on Nov 9th, 2007The software not taken
I have recently had a couple of very large batches of photographs to process. My aperture software, think a digital dark room without being Photoshop, has been slowing down a considerable amount. Last night I went to a photography group meet up that I have written about before. The subject was about RAW file processing and our teacher was the very talented Matt Dunmore and the software he used was Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom. His Ligthroom responded so much quicker than aperture. I started to think that perhaps I had made the wrong decision in software to use. After a few questions I learned a couple of interesting things.
Lightroom does not have some of the organization tools of aperture. Aperture is designed to house my entire photography library. With proper key wording, small albums, web pages and collections are available. Both software products have a rating system and both have key wording abilities but from what I heard Lightroom is not really designed to hold your entire library. I can go into aperture and tell it to collect all the photographs of a particular person or place with a four star or better rating and turn it into a web page and it will do it for me.
Lightroom would slow down considerably with a library my size. From what I heard if I had a Lightroom directory with over 14,000 images in it, it would be sluggish also.
Lightroom does not have the full screen and multiple monitor edit modes that aperture has.
Lightroom has some major pluses also. Lightroom even with the library choices that seem popular with it is still very fast.
Lightroom has color code labels on top of a star rating system, this could be very useful. Lightroom also has some really nice image editing controls, such as vignette and duo toning that are not present in aperture.
I think the conclusion I reached though is that both software systems are in an early stage (they are both in there 1.x incarnations) and that the future is very bright indeed for digital RAW processing software packages.
I still want a very powerful Mac Pro system with two 30 inch monitors though for my photo work.
The Mac Pro? Sure, why not! But the two 30 inch monitors from Apple? Ouch! Maybe from somewhere else though.
How soon will you need this, anyway?
Dell has there 30 inch monitors for at least 500 dollars less. I don’t need this rig until sometime next year, maybe year after that.