Dear Apple-
I’m a long-time Lightroom/Photoshop user. I shoot almost all digital RAW or do high-resolution film scans from medium format negatives/slides to 16-bit TIFF. I’m basically very happy with this setup both in terms of performance and features. However, since upgrading my operating system to Snow Leopard (on a new, clean hard disk), I decided to try the latest Aperture to see how it’s progressed over the last couple of years.
I took about 5 RAW files from my Canon 30D and about 5 film scan TIFFs (16-bit files about 75-150MB each) and imported them into the Aperture trial library. After attempting to make adjustments on a few of the files, I realized my late 2007 Macbook with 3GB of RAM is clearly not capable of running Aperture 2.1.4. After only making a handful of adjustments on the 8MP digital RAW files from the 30D, Aperture seemed to slow to a crawl. On the large film scan TIFFs, Aperture seemed to slow to a coma very soon after starting to make adjustments. By contrast, on this same computer, I have a Lightroom 2.5 library with thousands of images, including huge film scan files. Lightroom runs extremely fast almost all of the time for me — it only seems to slow down when I make tons of brush/spot adjustments on a large file. Lightroom runs so much faster than Aperture that realistically, I can’t think of switching regardless of features. I wonder if Aperture requires a dedicated graphics card to run at an acceptable pace whereas Lightroom doesn’t? Just a guess.
However, I was very impressed by these features:
- soft proofing (yes!)
- levels tool (having 5 sliders)
- highlights and shadows tool (esp. the advanced options here)
- dodge and burn tool gave pleasing results
Going forward, I’ll continue to monitor the evolution of both Lightroom and Aperture (and any other viable tools that emerge) for my photo library management and RAW development needs. If Lightroom ever gets a soft-proofing feature, I may never look at Aperture again. Or if Aperture gets much much much faster, or if I somehow obtain a much much faster computer, I might just switch to Aperture at some point.
I hope this feedback is valuable in some way.
Respectfully,
Matt Sawyer
M.SAWYER PHOTOGRAPHY
