Why should I use LR or Aperture

As you could read last week I made the switch from Aperture to LR4.
Just to make it 100% clear, not because I don’t like Aperture (far from that) but because at the moment only 2 of my cameras are supported by Aperture and soon only 1. And to be honest that’s a bit too much of a hassle, I’m shooting with a lot of different cameras lately and it’s a real problem when you can’t browse through your images and compare them in the same software…..

Now because of the extra attention on my blog for this switch I also got a lot of questions from people that did not use any form of software to catalogue/browse or work on images, instead of answering these questions by mail I decided to make a blog post about it.

Why should I?
This is the most heard question.
“why should I use Lightroom/Aperture, I already store all the images in folders and use finder to browse the images”
Well it’s great that you already use folders, this is very important, however there are a lot of things you can’t do when you don’t use software like Aperture or Lightroom, let’s get some points that are (I think) very important and will speed up your workflow A LOT.

First of all I have to add that when you just start out and have maybe 1000 images on your hard drive it indeed sounds a bit weird that you need to catalogue, you can probably find everything back with ease and you will remember when which shot was taken, however photography in the digital age has one huge disadvantage….. it grows, and grows and grows, there is no limit to the amount of images you take, if you take 1000 shots the costs are exactly the same as if you shoot 10 shots (if you don’t count storage), so over time you will find your self shooting stuff that you would never do when you shot analogue, or that you thought off when you started out.

Very soon you will cary your camera with you everywhere and your folders will grow substantially.
Now let’s say you love windmills (hey I’m Dutch) and you have a folder on your hard drive called “windmills” however during a trip you take you shoot some windmills, but they are part of your family vacation, how do you approach this, do you place the windmill images in the windmill folder, or in the family trip folder…. if you take them out the family trip folder you’re registration of that trip is not complete, however if you don’t put them in the windmill folder you miss a windmill….. hummmm

You could of course store the images twice, but this will take up a lot of space in the end.
But there is a solution for that and that’s the first point in my list.

1. Keywords
Often people don’t even know they exist.
Keywords are great, Keywords are wonderful, Keywords are (yeah ok you got it right?)
Keywords can be connected to every image, and you can add as many as you want.
I use keywords for all my topics of interest, for example “family, Brian, Annewiek”, but you can add whatever you want of course.
The power of keywords is however much more than you might think.
A trick I use with keywords is that I have some special keywords called “overig (meaning the rest), sport, slideshow, private”
The “overig” keyword is used for my personal favorite street, vacation photography.
The “sport” keyword is used for my personal favorite sport shots.
The “slideshow” keyword is used for my personal favorite model photography work.
And finally the “private” keyword is used for family shots that are dear to me.

You might ask, “why?”
Well there is an option called “smart albums” in both Aperture and Lightroom.
This option makes it possible to create an album (contains no real images just links) with certain “rules”, for me this means that I will for example make a smart album called “slideshow” containing all the images labeled slideshow. This way I can very quickly export a selection of my best work for output, if someone asks me for an image for publication I will browse through this smart album and export what they need in the format they need. The keywords are removed if I don’t like the shot anymore or if I shot something similar that I like more. The fun thing is that by using smart albums you always have a selection of your work linked to the original files. And that my friends would be the only reason you need to start using Lightroom or Aperture.

2. GPS
During trips or during vacations I always use GPS information. In my case I use the free GeoCorder app from the iPhone, but for almost every phone there will be other options, and you can of course also by a separate GPS device, for me however I always have my phone with me and it works great so why spend more. When I’m done with the day I will mail the GPS information to my mail address and link the information via Lightroom (or any other software package of your choice) to my images. This way I’m always able to see where I took a shot. One small tip for this… make sure that the time on your camera is set correctly to correspond with the phone/GPS device.

3. Retouching
Well ok I have to admit that I don’t use that A LOT, but since I switched to lightroom this has changed (see topic 4).
Some things are best kept in Photoshop, for me that’s most of my work.
However when I shoot sports, vacation images, personal stuff it’s very nice to be able to do all the retouching in lightroom, this is something where I think at the moment Lightroom 4 excels over Aperture, the new RAW engine really rocks, and of course all your favorite plugins from NIK etc. are also appliable.

The nice thing about retouching in Lightroom/Aperture is that you are working on a file without opening it, you don’t have to save it, and if you like the retouch you just “copy/stamp” it to all the other images, if you’re not happy with some images, no problem select that image and change for example the shadows or highlights for that one. In other words make one image perfect, copy this to 20 other ones and quickly retouch the smaller differences.

4. Colorchecker and workflow
Ok, now it gets interesting, and one of the things that I LOVE since my move to Lightroom.
When shooting I’m using a color checker or Datacolor Colorchkr to get the colors as good as possible. These profiles can not be used in Aperture, and as I mentioned in the past a few times I did not really care, most of the work I did in Aperture was storing, key wording and non color critical retouch (mostly personal stuff). To use the color checkers the process was as follows.

Convert my RAW file to DNG, drag it into the software and the rest was done automatically.
With Lightroom there is a very nice plugin that makes it all a lot easier.
Just crop the color checker and export to color checker software, from there on everything is done in the background and you’re done, to see the result you will have to restart lightroom, however the real time saver for me is outside lightroom.

Normally I will select my best images and export them to a folder called “to be retouched”.
From this folder I would normally select my color checker files, convert them to DNG and make the profiles, this is an easy process and never pushed me towards lightroom to be honest, the idea of switching to lightroom and all the extra work was much less appealing than using the plugin :-).

However now that I run with Lightroom I have to say that I really like the new method. I now select my images, including the color checkers, WITHIN Lightroom I will export the color checker files and name the profiles (for example “red dress June9th” “blue dress June9th” etc.) now I restart lightroom and “sync” all the images with the color checker profiles that belong to them. I now export the files to the retouch folder and voila when opening the files everything is in order and I don’t have to select the camera profile, whitebalance etc. this does save a lot of time in a daily workflow. Again this would not be THE reason to switch to Lightroom from Aperture, but man does it ease the “pain from the extra work” after the switch.

5. Books
Some of the more powerful features that will appeal to many people is the option to create some stunning books straight out of your software. No need for extra “book software” just select your image, create the layout you want and send it to the printer. It could not be easier…. this will cost you money by the way, it’s so addictive to do that you will have a lot of books before you know it.

6. Comparing and checking
You remember that series where you thought you did all the retouching the same, only to find out that in the end there was a slight change in all shots, meaning the series is not constant and your client send it back to you?

Well that can happen when you only look at one image a time.
When you use software like Lightroom/Aperture you can see the images in a film roll, zoom in, check, see images in compare mode etc. this makes it very easy to see differences, and don’t worry… if there is a slight difference you don’t have to go back into Photoshop, you can just solve it within Lightroom.

Another question that came in was “How to work with a NAS and Lightroom”
That’s no problem at all. You point the library to the NAS, import the files and folders and you’re done.
If the NAS is offline you can just browse the images (previews), as soon as the NAS is online again you can work straight on the images. 

Of course there is much much more in software packages like Aperture and Lightroom, this doesn’t even scratch the surface.
However I do hope it will give people the answer why they should use software like Aperture and Lightroom instead of just storing the files in folders.

Now if you would ask me which one to choose? 
Let’s say that you don’t have any software yet.
I would choose Lightroom4, the price is very low, Adobe is quick with updates for new cameras, when you are traveling and you can very easily do all your key wording while on the trip and import the folders in Lightroom when you’re home and don’t have any extra work… with Aperture this is also possible but it’s a lot harder to get it the way you want it. Also importing in Lightroom is more “logical” and quicker.

Both  have their strong and weak points, I’ve worked with Aperture for some years and the switch to Lightroom was actually 100% painless and rather quick, the learning curve is almost zero, if you already know how the system works and you know ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) it’s actually much more easy than you would expect. At the moment with the whole “cloud” idea and the Adobe suite integration I think Lightroom is a must buy when you work in Photoshop and what to have a seamless workflow.

However having said that.
If you now run Aperture and all your cameras are supported, you have LOADS of adjustments in Aperture and like the way it runs…. wait for the next update and see what happens, there is no real reason to switch. If you did not use a lot of adjustments and only keywords, the switch is much easier than expected and I would seriously think about it. I did it for the RAW support but in end am very happy… you know that feeling that you are accepting to walk around with a bit of pain because you don’t want to take a weeks rest? well this is something like that. I loved Aperture but also hated some points that I knew Lightroom did better (GPS/books/importing/colorchecker integration/workflow with photoshop) however the idea of switching almost made my stomach turn, in the end it was worth the effort, and the effort was much less than expected 🙂

Want to know more?
Make sure to check out the following websites :
Matt Kloskowski http://lightroomkillertips.com/ and join him on his tour 
Sean McCormack http://lightroom-blog.com/lrbgrad/
http://www.apertureexpert.com/

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