Aperture to lightroom4

Well it’s been a long time in the coming but finally it happened.
This week I made the switch from Apple’s Aperture to Adobe’s Lightroom4.
Now a lot of people asked my why I did it, and most importantly HOW I did it. So today a small blogpost about my workflow for the switch and why….

Support
Let’s make one thing clear, I love Aperture.
However lately the frustration point for me was support for cameras.
I bought the Fuji X10 and that camera is not supported by Aperture, I’m testing the Fuji X Pro 1 and also that camera is not supported. And ok I can use of course the software delivered with the cameras but I want everything in one database, for the X10 this meant converting to DNG, something I actually don’t really want to do (I always want to keep my RAW files). For the X pro 1 however there was no way to do this (at that moment)…. However when I found out that the possibility that my new Leaf Credo 60 back will be supported is incredibly slim (read probably never, because there is also no support for other IIQ formats (Phase One) it was enough for me…. it would mean that I would need to use Capture One for the Leaf files, SilkyPix for the Fuji files (no database options) and Aperture for my old database.

Soon I thought, “why not use Aperture for my old database and LR4 for everything from now on”
But to be honest having 2 databases to look for something….. No I don’t think so either.
So I knew it was gonna hurt but I decided to make the switch 100%……

Did it hurt?
Well actually this was not so much the case.
Importing files is a bit of a problem the way I do it in Aperture, in short I always use folders on my drives and import these in the database (in the end this saved me a lot of time), in Aperture this meant that I would first create the structure on the hard drive (if not importing from the card) and later first had to make the same structure in my database. It was some work but in the end it worked the way I wanted.

In LR the import process is much easier, just add all the folders to the database and done… yep done.
Especially when on location this is cool, I can shoot the files, store them on the laptop and give keywords and rating, add GPS code and back home just copy it to the storage towers and import into the database. With Aperture this is possible but it’s more difficult.

The problem I had however was keywords, I really did not want to loose my keywords.
The solution is not perfect but I decided to do it this way. In Aperture there is an option called “Write  IPTC into RAW files”, this will embed the keywords into the RAW files. Now this is something that can go wrong but I searched on the net to see if there were real problems and the conclusion I got to was that in theory it COULD go wrong but in reality it would probably not happen. Now you can of course select all your files and do this but I found out that my Aperture would crash during that process plus it would probably take me a week. So I decided to make a smart album within Aperture with the keywords I wanted to save (which were a lot less then all the keywords I ever used), this took a few hours and it was done.

To be honest I was a bit afraid it would not work, however it worked flawless, the keywords were embedded and it all worked, problem 1 solved.

Adjustments
Now if you use a lot of adjustments, I’m sorry you’re in trouble.
As far as I could find there is no way to copy these.
For me this is however no real problem, only from some city trips I did the retouch in Aperture, from these series I just exported JPEGs from within Aperture and imported that folder into LR4 under the “retouched files drives”. If you however do all your retouching in Aperture I think the switch will be very painful.

Is there no hope?
Well yes there is of course.
If you (as I did) save all your images in separate folders on your drive, it’s no real hassle to just keep your Aperture database in tact, it’s a few GBs on your drive and it doesn’t grow from this moment on, I won’t upgrade my Aperture anymore, won’t add any more images to Aperture but I will just keep it on my hard drive for that moment that a customer wants an image including retouching that lives in Aperture and that I missed. Everything that is new will be retouched in LR4 of course.

Differences that really got my attention
Again, I did not switch for functionality, in reality I use Aperture or LR4 for what it’s designed for, for me it’s  just a browser,  search engine and if needed I will do some quick retouches, make slideshows, smart albums for export etc. All my serious retouching is done in Photoshop. I do use a color checker of course for my shots and this is something that really got my attention within LR4. Of course I knew that there is great plugin for the Colorchecker Passport (and Spydercheckr) and I did test this in the past however I immediately forgot about it because I would never use it because it was not supported in Aperture. However now that I work in LR4 this actually shaves a lot of time out of my workflow. I select my image with the color checker in LR4, run the plugin and the profile is saved both in LR4 and Photoshop, this saves me a lot of time…  Making a profile was not much work, but let’s be honest every minute you save is one minute you can do something else.

The quality of the develop engine is awesome of course from LR4, but I’m convinced that the new Aperture will probably also improve a lot, maybe better than LR4, maybe on par, we will know soon (I hope), but it will never be a reason for me to switch because as mentioned before the serious retouches are all done in Photoshop.

In the end the support for new cameras killed Aperture for me, I’ve used it for quiet some years, actually ever since version 1.
But at the moment it was getting ridiculous that I could actually only use the 5DMKIII and my old files (actually also some older leaf files were not supported which LR4 did import). The whole switch went actually rather painless (I was really worried), and I’m glad I did it. Adobe is much faster with camera support and let’s be honest all my buddies are using LR4 so I now have a wealth of knowledge to turn to…. 🙂

I think Adobe made the switch also a lot easier for people by it’s much lower price point of the new LR4. So I’m afraid (for Aperture) that slowly more and more people will be making the switch.