This was from a house fire in Hurricane earlier today.
I uploaded a photo mostly because I haven’t in ages but what I really wanted to ask was, does anybody have an opinion on the subject of Lightroom vs. Aperture vs. Photo Mechanic?
I’ve been using Photo Mechanic for eons but haven’t been able to bring myself to pay for the upgrade to 4.6 and am just wondering if the grass is actually any greener on the other sides.
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Found some good stuff here. hope it helps.
I’ve never tried Aperture, but I’ve always been happy with Lightroom.
Aperture will have fairly high hardware requirements with the latest Aperture 3 requiring an Intel Mac and 10.6. Also plan on lots of RAM (6GB or more) with Aperture. I started out with Lightroom and liked the speed, but ended up moving to Aperture because of the workflow. It just made more sense to me than Lightroom’s pipeline. Aperture was more intuitive and I felt more comfortable with the library management than I did with Lightroom. The new features in Aperture 3 are absolute blockbusters http://www.apple.com/aperture/whats-new.html The edge aware brushes are such obvious improvements that it’ll really make your head spin. Face recognition and support for video now are also killer features.
Though…. while I’ve been very happy with Aperture 2, Aperture 3 seems a little buggy. I’ll wait for the .1 increment before moving all my libraries over to Aperture 3. Also, like I said the hardware requirements are pretty high. That said, a Mac Mini should be able to run it just fine provided that you are running your library off of faster (external) drives. I have friends with early 2008 iMacs running Aperture 3 just fine (though with 6GB of RAM or more).
I can’t pick just one. For me, PhotoMechanic is a must-have. It’s so lightweight and does so much in the initial ingest-caption-edit stage. Really an invaluable program for me.
I’ve also incorporated Lightroom into my workflow and love it. It’s not perfect (or else I need to learn more), so I’m still using other programs to handle things like searching through my entire archive, etc.
Haven’t tried Aperture 3 yet. I’ve always wanted to be in the Aperture camp but I don’t have screaming hardware, or even recent hardware.
I do notice that Adobe has been updating Lightroom a lot more often than Apple has been updating Aperture. This would only matter if you’re someone who buys the latest cameras, because those are mostly what the updates are handling- new raw file formats.
Trent, have you upgraded to the new version of Photo Mechanic? None of the new features in 4.6 that they list on their website seem like they’re worth $90. Am I missing something? Only thing I can figure that would be worth paying for the upgrade would be future updates.
Another question for you, Trent, so you’re doing all your toning, sharpening, etc. in Lightroom? Has Lightroom replaced Photoshop for you? Can Lightroom/Aperture replace Photoshop?
I have 4.6. Don’t remember what features it brought over 4.5, but newer raw formats work (mark IV, D3S, so that’s good).
Part of what keeps me going so fast is having a workflow that is quick and efficient and repeated every time. PhotoMechanic does a lot of that for me.
Question 2- I still open just about every photo in PhotoShop for detail work, final toning, etc. I do a lot of lasso and feather work that for me is more precise than using brushes to dodge & burn. Lightroom really kicks ass when you have a hundred or more RAW photos that are the same and you need to tone them all and export to whatever size/format you need. Right now the Lightroom 3 beta is free. It’s not perfect software but it will give you a good idea of what’s possible.
My workflow – ingest/edit/caption with Photo Mechanic, open selects in photoshop, save out, FTP from photo mechanic. But you know, whatever works for you. Think it through and work out the kinks.