[X4U] iPhoto Library Reorganization [3]

[Stroller]

[BAH! I thought I was going to get this through in 3 postings, and  
surely could have if it were cut in the right places.
But I decided to keep the answer to this last question all in one  
section, and the reply to that has just been bounced.
My apologies to the list for the clutter.]

On 28/7/06 1:42 PM, "Ken Schneider" <ken at schneider.net> wrote:
> ...
> Purchase Portfolio or iView MediaPro or Aperture or Lightroom (when
> available)?

I haven't used Portfolio or MediaPro, so can't comment on them.
Aperture & Lightroom I like very much, and I'm a little torn between  
them.

My first impression of Aperture was not good, and I liked Lightroom  
immediately. They're both "workflow-management" applications and  
store images within their own library in structures you shouldn't  
touch, but you can organise images as you wish by album & shoot  
within the program. You can extract images from either library should  
you need to.

Both have good cropping / straightening, exposure, sharpening and  
colour-correction tools; Aperture's exposure & colour-correction  
tools are quite a bit better, I think. I don't think either handles  
touch-ups (like the cloning tool) natively, but both allow you to  
right-click and open in an external editor like Photoshop (or  
Photoshop Elements, which is cheaper & just as good for most people,  
I think).

I have two images taken the same day, one of a sunset and one of a  
church tower against a blue-sky. The church tower looks perfect in  
Lightroom but after the "same" colour-correction in Aperture (use of  
a WhiBal card) it doesn't look right. On the other hand the sunset  
was visibly brighter or more pleasing when I accidentally opened it  
in Preview than it was in Lightroom, so I ended up correcting  
adjusting it in Lightroom to match that; Aperture should give the  
same defaults as Preview, I think, since they both use OS X's native  
RAW handling, but I haven't checked closely. Aperture has explicit  
noise-reduction and RAW image-importing controls, and I'm not sure if  
Lightroom has that, but Lightoom's RAW handling seems a bit better  
out-of-the-box.

What's crucial about both these apps is that they're non-lossy. You  
import the RAW file and any changes you make to the image are stored  
as "metadata" - they're not written over the original file, but are  
stored separately as a set-of-changes to be applied to that image.  
The upshot of this is that when you've finished editing your image it  
will have the highest possible image quality, it is simple to revert  
to the original, and that edits consume very little hard-drive space  
- you can make 10 copies of an 8meg RAW file, edit them all  
differently and together they'll all consume little more than the  
original 8megs disk space. If you make an edit in Photoshop (or some  
other external app) then the RAW file is exported to that as a full- 
quality TIFF and then reimported back into the library; a copy of  
each is retained (this does take up more space).

I have gone back to Aperture, as it has a couple of features that  
Lightroom did not at the time (and which I guess Lightroom will not  
have fo a while). The most important of these is stacks, which allows  
a bunch of images to be stored as a "group"; you organise them as a  
single image, but you can "unstack" them to examine or edit an  
individual shot. This saves albums or folders of images from getting  
cluttered, because I just stack up all the not-quite-rejects images  
together as one stack, and also other images each get all their edits  
grouped as a stack. This is kinda hard to explain, but some of the  
reviews of Aperture have screenshots - it just makes it really easy  
to edit an image, make another duplicate of that image and edit some  
more chose a "pick" which you like best, and then stack away the  
original and the "rejected" edits away underneath the pick so that  
you can still access them in the future should you wish to. So  
basically, however many images I have within an album, all I ever see  
is my picks, plus one more image stack.

[CONTINUED]