Quick (Not!) and Dirty Comparison

I thought I'd throw together a little compare & contrast exercise for y'all between Lightroom 3 Beta and Aperture 3. The problem, of course, is that I'm working on my severely underpowered MacBook Air. It will run both programs, but everything is much slower than one would hope… and in the case of Aperture, it quickly becomes damn near unusable. LR3 does a MUCH better job of supporting my feeble little laptop. With this hardware, the fine points of image quality are really irrelevant; I simply can't get work done in a timely fashion using Aperture on this machine.

Nevertheless, I've prepared some comparison images for your amusement.

First up, an unremarkable image opened from RAW with no adjustments:

Aperture



Lightroom



Now with typical adjustments:

Aperture



Lightroom



A few other examples:

Aperture



Lightroom



Aperture



Lightroom



And, lastly, a comparison with a previously-posted image:

Aperture



Lightroom



If you're not seeing big differences between these images (or if you're not seeing them at all on Facebook, please click through to the post on my blog), well, that's because there aren't a lot of big differences. I would say, on average, images coming out of Aperture tend to wind up a little more contrasty and a little more vibrant/saturated. Some of that is probably because, on my gimpy machine, I can't really do adjustments in real time, which probably means I'm over-correcting.

Still, the upshot of this comparison is that while I LOVE the many other features Aperture offers (ease of keywording, Places, and Faces), it is currently way more frustrating than I'm prepared to tolerate for actually making image adjustments. And I think Lightroom 3 Beta currently has the edge in terms of brushed-in adjustments.

My Aperture trial will expire in 9 days. Lightroom 3 Beta will expire in mid-April. I will revisit the comparison when I have hardware that can handle the burden that Aperture places on it, and make a purchasing decision shortly thereafter. It's possible I'll wind up using LR3 for RAW editing and iPhoto (the latest version of which will be free on my theoretically-forthcoming new hardware) for cataloging and other higher-level tasks.

The Raw Deal

My GF-1 makes pretty nice JPEGs. I haven't had any complaints, really. But yesterday's experiment in RAW+JEPG has opened my eyes. Even with my clumsy bumbling in Lightroom, I can see why professional photographers shoot in RAW. Although I'm post-processing these images on a non-color-controlled MacBook Air, I can clearly see why the exquisite tonal and color control afforded by post-processing RAW data is desirable. Here are a few examples (of course all images you see online are now JPEGs, and have gone through an extra level of compression courtesy of Blogger, so some of the differences get lost in the process).

Blue Ice Puddle


Image 1: Camera JPEG, tweaked in iPhoto. Not bad!


Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

Three Guy Wires


Image 1: Camera JEPG, tweaked in iPhoto. Pretty good!


Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

Pink Pipe


Image 1: Camera JPEG, tweaked in iPhoto. Difficult color palette, handled quite well.


Image 2: Camera RAW, processed in Lightroom. Guess what? More accurate color balance, better tonal range, increased detail sharpness.

It's a lot more work, and there's clearly a whole world of technical expertise I've yet to acquire. Fortunately, I have a pretty good technical background in image processing, both from my background as an analog printer (remember the silver print darkroom in days of yore?) and from years of working with digital images in circumstances where image quality was paramount. I can learn what I need to, and my eye is decent. The biggest challenge working from the RAW file is that there are so many instances, so many "interpretations" if you will, of the data that are viable. There is no one correct version. The hard part is to pick a vision for the image and then know when to quit tweaking. Ansel Adams would have loved this technology.