Aperture 2 vs. Lightroom 2

The split/merge library feature is a good one: you can have one master library on your home Mac, and start a new one on your laptop when you're travelling, then later merge them.

Looks good. Going down the list of cameras with RAW support - yes to the Pana G1/GF1, no to the various Oly Pens...

g1/gh1; no gf1!

feel like if I upgrade I'll be forever paying canikon taxes to apple (I.e. delayed and sporadic support)

is LR3 out of beta yet?

the beta expires on april 30, so i guess they'll have the finished product then.

gotcha.

worth using? or should i just stick with LR2 for the moment

i've just dabbled, but it seems pretty good. high iso stuff comes out looking v natural and filmlike. it's free, so why not?

D'oh - misread, sorry! No GF1.

really mystifies me that G1/GH1 are supported but not the others. LX3 and S90 are supported too, so it looks like they've finally built in lens-correction into their RAW processor.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/28/drudge-siren.gif aperture release supports e-p1, gf-1 http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/28/drudge-siren.gif

Aperture 3.0.1. update U&K too!

congratulations to aperture and all its supporters

Congratulation to aperture for its update

I can get Aperture 3 for about £60 with education discount; seeing as I *ahem* acquired Aperture 2 free of charge, I'd not mind paying for 3. Should I upgrade?

I definitely would for 3.0, the new feature set seems pretty excellent and once I hassled with getting my library converted over I like it a lot.

try it out first?

I tried it out in the Apple shop last week, will def. download an upgrade.

picked up the upgrade copy last night. love apple packaging

Have downloaded the trial at work. Think I may splurge.

Downloading upgrade now..

anyway know what the de facto aperture forum is? would love to find a kodachrome preset

new lightroom beta has support for video (metadata, library, etc., not video editing).

Also the Tone Curve is Photoshop-like now - as many points as you want, endlessly tweakable.

how do you even work a tone curve

are the ends still fixed or can i dial down overexposed whiteness to greyness?

The ends are not fixed.

gbx, we pointed you at a coupla tutorials on the other thread a few weeks ago! Sheesh!

(Just kidding, like).

can i dial down overexposed whiteness to greyness?

Mind you, pulling the ends in (crunching the DR) is not the way to do this. That's actually going to brighten your higher mid-tones. You're better off with the Recovery slider to pull back blown-out highlights (shooting Raw, you might even find there's detail in there, not just greyness).

Recovery had the same problem though, i.e. brightest whites (FFF) were always unaffected. Has that changed? I know, I know, learn to shoot better, stop trying to fix yr schoolboy errors in post :)

Hmmm. I need to have a play with a larger catalog than the one I have at work (which is mostly photos of Movember and various Bake-Offs) to see what you mean. I know that I often haven't been able to completely eliminate blown highlights in the past but IMO it's better to leave them like that than pull them down into greyness (which you could do in a very blunt way by using the adjustment brush and pulling down exposure).

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/photoshop-curves.htm

this site has a very good intro to curves (and to post processing in general)

thx dude, will look into it

You mean you didn't when I posted the same link on the Processing thread in January? ;) It is a good site, that.

I suspect I've been missing a trick or two with the Tone Curve in LR2.x, reading Milo Z's comment upthread and judging by some of the wacky shapes I see in some of my presets. Definitely seems easier to manipulate in a PS CS2+ style in LR3, but perhaps I never figured out how to do that with LR2. I'm generally pretty happy with a little S-curve and using the histogram sliders for everything else.

If they could incorporate specific lens distortion algorithms (a la DxO Optics Pro) in LR3 then I'd definitely be in. It's only maths, innit?

lens correction is already built into camera raw - if your camera has the right EXIF info (i.e. you're shooting a micro 43ds, LX3, or S90) it'll apply the correction automatically. of course you may want to do more than the manufacturer has dialed in (to remove excess CA etc.)

Hmm, I guess the lens correction I'm limited to with ACR (with my Canon EF lenses) is just vignetting/CA (which is all there in the LR interface). Judging by the profound effect I see when applying the 40D+28/1.8 DxO module to images taken with that combo (and these are tiffs exported directly into DxO from the imported LR Raw), there's clearly no barrel distortion fixing going on with ACR.

I should experiment a bit more though. This is based on an hour last night...

PS already has a lens correction tool I think, but it's pretty basic and not calibrated for individual lenses - it would be nice if Adobe incorporated it, but I don't see it happening...

as each lens has its own distortion characteristics, you need to specify how much correction to dial in for each particular lens, and if it's a zoom, at each particular focal length. so it's easy to do for a prime, but for a standard 24-70, you'll have up to 46 different possible distortion characteristics which you need to compensate for..

you should also give PTLens a try - much cheaper and does the same thing

Yes, that seems pretty good. As fun as the FilmPack stuff is with DxO, I have no real use for much else that it does, as it duplicates a lot of Lightroom functionality. The one-click appeal of DxO is rather lost when you find it doing something you don't actually like (the auto noise reduction is not as subtle as LR, I don't think; though you can customise so it limits what it does in Auto mode) and then you have to start going through drop-down menus.

Also, it's not ideal calling external editors from within LR on images you may have already processed in LR; not only do you lose the changes in the export (OK, not with PS or PSE), what you get back is a TIFF or a JPG, so that copying the original LR adjustments over gives you something wildly different. It's tricky working out what the correct workflow would be with something like DxO; either you have to do everything in DxO or just accept that the nicely flat, sharp image you get back in can't be manipulated with quite as much freedom.

for users of aperture - apparently this update may improve stability/memory leaks with aperture 3, and it doesn't show up in the software update

http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1008

aperture 3 has been an absolutely nightmare for me. i think the prokit update and 3.02 have fixed it, but i'm still rebuilding my (admittedly stupidly large) library after trying twice to import all my photos (first by transferring aperture 2 library, then by reimporting files and folders) left me each time with an application that crashed as soon as it was opened, every time. I HATE APPLE etc etc.

anyway, hopefully the reinstall and new library will do the trick.

haven't had any problems yet here (knock on wood). hope yer problems get sorted out! (I have a pretty small library to begin with - also I store my photos in folders on the HD, instead of inside the aperture library package.)

yeah so do i - they're on external drives. but it's huge, because i'm too lazy to throw stuff out. basically:

Level V Hoarder

Household will require intervention from a wide range of agencies. Professional organizers should not venture directly into working solo with this type of household. The Level V household may be under the care of a conservator or be an inherited estate of a mentally ill individual. Assistance is needed from many sources. A team needs to be assembled. Members of the team should be identified before beginning additional work. These members may include social services and psychological/mental health representative (not applicable if inherited estate), conservator/trustee, building and zoning, fire and safety, landlord, legal aid and/or legal representatives. A written strategy needs to be outlined and contractual agreements made before proceeding.

lol - 'external drives' says it all!

So, Lightroom 3 is out. Worth the upgrade from 2.x, I wonder?

I've been using the beta -- it's pretty good, and I like the noise reduction and Flickr integration. Don't know if I'd pay cash money to upgrade if I'd bought 2, though.

The big post-Beta addition is the Lens Correction feature. Pre-loaded Canon profiles are limited to the L lenses and the EF-S range (so nothing for my mid-price primes) but they have a shedload of Sigmas. I don't know whether they'll roll out more. Seems a bit slow with my tiny 400-image catalog at work.

this guy says it has the best noise reduction ever. i'm not convinced by his examples.

Colo(u)r noise reduction was always pretty good in LR, I think (though I don't often use it beyond the preset value for Raw because the in-camera colour NR for high-ISO is quite adequate on the 40D); luminance NR was horrid and blotchy. This seems smoother but they could just be smearing out details (this guy seems to like that effect).

I have more of a problem with this guy standing up in a Ford T-bird convertible going through a tunnel, brandishing a 5D2 and 14L. I bet he was going "Whooooo! Fuck yeah!" at the time.

(If he follows his referrals - I'm only kiddin', like).

Have just invested (cough cough) in Lr3, will have a mess around and report back.

Had a little look-see in the LR3 Lens Profile file for the Sigma 12-24 (cos I've just hired one); there are six focal length settings (12/15/17/20/24) and 12 aperture values (seem to be 1/6th-stop intervals between f/4.5 and f/8.0) plus a load of focusing distances, I guess. So what it does if you've shot something at 22mm f/11, I'm not sure - does a little interpolation? Nearest value? This is part of DxO's criticism - their modules are supposedly much more thorough that this. (Though the real meat of their argument was that users couldn't really be expected to create their own profiles with any degree of accuracy for those lenses which are missing).

I went from Lr5 on a budget Toshiba W8.1 laptop to LrCC (what they now call Classic) on a Mac Book Pro, so any slow-down was more than compensated for by a huge leap in hardware performance.

Also like the latest color/luminance range masking in Lr, which I'd only previously seen in something like CaptureOne (it was much nicer to use in there though). Though naturally I still do basically the same shit to every photo I work up (with the occasional round-trip to Ps for content-aware fill, or Silver Efex Pro for B&W), so most new tools are wasted on me.

I think the layout in Lr is a bit tired and mid-'00s now. You shouldn't have to scroll down a massive panel on the right to access all the tools. I don't know how I'd rework the UI, tbh.

"When you said you worked on Aperture, you’d get a sympathetic response. Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that."

choice quote

"Many people, including myself, developed long-term health problems. One person, as I mentioned, had a nervous breakdown, others just took forever to get any spark back in their careers. I would look these people in the eyes, and they had this look like someone close to them died.

An amusing aside was that in my annual review, I got the most substantial bonus I’ve ever gotten and the most significant salary increase. I guess getting yelled and screamed at has its perks. Or they felt guilty. Who knows."

I've been meaning for ages to get off Lightroom CC after it caused me to lose a few hundred images last year, and this week's 5.4 "sorry we deleted your pictures" update has finally prodded me into it.

The Downloader is predictably terrible — I have 500gb (how did I manage that) to download and after an hour it's still sitting at 1%.

I'll figure out where to go next after this. I've been using Lightroom since v1. Capture One seems to be the only serious alternative, right?

i switched from lightroom to apple photos and honestly it's fine for my purposes. the developing side is more than i need. the organization is a little basic but fine. it knows about live photos and all the other weird shit that comes out of an iphone.

Adobe finally updated LR so it remembers which preset you’re on when you step away and come back

Okay so moving to M1 Mac means my old copy of Lightroom no longer works. And I'm not paying for a subscription. Anyone have a recommendation?

Right now I'm tempted to just write a script to make the right folders in the photo library and copy images from the SD card, then use Pixelmator on individual images I give a shit about. (I don't shoot a ton any more, although that will change if my family situation turns out as I expect it to.)

A pro I know swears by Affinity (which is about $60?) but it’s not an organising tool; not sure what else there is for that. I still have a basic version of Capture One knocking around - apparently that can convert Lr catalogs.

I can understand not wanting to give Adobe a tenner a month for the rest of time but I can’t switch, not now. And AI masking in the latest version is really good.

i switched from lightroom to apple photos and it's been fine