Lightroom and Aperture

I have been using Apple computers since the early eighties. I had an an Apple 2e and then a 2c and then, a lot later, we had (still have) a green G3 iMac. And now a G5 iMac and an intel Macbook Pro.

I have also been using PCs for about the same length of time, but as machines at work, mostly using WORD and EXCEL.

I like the graphical interface on Macs and the easy way everything can be found, moved, renamed, and played about with; seemingly without the restrictions that affect PCs.

I have been playing around with, but not seriously using, Aperture for a month or two. I haven’t really enjoyed using it but I put that partly down to having to learn a new system of commands. I have had my hands full with other things and I half-promised myself I would sit down and learn more about Aperture when I had a clear head and a few hours to spare.

Meanwhile I have been following the development of Adobe Lightroom and a couple of days ago I downloaded it.

I am not going to make any comparisons of the capabilities of the two programs to ‘develop’ a digital negative because they are both good.

What I can say without doubt is that Aperture is slow compared to Lightroom and not as useable. Lightroom is fast and useable and it is such a pleasure to use brought a smile to my face.

One feature I really like in Lightroom is the ‘compare’ feature, where one can see the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states side by side as one develops an image with sharpening, white balance etc.

Another feature I like about Lightroom is the ability to export (i.e. save) images to the hard disk and Lightoom automatically makes a subfolder within the folder from which the original image came, titles it and saves the images there. It can make a large jpeg and a save-for-web jpeg so fast that I had to go check the image had really been saved.

And for some reason, the Ligthroom program is one quarter the size of Aperture (about 50MB compared to 200MB) – now why should that be?