familiar with the Apple look and feel, it’s very easy for me to work with Aperture. The interface is very customizable and it fits my workflow better than Lightroom’s interface, which to me, feels a bit clunky.

2. Books

Apple’s book feature is spectacular. The layouts are flexible and relatively easy to manipulate. The books are printed very well and affordable. And the turn around times fast. Lightroom has nothing like this and it’s reason enough for me to stay with Aperture.

3. Library Management

I am older than most of you and already suffering “senior” moments. When I use Lightroom, keeping track of my images is a chore. When I use Aperture, Apple does all the work for me. I’ve never lost an image using Aperture going all the way back to version 1.0. The “vault” (Apple Aperture’s built-in backup system) works brilliantly, quickly and easily. Once you load a photo into Aperture and back it up to your vault you can relax. There’s no need to keep track of anything. That works better for me.

4. Video Integration

Aperture hands down beats Lightroom for management of video assets. There is better audio file handling and you can actually do some minor editing of the video from Aperture. You can easily integrate the video into slideshows featuring stills. This is an amazing feature and a place where Apple really got the jump on Adobe.

5. Quick Brushes

This is purely personal taste but I love this feature in Aperture and think it works better than the brush feature in Lightroom.

6. Price

Aperture is $100 less expensive than Lightroom. If all else is equal, in this economy, a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks.

CONCLUSION

You can and should try out both programs if you are a Mac user. They are both free to download and try for 30 days. See which one works for you. It’s often just a matter of personal taste. If you’re worried about losing your files, I’d suggest Aperture because of its managed libraries. At the end of the day, the same advice I give to camera buyers I’ll give to post-processing software buyers. You might be better off buying the one your friends, mentors, teachers, etc., use since it’s them that you’ll probably look to for support when you get stuck. The good news is that no matter which one you select, you’ll be getting a great program capable of helping you take your photography up a notch.

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