The gloves are off?

The photo workflow part of the net seems to be abuzz with experts on the demise of Lightroom with the introduction of Aperture 3. Fellow Irish based photographer Marco Davi make his case for Aperture. And of course he's welcome to that opinion, and he does have some valid points. And one bizzare one.

First up he calls Lightroom's UI clunky. Personally I've stated for years that I find Aperture cluttered. And Aperture 3 certainly has done nothing to change that perception. His statement that he constantly has to click on scroll bars shows that maybe he's not the expert he thinks he is. There are certainly times when scrolling is necessary, but with simple modifiers like Control/Command clicking on a panel to collapse all, and Alt/Option to invoke solo mode, it's not an all the time thing. Personally I can find pretty much most tools under my fingertips. That's because I learned the single key shortcuts that cover the bulk of the getting around in Lightroom. G,E and D, being key to getting about (pardon the pun). Having collections in Develop with LR3Beta means that the library disconnect is gone. In truth, I don't work that way. I do my file management, get my selected images, and then develop those selects. Then back out as needed for export etc. Of course, if you have all the Adjustment options selected in Aperture, then you have to scroll too.

Next up Marco states that brushes work better. Well, yes and no. The mask options do allow the emulation of blending modes in Photoshop, along with mask inversion. These are an excellent addition this type of tool, and Lightroom should have them. Lightroom does allow you to build individual masks with a mix of settings. Mixing Flow and Density, you can easily build quite complex masks. These can be used with the Graduated Filter, which I don't see in Aperture as yet. No doubt it'll be on the must copy list also. With Lightroom brushes, even if you paint with a full setting, you can start a new brush in the same spot and double the amount. Another thing is that if you hover over a brush pin in Lightroom, you can click drag to change the overall setting for that mask, similar to using layer opacity (so if clarity was -100 and sharpening 50, dragging clarity to -50 would force sharpening to 25 for example). For me, there isn't a clear winner, but I'd like to see the improved mask options go into Lightroom.


Presets. No different than Lightroom, so I'm sure this is a reason to switch?

Loupe. If you're on a single monitor system, open the 2nd monitor window. Make it loupe sized, zoom in to 1:1, click Live Loupe. Viola. No charge.

Light Table. Can't deny this is nice, but you can emulate it a fair bit using Custom Package in Print. Again it's not the same, but while I really wanted this feature way back, I rarely need it. When I do need to see many images, I just use Survey Mode.

Full Screen? If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know my favourite shortcut: Shift Control/Command F.

Competition. I'm all for competition. It drives technology forward. But buying two products and into 2 upgrade paths? That's not competition, that's bad finances. Bizzare.

Lightroom 3 Beta has new demosaicing and improved noise reduction that make the image quality outstanding. And as a photographer, this is what truly matters. Everything else is a distraction.

And as a Web plugin developer? Web in Aperture sucks, unless you want to make your own full pages from scratch using tokens. There's no way to make something that can offer the level of customisability that you can get in a Lightroom Web plugin. My website plugins couldn't happen in Aperture.

There's still great stuff in AP3. Video import, video inside slideshows. Timeline is a great feature. But, there's very little customisability for the user, same as Web. Places is excellent, but to me faces is more consumer oriented and not really beneficial to my workflow. Maybe if I shot more events?

I'm not the only one commenting on this, Matt Kloskowski has a post over on Lightroom Killer Tips too.

The Export question

Stephen Shankland from CNET has an interesting post that's been doing the rounds. Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty referred to it as "Not my favourite headline this year" on Twitter. The post relates to Export not being as quick as it could be and is partially based on miscommunication, which has since been updated. Of course the furore over the post is in full swing, and a lot of the earlier readers may not yet realise there's been an update to the post.

Stephen indicates that it started with an older post from Lloyd Chambers on getting better performance in Lightroom. The post did the rounds a while back with Scott Kelby weighing in on it. One of the outcomes from Lloyds post was the revelation that running 3 smaller exports is faster than one larger export with the same total number of images. Seems odd that it should work, but it does.

Stephen approached Tom Hogarty for an explanation. Essentially Tom's response equates to saying that they want Lightroom to be capable of doing other tasks while Export is running as a background task. And that, in my rather humble opinon, is a good idea. Other programs (Aperture for example-edit version 1 did this) give total control to the exporting process, rendering the program useless for other tasks. Often I proceed with new tasks, like image tagging or development on a different image set while an Export is happening. I'm rarely worried about how long it takes under these circumstances, and am more than happy to trade a slower export with program usablility.

There are obviously times when a speedy export is needed. In these circumstances I can use Lloyds speed trick, but it would be nice if it could be automatically set in the export dialog. As each task is alloted it's own set of resources, the export can happen quicker. With Import, I've often had 3 cards on the going with an import session. Import one card, then when the previews are rendering, import the next and so on. I end up with an import and 2 preview renders running consecutively. It doesn't seems to phase Lightroom and I'm happy not to be waiting any longer with card swapping.

On the performamce matter, Lloyd weighs in again: "Today is not 2006, Adobe. I have 32GB and 16 virtual cores in my Mac Pro Nehalem, I paid a ton of money for that potential, and I did so to save my valuable time, not to watch the machine idling (which is mostly what it does in Lightroom and Photoshop)."

It's a more than fair point. When the user is doing task that are processor intensive, Lightroom should make more use of the machines ability. There will always be users on lower power machines, but this shouldn't prevent those who have paid for the privilege of having a high powered machine getting full use out of it.

Video and Lightroom

In these days of convergence, where 2 of the newest DSLRS offer HD video recording capabilities (albeit basic), and almost every compact has some kind of video mode, I'd like to see Lightroom support Video. At minimum, I'd like it to import the video with my images. Preferably, I'd like to be able to playback the video and perhaps add basic metadata (copyright, keywords etc). I have no expectations of being able to edit video, or even work on colour, brightness etc. I just want to have my video managed with my images.

There are a couple of specific personal reasons for this. One is the slowly growing collection of time lapse videos I'm creating. Obviously I have a selection of video tutorials that I'd like to keep better track of. I do also use Snap Pro X to record Slideshows to video (I'd prefer to see this as an option in Lightroom, but that's not the thrust of this post), so I'd like to access them also.

On top of all that, with my intention to purchase a Canon 5D Mk II in the near future (Jan-Feb timeframe), and the fact that I just completed a short film course, I'd like to be able to add my finished Final Cut work to Lightroom.

Yes, there are other programs I could use for asset management, but I've already shifted away from them since I began using Lightroom. Version 2.2 will be on us in December, as announced by Tom Hogarty, so maybe as the end of the year approaches, we should be thinking about where we want this program to go. I'm not talking about feature bloat here though. Let's aim for actual usable features we need in our work and workflow.

I haven't really done a 'Comment' style post this year, but as I really feeling this need, I thought it might be good for discussion.