Posted: 1/10/2009 11:07:57 AM EDT
| What do you guys think of the Aperture program from Apple? I know alot of guys like to use Photoshop, how do the 2 compare? |
|
If it's anything like adobe lightroom (I think it is), they're generally two different animals that happen to do some of the same things.
Lightroom (and presumably aperture) is designed to help photographers manage, track, edit, display, resize, correct, etc photographs. Photoshop is pretty much a standalone image manipulator. Lightroom helps catalog your images, tracks them in a database, keeps track of settings/changes made to each image (it doesn't make changes to the original file), etc. Photoshop opens up individual images and can edit them (you either save a different copy, or you modify the original file when saving). Photoshop is much much more powerful for image manipulation... but infinitely lacking on most of what lightroom is designed to do. Lightroom is severely crippled compared to photoshop when it comes to major manipulations (changing someone's smile/eyes from one picture to another, removing an unwanted person from the background, etc) but has some limited editing tools. Those tools are designed to be more of how a negative is developed... you can change the hue/saturation, adjust brightness/contrast, vignetting, color/black&white, cropping, etc. For the photographer, Lightroom/Aperture is a major step forward in many ways... while I think one can do without it, it is so helpful that I'd almost consider it a necessity. I don't know how I'd handle our 65,000 (give or take) pictures without a program like lightroom to manage them. Photoshop on the other hand is a tool that can be lived without, as a photographer... although it puts a LOT more pressure on you to get the picture taken correctly in the first place, as opposed to "fixing it later in photoshop". I'd suggest using both tools together... lightroom/aperture to organize and catalog your pictures as well as making minor corrections, and photoshop to make any major changes. I'll post a few examples here in a moment to show you where each piece of software can get you. |
|
Here's an example...
Image taken (intentionally too bright) in RAW format, sky looks blown out in many areas: 
Image "developed" in lightroom, but it's not easy to clean up subject's complexion: 
"Developed" image taken from lightroom into photoshop to clean up skin: 
Lightroom technically can clean up spots and blemishes, but it is (IMO) a huge pain and takes forever. With the healing brush tool in photoshop that was a 45 second job. All that to say... if you are looking for a photoshop replacement, Lightroom/Aperture aren't going to take care of the heavy hitting stuff. But if you're looking for a good way to organize, catalog, rate, sort, display, etc your pictures, Lightroom/Aperture will shine in those aspects. Hope that helps. |
|
Quoted:
I have a MacBookPro so what would be a better choice, Aperture or Lightroom you think? I didn't have the option for Aperture, since it is only for MacOS (AFAIK), so I've never played with it. I'd personally download the 30 day trials of each program and then find a few tutorials to get you jump started. From there you can make a decision based on features, ease of use and price that best fits your needs. Here's a good one for lightroom... video tutorials that take you through the entire program. Even if you don't have the 30 day trial installed, just watching the video tutorials will let you get a feel for how it will benefit you. Video tutorials for Lightroom Version 1 I noticed that their video tutorials are for lightroom 1, but lightroom version 2 is out currently. There are some changes, but most of the basic functionality is the same. To get a free 30 day trial of Lightroom, go to adobe.com and check their download section. I'd have to assume that Aperture has a trial version as well. Good luck! |
|
Quoted:
steenkybastage, Outstanding job...would you share an overview of what you did to recapture the sky and clean up the pictures? Was it simply the Burn tool or a mixture of layers/curves? Thanks... Well, I don't think it was really anything special... I wouldn't call anything but touching up his complexion "work" for that picture, but it did take a bit of tweaking. The main thing I try to always do is overexpose (when shooting RAW) because most of the information (and thus detail) is in the right side of the histogram. If I had been shooting JPG, the sky would have been mainly lost... RAW allowed me to recapture. So... I overexpose the picture when shooting... which makes more work in post processing  but gives better results (IMO) in the finished product. 
Bringing the RAW file into lightroom, I first white balance, then go thru the first sliders in order (exposure, recovery, fill, blacks, brightness, contrast) to fit my needs. That does the bulk of it, but oftentimes I then move into saturation (overall and individual colors, if necessary), vignetting, etc. Here are some screenshots showing what I did to get to that point: Develop section of Lightroom... looks like they're making it resize down to 1024x768 (no 1900x1200, sorry) or thereabouts... so you can't read it too well here: 
This is the history panel up close and personal like: 
This is the histogram and first part of the main develop tools: 
The rest of (what I used) in the develop tools: 
If you follow the steps in the history panel you can see the actual steps I took (in order) to get that result. There was no "editing" of the image (no curves, dodging/burning, etc), only taking what is available in the RAW file and manipulating it a bit... The history panel starts at the bottom and works up to the most recent change, BTW. If you look at the histogram, you'll notice that the finished picture is has most all data at or below about 80%. Even though when I shot the picture the clouds, which are the brightest object, were at (guessing) 110% or so. The reason I overshoot and then post process is: Expose to the right Short version of above link is that you get more data and thus less noise in the brightest parts of the histogram (in camera), and progressively the reverse is true the further left you go. If I had properly exposed this in-camera... I would have had a lot less work to do, but there would have been less detail in the dark areas. I find that I'm often overly anal about overexposing, even when I don't need a large print... I guess it's habit. It is good for my line of work (mainly wedding photography) to have that ingrained in my brain... one of the recent weddings we shot had me at ISO 6400, 1/50 /sec and F/1.2 most of the evening (no flash), and since that slightly overexposed most of my shots, all the images turned out beautifully even despite the high ISO. In fact, I like the 6400 "grainyness" so much, I may start doing that on purpose from here on out! |