Which photo tweaking software for the Mac?

[Heath]

I need to get some kind of photo software for the Mac. The obvious choices to me are either Apple's Aperture or Adobe's Lightroom. Both seem to do the same sort of thing. Lightroom is about £40 cheaper than Aperture and while cost isn't a major factor, I don't see the point of paying more for no advantages. My gut feelings are that the Apple software will work very intuitively, but Adobe know what they're doing with photo software. Adobe have also put some rather nice tutorial videos on their website. Has anyone compared the two (or others) and have any thoughts one way or the other?

Heath

 

[garyi]

Heath.

Aperture is quite different to Lightroom in how it works.

Firstly you need a powerful mac for Aperture. The bare minimum is an iMac Core Duo with 2 gigs of ram and the uprated graphics card.

Lighroom requires less overheads.

Both are more of a workflow product rather than photo tweaking software. Photoshop Elements would be the better choice for full on tweaking.

Also for basic quick editing check out imagewell, its free and designed to ge timages up to the web quick.

Having used the lightroom throughout its beta and owning aperture. I would go for aperture every time, its quite the most stunning piece of software on a suitable mac.

 

[Heath]

Hi Gary

Luckily I ticked the 2 gigs of RAM and uprated graphics card options on my Core 2 Duo iMac What does Aperture do that requires such a high spec computer?

It was more the cropping and adjusting highlights, shadows, etc that appeals, rather than the full on pixel editing of Photoshop. I haven't seen how this works in Aperture, but the 'intelligent' limited adjustment range in Lightroom is supposed to stop people like me completely screwing the picture up by tweaking it too far.

I have been using Nikon Capture on the PC for cataloguing and this sort of adjusting, and I see either of these programs as a replacement for that. I've used Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro on the PC for pixel editing, and I see myself buying the full Adobe Creative Suite for the Mac when the new 'Intel' version comes out - I don't see the point of buying a old Mac version at the moment.

Heath

 

[Mark EJ]

Very broadly, Aperture is much more of a photographer's production tool than Photoshop. Its prime focus in many ways is non-destructive editing of RAW images -- the image is king. You probably wouldn't use it for something which was to end up looking like a pen & ink drawing, for example.

Photoshop is a creative tool for using photos (or any other image) as raw material for the end result. It is entirely subtractive; ie, anything you do removes information from the image. The end result is king. Pen & ink, watercolour, you name it.

These are naturally very coarse expressions of the differences. Many people end up with both (and a load more besides).

Further, Adobe have a wider agenda. Their aim is to sublimate the OS, so that there's little difference running their software on different platforms. This can lead to a great deal of unrequired bloat which can hamper performance and stability -- it took well over 18 months to get a full CS2 installation stable on X 10.4, but if you ommitted Bridge and some other garbage all was fine. Purists would augue that Bridge only provides what the MacOS Finder does anyway, so why pay for the bloody thing?

 

[garyi]

Hi Heath.

Aperture use the core graphics engine to give you real time effects all of which are individually non destructive, This is everying from the crop through to the sharpen, every thing is seperate from everything else.

In preactise this means you could crop, add sharping, colour adjustment, exposure compensation and a tint. Youc ould go back a month later and remove just the sharpening, this is applied in real time to the RAW image, it requries a fair amount of processing power to achieve this.

What you get though is quite a different expereince to lightroom. I am not knocking lightroom, I am just saying aperture is exploiting more of the mac OS because it was made by apple. Its quite special in my opinion.

The good news for you is they have a 30 day demo available as does lightroom so you should get a good feel.

The other fantastic element of aperture (and lightroom) is that you can export out from within the app to say photoshop make you really deep changes and it will create a version within aperture of your new image. All seamless and sweet. Because aperture is Apple, it will display all images in iDVD etc.

The demo is worth a go.

 

[Heath]

Cheers for that. I didn't realise that there was a 30 day trial for Aperture. I'm currently downloading it, so I'll give it a go and compare it to Lightroom.

Heath