Responding to Ian Wood's LR / Aperture comparison

Ian Wood has posted a comparison of Apple Aperture 2 and Adobe Lightroom (incl. 2-Beta features) on the Inside Aperture blog. I posted just a brief comment there, adding four points to his (and other commenters') already very comprehensive list. Here is a more complete, longer version.

>>> FIRST: One of the big issues in LR is the "scatter" of all settings and presets. Unlike Aperture, LR does not have (even in 2 Beta) one convenient interface to see and manage all the presets in one place; instead, they are located EVERYWHERE, and are often quite well hidden. So, we have the TEXT preset editor; and the separate FILENAME preset editor (no way to get to either directly from any menu; have to know and remember where they are hiding); there are DEVELOP presets, stored as separate files in one of the LR working directories (but they may be stored in LR directory, or in catalog directories, and can only be consolidated into one location manually, by fiddling w/ LR's working directory structure); there are SERVER setting presets hidden in the completely non-obvious drop-down menu in a dialog box in one of the web module choices; there are PRINT presets, lurking in the print module, etc. After you accumulate lots of those, getting a quick, one-glance overview of what you have, and where, is REALLY cumbersome. Aperture offers one, consolidated, very elegant interface to manage various presets.

SECOND: This brings me to a somewhat related issue: packaging everything for output. Aperture can export and package a self-contained subset of your library, and create one file that has EVERYTHING in it (albums, books, slideshows, light tables, etc.). It can even (as an option) embed the masters in this file, and that, even if they are just referenced and not Aperture-managed in the original library. No such luck in LR. This is somewhat surprising, given that Adobe realizes the importance of this with other apps that deal with multiple assets - e.g., InDesign can package everything for print (idd files, book files, images, styles, and fonts). There is no way to send a self-contained catalog or a zipped folder to a client or a project co-author; you have to manually create a zip file and make sure the directory structure you created in it contains everything the other person needs. Keeping in mind my point one, above, this is a challenge - exported catalogs by default strip ALL the presets (even the print templates or web layouts), except for just a few LR's built-in defaults.

THIRD, and perhaps most controversial point, is the difference in LR's and Aperture's RAW engines. On low-key, dark photos, LR's ACR engine renders a strangely "frothy" (in some areas almost posterized) version; recent Aperture RAW-2 comes much closer to what I would get in Nikon's NX. Very, very close, in fact (OK - I can't really see the difference, except for color toning, which can be easily adjusted). Sure, a dark photo with noisy, dark-color transitions will still be noisy, but in Aperture and NX it looks like the traditional photo grain noise, not posterized clearly visible flat-color areas with frothy edges that ACR produces. There are FEW images I have where this is obvious, but still, for low lighting, or very contrasty, dramatically lit photos, with large, flat-color areas, such as this one, this is quite noticeable (and not just in exported jpg files), especially at 1:1 or greater zoom, and, of course, on prints.

FOURTH: In LR's favor, Aperture's loupe drives me crazy - I much prefer the ability to zoom in (up to 11:1 view) in a way that includes the whole screen, not just a small, circular area - but that's probably one of those personal preferences...

Of course, if you also use Photoshop, and Bridge (which I use to manage InDesign files), only LR's adjustments and metadata (keywords, ratings, labels and most of develop adjustments) can be shared between those. One major reason for me to stay with Lightroom, although with a bad case of* Aperture envy*.

ALSO: See my previous quick, initial post about LR 2 Beta (and Aperture), and another one that compares localized adjustments in LR with Viveza and Aperture (sort of).