I'm staying with Aperture. At least for now.
All this talk about a new version of Apple Aperture is now driving me crazy. It's all over the Internet and there seems to be a new rumor in Twitter pretty much every day. Hey, even I have been contributing to the rumors here and in my last post I went on a rant about thinking about switching to Lightroom in which I described a few issues I've been having with Aperture since upgrading to Snow Leopard. And as much as I'm over the rumors, here's another one for you. A book for Aperture 3 is right now (as of this posting) available for pre-order in the Canadian Amazon store. There have been a few instances of this happening but they've removed the page and I had never seen it before. This time I took a screenshot just in case they remove it.
Anyway, as I mentioned in the last post, I've been giving Lightroom a good run lately. I actually downloaded both the Lightroom 2 trial and the Lightroom 3 beta. I downloaded a copy of each for both my MacBook Pro and my desktop, so that when one trial expired I could continue testing in the other machine.
Yes, Lightroom is a great program and in many ways it does pretty much the same thing as Aperture. It does have some features that Aperture lacks and it has a few things that I admit are really cool (like the cropping tool and the Print module). But the reality is that as much as I tried, Aperture just seems much more useful and friendly. It's infinitely better as an organisational tool, which is the main purpose of these applications, and in the current version there's very little that Aperture doesn't do for me.
That whole localised editing thing I think is highly overrated. I spent a lot of time using this feature in Lightroom and it really isn't that useful without proper layers and blending control. If you need that level of processing you really need to take the image into Photoshop. It seems like a gimmick to me, but that's just my opinion. You're welcome to disagree.
The more I think about it, the main reason I want an Aperture 3 is because the geek in me wants to see what "cool stuff" they put in there that I don't know I need. I'll say that again... cool stuff that I don't know I need. That's an interesting statement. On one hand, it means I don't really need a new version of Aperture as the current one serves me fine. On the other one, they may come up with something so cool that'll change my workflow significantly. Take the iPhone for example. I was really happy with my mobile phone before the iPhone came out and I never thought I'd need one. Now I love it and couldn't imagine getting by without one.
But I digress. This post is just to say that at least for now, I'm staying with Aperture and I plan to revamp the articles here. The only things I would really like Aperture to have are global adjustment presets (I have to give it to Adobe on this one), camera profiles, a non-destructive gradient tool, and better integration with Photoshop.
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Reader Comments (2)
I tried the lightroom 3 beta like everyone else. I even used it as my main program for a few months, importing all new projects into it rather than Aperture. I learned the keystrokes, doenloaded all the tutorials I could find, and really tried to learn it. In the end, I deleted it. It was nice, but I didn't like it nearly as much as Aperture. For starters, I don't think it offers a whole lot more than Aperture does, and of the things they both do, I think Aperture does them better.
I'm also not entirely convinced Adobe needed to release this. Maybe by the calendar they did, or to steal thunder from Aperture they did, but by the features, they didn't. Now I'm not a Lightroom user so anyone feel free to correct me, but it feels to me like the Lightroom 3 beta doesn't offer that much new over version 2.
I look forward to Aperture 3 blowing Lightroom out of the water. Maybe that's me dreaming, maybe not. We'll see, huh? Either way, I'm more than happy enough with Aperture 2 to stay with it until the next version comes.
David, that's pretty much the conclusion I came to after trying out both LR2 and LR3 Beta. I think they may have released it because the rumors of Aperture 3 were starting to gain momentum back then even though it doesn't feel like a full version update.
Hopefully a new Aperture will impress us all... soon.