Mark Levison over at "Notes from a Tool User" has posted a useful guide to some head-to-head comparisons of Adobe Lightroom vs. Apple Aperture. He links mainly to two other blogs, but I'll let you follow along from his page. This post has obviously been helpful for people mulling over a sortie into one or the other of these new hybrid programs, because this post has been one of the most popular and heavily linked on "Notes" during the past few months.
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Mike
I'd love to see them include LightCraft's LightZone in the comparison mix. My feeling is that this unique and interesting application blows Lightroom and Aperture out of the water now that LZ is in version 3.0. It's nice to finally see an application that thinks outside the Photoshop-centric box.
Ed
Posted by: Ed Wolpov | Tuesday, 05 June 2007 at 09:29 PM
I'm with Ed with regards to my love for Lightzone. This program lets me get to my finished photos much faster than photoshop (where my skills are admittedly limited). Version 3 is much faster, and the tool set is developing nicely. The UI makes 2 steps forward and 1 step back---so on the whole it's improving.
One issue that I have is I shoot with Sigma cameras. No support (yet) for x3f raw in either Aperture or Lightzone. Lightroom does support it---but I really didn't like the 1,000,001 sliders for dealing with files (I think I quit on beta 4). I'd love these programs to deal with my raw---but I'm stuck with going to SPP and cranking TIFFs out of it.
I'm not convinced that any of these programs are worth a DAM in comparison to iView MediaPro---but since Microsoft acquired that, they've added nothing but extra suck. I'm still on 2.6.4, and will unlikely upgrade to Expression Media unless they pull something magical out of their hat.
Posted by: Jim Kofron | Wednesday, 06 June 2007 at 07:01 AM
My comment is off-topic.
Jim, I love your expression "...they've added nothing but extra suck."
Posted by: Robert Roaldi | Wednesday, 06 June 2007 at 08:02 AM
OK I will try LightZone and do a comparison with Lightroom. But be warned I have a day job and family this could take me a few weeks.
If you know LightZone well and want to help me get the most out of it - ping via my blog or Mike.
Posted by: Mark Levison | Wednesday, 06 June 2007 at 02:57 PM
Lightzone is an interesting app. With the 3.0 release it's become more mature.
However, comparing Lightzone to Aperture or Lightroom is invalid. Compare Lightzone to applications devoted exclusively to image editing, such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
Aperture and Lightroom are much broader and deeper platforms than Lightzone.
Posted by: Ken Tanaka | Wednesday, 06 June 2007 at 06:03 PM
I've been using the trial version of Lightzone for a few weeks, and I agree with the others that it's a very different approach. And it's an approach I like! However, I do find some aspects of it to be very slow (e.g., loading of thumbnails), and I find the help and tutorials rarely address my questions, which is frustrating. I'm using 2.0, so maybe I'll give 3.0 a whirl before I commit (or not).
Posted by: blork | Thursday, 07 June 2007 at 11:41 AM