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Aperture vs Lightroom - An O'Reilly "Inside Aperture" Field Test
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Are You User Experienced?

One of the major topics I kept coming back to while trying out Lightroom was what many call the user experience. To me, a program like Lightroom, or Aperture, or even Photoshop for that matter, should focus on the user. After all, we're creative artists, and when it comes to realizing our artistic visions, environment is everything. I'll give you an example.

As I sit here writing this article, I have my perfect writing environment set up. I try to create a similar environment whenever I write because it gets me in the mood and helps me to see the forest through the trees. Before I begin writing, I usually clear off my desk. I'm a horribly disorganized person, so my desk gets pretty cluttered, and clearing it off helps me clear my mind. Once my desk is nice and clean again, I turn on some music, and light a candle. If it's late at night, which it usually is, I turn on a dim desk lamp, and then I can get to work. Once I have my ideal working environment set up, my creative juices start flowing. It works every time.

With Aperture and Lightroom, it should be no different. These types of programs dominate my digital darkroom. They have such a heavy influence on where I take my imagery. It's just like being in a darkroom, where certain environmental variables must be just so in order for your prints to come out the way you envisioned them.

Dispense with the Workflow

What attracted me to Aperture in the first place was its non-linear way of doing things. I'd gotten so fed up with all this workflow stuff, that when the ultimate in workflow software came to market, I could barely bring myself to say the word. From here on in, lets refer to it at the W-word.

Maybe it's because of my personality type, but I really hate doing things step-by-step. I don't like to keep lists, and when I get tired of working on something, I like to switch gears and work on something else. When Aperture came out, I could finally dispense with the W-word.

Aperture allows me to work the way I like to work. I don't have to worry if I miss a step, or forget to file something. I can always go back and do it later. I can start working on a web gallery or even page up a book. If I get bored or tired of the work, I don't even have to save it, I just move on to something else.

Figure 2. Aperture's Full Screen Workspace

Often, when I'm working on an image in full screen mode, I realize I'm not happy with how it looks. For whatever reason, I think I've gone down the wrong path with the image. In Aperture, I can easily hit Option-G and I have a new blank slate to play with from the original Master image. My previous work is still intact, and when I get over my doubts about how the old one looked, I can quickly go right back to it if I change my mind. In the middle of all of this, I can make my new version the top pick in a stack and see it show up as the current version in the web album I was working on before. Everything just flows, and I can get back to being creative again.

With Lightroom, I don't see this as much. I'll be the first to admit, though, Lightroom's a fine piece of software, and I'm sure it will only get better. It seems to have all the pieces, and a great "keep it simple stupid" attitude, about managing digital assets, but it really fails for me by bringing back the W-word with its system of modules.

Allow me to quote my most recent comment as of this writing.

"I found Lightroom to be too rigid in its modular thinking; almost remedial in its hand-holding approach of "first you go here, do this, then go there and do that," and on down the line."

I think he nailed it. The module approach resonates back to the days of writing Photoshop Actions to speed up your personal W-word. Not being able to work on the fly, and having to think about where I am in a piece of software clutters my creative vision and I'm back to looking at the trees.

In my posts over the past week, I gave a variety of examples of the little details that I found annoying with Lightroom. To be fair, I should say that for just about everything I mentioned that I couldn't figure out in Lightroom, a commenter pointed out exactly how it could be done. This interaction with the readers is what made the whole experience so much fun. I hope we can keep it going, regardless of which program you decide to go with.

Even though I eventually figured out how to do the things I needed to do in Lightroom, I couldn't help but keep coming back to one major gripe. Why do I need to be in a certain module to do a certain task in the first place? After playing with Lightroom for a week, I found myself constantly having to think and rethink how and where to do things, because with the module system, you can only do things in one place.

Be Aware of Your Surroundings

We're all pretty much aware of Aperture's extended functionality when it comes to dual screen mode. It's an amazing feature of Aperture, and I wish I had a gigantic display to utilize it, but I don't. I have a 15" laptop. However, I really love using Aperture in full screen mode. I just press the F key and I'm instantly transferred to an environment where all I see is the image on a black surround. I can hit H to bring up my Adjustments HUD and I can scroll through images using the filmstrip and select multiple images for comparison. Everything I need is right there for me, and can easily be hidden so that I can see my work. Full screen mode works great for me.

When I first started playing with Lightroom, I missed being able to hit F and get into a full screen environment with a single keystroke. I learned through some of your comments that you can, in fact, hit the F key to toggle through a couple of modes, and one that Adobe refers to as Full Screen Mode, but Adobe's idea of a Full Screen environment is much different than Apple's.

In Lightroom, when you enter Full Screen Mode, all the program does is maximize the workspace by removing the top menu bar and hiding your Dock. The surround is still gray, and any panels you had open are still open. I know there are keyboard shortcuts for hiding the panels, but even if you remember all of them, once hidden you still see this black border, and the gray surround. I find these elements very distracting.

You can customize the surround if you wish, but that's an extra step. You can memorize the keyboard shortcuts, but that's more to think about. When I want a true Full Screen mode, I want just that:my image alone, stretched to fill the entire screen on a black surround. Aperture has simply done a much better job here. Not only can I get into full screen mode by hitting F, I can do it from anywhere, at any time. Once in full screen mode, I have all of the tools I had in Normal mode, all of them.

When editing images, your surround plays a key role in how you perceive your work as you make adjustments. The room lighting, the size of your workspace and your image's surround are crucial (not to mention a color-managed monitor). I'd really like to see better full screen support in Lightroom.

Portability Is Key

If you've been reading Inside Aperture for a while now, you'll probably have noticed I'm a traveling photographer. I do all of my work from a laptop, and I store all of my images on external hard drives, DVDs and whatever else I can get my hands on. Just check out my article, Photo Workflow on the Road - A Hitchhiker's Guide to Aperture, for more information on how I do what I do. One of the coolest features I've found in using Aperture is its Project packages. With Aperture's Project packages, I can move my images, metadata, books, web galleries and, well, EVERYTHING, from one Aperture database to the next. If I shoot pictures for my girlfriend's web site, and she wants to work on them on her laptop, I just export the project and copy it to her machine. She imports the project into her library and she's off and running. Any editing I'd done up to that point is preserved and nicely packaged into a single file. I also wrote about how some traveling friends of mine used Aperture's Project packages to organize, archive, and backup all their travel pictures, which you can read here.

In Lightroom, there's really no parallel to this essential functionality. Your work (and I'm not talking about your Master image files here) is basically bound to one computer, and one database. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this won't be a problem for long.

One of Lightroom's strong points when the beta was originally released was that it used a referenced library system. This meant that you could store your images anywhere you liked, as opposed to Aperture 1.0, which required you to store your managed images within the Aperture Library. Well, as we all know by now, Apple fixed this in version 1.5, and that's made the application very useful. So now both Aperture and Lightroom give you the option of working with referenced files or in a managed library. There's something very calming about having all your imported images stored safely inside the library package.

Note: In my daily work, I import images as managed files, and back them up to a variety of locations using the Vault, and my own backup software. Later, I move the images to an external hard drive and set them as Referenced Masters. I wish I could do this in Lightroom.

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