Adobe Lightroom

Amazing: you wait forever for decent photo workflow tool, and then two turn up together. Adobe lost out on the race to go public first with Lightroom, but Apple may lose out from under delivering on expectations with Aperture. The big difference to most people is, basically, $500. You can now try out an early beta release of Lightroom for free, but Aperture is strictly for paying customers only. I haven't even seen Aperture except boxed on a shelf, and in screenshots, but I have downloaded Lightroom. I am quite impressed with Lightroom's UI design. Apparently the guy who designed worked with Kai Krause, on the UIs for KPT, Bryce, Soap, etc, and it shows. It is pretty, but also effective. The "rooms" metaphor from Soap is quite clear in Lightroom. Lightroom works fine with Olympus E-1 RAW files, as expected, or at least as well as Adobe Camera Raw, which is not as good as Olympus Studio or PhaseOne C1Pro. Aperture also works with E-1 files, which I know from opening E-1 RAW in iPhoto. The quality is pretty poor though, not as good as Adobe. Olympus files seem to cause problems for many converters. So, as of today, I would use either for RAW conversion.

An Olympus E-1 RAW file open in Lightroom's Library view

What I'm looking for is a rock solid versioning and management tool. I want to work with photos, not files. I want a program to realise that a TIFF, JPEG or Photoshop file processed from a RAW capture is a version of the same photo, not a completely unassociated file. Both Lightroom and Aperture seem to be offering this, although I think it is fair to say that Aperture is more sophisticated. And, whilst browsing, comparing, rating and labeling functions are welcome, I also want the application to get out of my way and let ME decide how I'm going to process RAW files. If I want to use the C1Pro engine, let me. There is no reason why managing a RAW file cannot be disassociated from processing it. Lightroom has received some plaudits over Aperture, because, apparently, Aperture is perceived as being tied to the Mac OS. Well, this is true to some extent, but Lightroom is just as much tied to Adobe's product line. Aperture is actually designed to work with Photoshop (even if it does not do so entirely perfectly so far), so arguably it is more open. Lightroom also promises an API, but what sort of API remains to be seen. Unless it supports Photoshop plug-ins out of the box, I can't see it being a big advantage. Aperture has many other issues, and I certainly would not buy it yet (although if the RAW converter improves I might, and if Apple offer a limited trial period it would help a lot), but it does seem more ambitious than Lightroom. I don't for a moment believe that Lightroom has been knocked up in two months to spoil Aperture, but I do suspect that its focus has changed. If you read the history published by Jeff Schewe over at PhotoshopNews, the initial idea of Lightroom does seem to be closer to a "Kai's Soap Pro" than anything else. I'm also a little put off by the exuberant enthusiasm of some of the Adobe cheerleaders (Jeff Schewe, Andrew Rodney, even Michael Reichmann) for Lightroom over Aperture. There is no doubt that Lightroom is interesting, but it is being seriously overhyped. It doesn't actually do very much yet. So far, it is a (very) nice UI design wrapped around Adobe Bridge functionality and a few editing and display tools. Not much more than iPhoto, to be honest. The excitement of the cheerleaders seems a little out of proportion. Yes, it is a beta, but releasing a beta has benefits and negatives, and you can't take one without the other. If Lightroom is going to be released in Q3 2006, Aperture has quite some time to make good it's defects, and incidentally profit from the free market research on the Lightroom forums. Personally, I think there is a real opportunity for PhaseOne and iView to merge C1Pro with MediaPro 3, and forge a fantastic full workflow product from two strong specialists. Who knows, maybe it will happen.