Adobe's Lightroom challenges Apple's Aperture

There's a new kid in pro photo town.

Posted on 2006-01-09 23:42 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]

Apple began shipping its pro photo management application Aperture a little over a month ago. Ever since I learned about it and saw demo videos, the $499 it costs have been tugging very hard at the iron bars in my bank’s vault.

But I wanted to wait just a little bit longer, to see where it went from the initial reports of insane demands on computer power, bad RAW conversion, lack of DNG support and more.

One of the things I read that put me off was Ars Technica’s review”. It’s rather long (but thorough!), so for now you can skip ahead and just read the conclusion. You shouldn’t put your trust in just that one source, though, so check out other reviews too. But it’d better be damned near perfect if I were to shell out $499 for it.

I crave something that’ll replace iPhoto. I’m sure iPhoto is great for hobbyists, but not for me, an aspiring hobby photographer with a need for good RAW support and workflow. (Yes, I know iPhoto 5 has RAW “support”, but in the lamest way: It converts RAWs to JPEG and then never touches the RAW file again unless you want to revert to the original, in which case you get the RAW converted to JPEG again. Man, I’d forgotten how disappointed I was at that.)

Which is why I like Adobe’s Lightroom much better from the start. It’s a direct challenger of Aperture—although still in public beta, and not scheduled for sale until late this year. In principle the two applications do exactly the same thing. In practice they do some things differently, and some different things.

Because the two applications are remarkably similar, at first I thought Adobe heard about Aperture and felt it couldn’t go unchallenged, so they hastily put together something.

Then again, the lightbox paradigm is pretty close at hand when you’re setting out to make pro photo management software. And according to Adobe’s Lightbox press release at DPReview, an early version of Lightroom was demoed in April last year.

I’ll quote the article Adobe Lightroom First Look and Primer over at The Luminous Landscape:

It’s rather remarkable given the time span how similar in overall concept the two programs are. It’s almost as if this is a design concept whose time had come, and both companies saw it coming roughly simultaneously.

Also at The Luminous Landscape, there’s a recent ‘non-review’ of Aperture that’s worth a read.

Why Lightroom will win

I haven’t tried either application—I’ve only seen demo videos of them both. I love Apple and would like them to succeed with Aperture, but I’m willing to bet Adobe will win this race, for a number of reasons:

For one, they have a few decades of experience in digital images.

Second, they make Photoshop, which every pro photographer uses already, and can integrate with it much more seamlessly.

Third, Lightroom will be cheaper. Probably much cheaper, and probably even more so bundled with CS. (I’m guessing Adobe will make some sort of pro photographer bundle once they’ve got Lightroom ready.)

Fourth, Lightroom is much leaner than Aperture. It’s like Apple thought they would have the market all to themselves and decided to not care about hardware demands, since most of their target users would have dual G5s anyway—they’re pro photographers, right? Gotta have the latest and greatest then. But they forgot about photo journalists with Apple laptops. (That, or there are really powerful Intel laptops in the works, that will probably be introduced by Steve Jobs in his keynote at MacWorld Expo tomorrow. You may expect another blog post tomorrow night.)

Fifth, Lightroom, although in early beta, is available for everyone now. (That is, everyone with Mac OS X 10.4.) No paying $499 for v1.01 software. $0 for beta, where you’re openly invited to give Adobe feedback and help them make Lightroom better—better than it is at the moment, of course, but equally important: better than Aperture).

My only gripe is that I’ll have to upgrade my G5 to Tiger if I want to use it there. The other option is the iBook with my external hard drive. Well, I bought that drive more than a year ago, it’s about time it gets used for something.

Aperture links

Aperture home page
Aperture demo video
The Luminous Landscape’s ‘non-review’ of Aperture

Lightroom links

Lightroom home page
Lightroom demo
Download Lightroom
Adobe’s Lightroom press release at DPReview
The Luminous Landscape’s Lightroom first look and primer

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