When Apple released Aperture they changed the way photographers thought about workflow, and I was an early adopter and advocate of the program. However, today I find myself using Adobe Lightroom and needing to transfer another 7,000 images out of Aperture. Why did I make the switch? Read on and I will try to explain the rationale behind my change of heart.

Let me start by saying that I still like Aperture for its workflow. When I go back to the program to export masters, I find that I miss the interface with its heads up displays and support for variable workflows. Lightroom is a much more rigid program, one that assumes a somewhat linear workflow. I have gotten used to Lightroom and am very productive in it, but there are things about Aperture that I will always miss. That said, I feel confident that moving to Lightroom was the right thing to do, especially after the recent upgrades to Adobe Camera Raw, the engine behind both Photoshop and Lightroom for RAW conversion.

It all started when I decided to compare the RAW conversion from Aperture to that of Capture NX, Nikon’s own program. I was quite pleased with the results from Aperture until some of my readers showed me that it was really my lack of understanding of Capture’s tools that made the difference. Mastering Capture was not something I was interested in doing though, because the interface doesn’t follow consistent practices of other Mac (or Windows) software and the program is really an image editor, not a workflow system. One thing that I learned in the process though is that Apple didn’t use any specifications or APIs published by the camera manufacturers when it developed its RAW conversion process for Core Image, the foundation of Aperture, iPhoto, and even the OS for RAW conversion.

I think Apple did a fairly good job with Core Image, but I was lacking confidence in their commitment to sustain development and continue to improve their converter. At that time, both Lightroom and Photoshop CS 3 were in beta and I decided to test their conversion against Aperture and Capture Nx. I didn’t do a detailed write-up, as I did for Aperture and Capture, but I was quite pleased with Adobe’s conversions. When Lightroom 1.0 was released, I still wasn’t completely sold on its workflow, but I made the choice to switch based on the RAW conversion. After all, it is the image quality that is most important and my justification was based on one fact that I couldn’t bend in Apple’s direction. Adobe is a company that is completely dedicated to photography as a business and they have some of the top minds in the industry working on their products. That, and the fact that they use the published specifications for RAW conversion give me much greater confidence in the future of my images in Lightroom over Aperture. It is that confidence that lead me to make the switch.

Apple is a great company, and I own a lot of their technology. I just don’t think that Photography is their real core competency or that Aperture will really get the kind of resources it needs to keep moving forward as a leading product. Since my move to Lightroom, Adobe has continued to improve the product and the new ACR is enough validation that my choice was the right one. I don’t know what I would do without the Clarity control if I suddenly lost it. In addition to my increased confidence in the RAW conversion of my photos, I think I have gained a few other benefits from Lightroom as well. Here is a short list:

• Performance: Lightroom is much faster at displaying edits on the image.
• Integration with Bridge and Photoshop: I keep all my edits in XMP sidecar files and I can move back and forth between editing in Photoshop and Lightroom without loss of data.
• User community: Lightroom has been adopted by several leading photography writers and there is a plethora of information available on the web and in books

I am sure there are more. I am so used to Lightroom now that it is somewhat invisible to me, as it should be. However, I keep finding new features or shortcuts that make my life easier and I love to hear about others. If you have any, please feel free to share them in the comments below.

tags: aperture | lightroom | mac | post-processing | workflow