Aperture 2 vs. Lightroom 2

There are other raw editors out there (I've tried a few) but if you want the catalog management, yeah, Lr seems to be the only game in town. I've been paying £8/month for the Adobe Creative Cloud photography package for over a year now, so that's Lr plus Ps with Silver Efex Pro 2 as my secondary editor (from the free Google release of the Nik tools a while ago).

I rationalise it as being less than I spend on chocolate (perhaps).

You can buy Lightroom, you don't have to rent it. Don't remember how but I did it.

New Lightroom CC out today ... seems to be not awful? The cloud syncing seems to be fast and good, at least between the web client and my iPad and phone and I'm glad they've separated it out from the desktop app, because the link between it and the mobile apps was creaking at the seams. The "save offline" ability for albums is aeons better than the Apple and Google Photos apps' insistence that they just get to manage that for you invisibly, too.

I need to download the new desktop app tonight, because if CC is all it's made out to be I might not need Lightroom Classic any more. (Which is apparently heaps faster in the new release, too)

Seeing as I don't have internet at home for potentially another week, I'm not going to be playing with this for a bit. How do Lr CC and Lr Classic co-exist? I assume they share the same catalog? Changes made in one are immediately seen in the other? If I make some fancy edits in Classic (settings that aren't available in CC), I see them all the same in CC, I guess?

I was thinking I could work entirely in Lr CC and just have an Lr Classic session for a wedding or some other major shoot. But I've yet to see what's missing from Lr CC.

Totally separate catalogues -- you have to do an import process to get yr LR Classic catalogue into CC, and then the link between them is completely broken. Your CC catalogue comes by default with all the albums you have shared with LR Mobile previously, though.

The big thing missing from CC I've found so far is curves, and there's no split toning (which I really only ever used for 300 anyway, so nbd)

Ugh. I'm not sure I like the sound of this. Lens corrections? Vertical/horizontal guides? Masking?

And the catalog split I'd need to get my head around. There's 17 years of pics in there!

You can upload them all to CC though, which is what my laptop is beavering away at now. No more backup hard disks for me to fret about! I'll check on those features when I get in

I still use aperture

So... the practice of LrCC making a local copy of all yr pics makes it's a no-go for most laptop users, I'm thinking? That's your experience, Stet?

I'm basically just using it as a viewing tool for things I've synched with Lr Mobile. That's all that's in there - the 500+ images (Smart Previews only) I've synched over the last couple of years. The LrCC web tool is ok for a quick tweak too. And I'm now sharing Lr Mobile albums with people, rather than a Flickr link. But I could have done this without LrCC.

LrClassic all the way for me, for the time being.

So... the practice of LrCC making a local copy of all yr pics makes it's a no-go for most laptop users, I'm thinking? That's your experience, Stet?

I'm basically just using it as a viewing tool for things I've synched with Lr Mobile. That's all that's in there - the 500+ images (Smart Previews only) I've synched over the last couple of years. The LrCC web tool is ok for a quick tweak too. And I'm now sharing Lr Mobile albums with people, rather than a Flickr link. But I could have done this without LrCC.

LrClassic all the way for me, for the time being.

Oops.

It works OK in general, as you can set how much disk space it should use for previews. I’ve been trying it out with a 20gb shoot and it has kept the local usage small.

The problem is the migration, where it insists on making a local copy of everything first and won’t move without it. I’m hoping that’s a stupid oversight, otherwise I just won’t be able to ever migrate to it

this decision to fork lightroom is really insane

i might live to regret this but i think i'm going to subscribe to lightroom cc

i decided to stick with aperture and bought affinity photo the photoshop killer. if i need a better digital cam program (right now primarily managing film scans) i’ll fork out the 300 or so for capture one.

should i buy lightroom 6 while they're still selling it without a subscription? i "acquired" 5.x and i like it. facial recognition is the only reason i know of that i want to upgrade to a new version. i assume the cloud version also has a slicker workflow for sharing galleries and getting photo snaps into the library.

I preferred 5 to 6 -- the performance tanked miserably for me with 6. CC is getting better, but obviously the standalone doesn't benefit from that

LR6 feels slower than 5 to me for no clear reason. i needed the upgrade in order to handle the RAW files for my new camera so i guess that's that...

it also adds the ability to go in and futz vertical adjustment, not just take what the algorithm decides (tho what you can do is still a bit constrained) and maybe there are other goodies i can't see...

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