Experience With Aperture & Lightroom

I downloaded the demo versions of Aperture and Lightroom to compare them and to look at whether I could dump PhotoShop for the new version of Aperture. My tests were conducted on a Mac G5 2GHz Dual Processor with OS 10.4.11 and 3.5 GB of RAM.

The key factors for me are:

1. Color correction and ehancement.
2. Basic image manipulation and editing (rotate, crop, etc.)
3. Retouching
4. Print on my Epson P2200 (PhotoShop CS2 leaves a lot to be desired)
5. Write jpegs for web use.

#1 is a tie, Lightroom and Aperture are different but equivalent. Because Aperture 2 is substantially faster and less resource hungry than LR, Apeture would be the winner. I mean here both the speed of the application and it's impact on the speed of the computer's other applications. For most image operations Aperture is only slightly faster than LR but it's impact on other application is much less.

#2 is a draw. I cannot develop a preference for either application. Aperture remains a winner here because of the speed difference.

#3 would go to Aperture by a huge margin with more convient retouching tools and better retouching options (edge retention is a clear winner).

#4 is a crash and burn for Aperture. The demo doesn't have Page Setup (the help files say it should be there but it isn't) and when you print it just sends the data without setup. This means you cannot determine if it will print well or not and the print dialog is dramatically inferior to LR. The printer capability in LR is really easy to use and works flawlessly. I don't believe I can get along without it now that I have tried it.

#5 is also a crash and burn for Aperture. There is no provision to control jpeg quality in the Export dialog box and the images created are huge. LR writes a much smaller file because it allows setting the quality level. PS writes an optimized jpeg that is half that size or LR for the same quality level. These means I cannot dump PS and will need to keep using it for web graphics.

So I will need to update to CS3 with LR. Aperture is fundamentally a better application but trails LR in capabilities that matter very much to me.

The roses are examples of a LR exported jpeg to one passed to PS and Saved To Web. Both images have lost color fidelity but this worse in the latter case.