One Photo, Two Results

Having recently converted to Lightroom 3 (Sorry, Apple. Aperture is just slower and less capable. Sorry!) I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at some of my photos to see what I can do with them now. I still don’t think it’s a great idea to re-edit old photos, but I just can’t help myself…

That’s the original above. Done up in Aperture. It’s not bad at all. I actually had a print made of it. But, let’s see what I can do with Adobe’s Lightroom…

This new edit is noticably different. First, it’s brighter and more colorful. The rust is red (not brown) the moss is green (not the same color as the concrete) and you can see all the way through the structure even with some vignetting added.

A more subtle change can be seen when you notice that the second photo is cropped in slightly closer than the first. That’s because Lightroom has a Lens Distortion effect that corrects the barreling you get with wide angle lenses (this one was at 18mm). Aperture has a similar feature but it is so slow and cumbersome I gave up trying to use it.

The main difference, though, is the time it took to get the results. In Aperture (especially given how slow it runs - it is a memory abyss) editing that photo could take 10-15 minutes. That doesn’t sound terrible until you remember that I might take 100-150 shots on one of these photo walks. Even at my typical 10% usage rate thats between 2 and 3 hours to edit the photos. I edited the Lightroom photo from the original RAW file (actually a DNG conversion) in less than 5 minutes.

I’m not trying to knock Aperture. It is a fine program, I’m sure, on faster machines. But I can’t afford a Mac Pro. And it does manage your photo library for you in a more sophisticated way than Lightroom. But, I’ve found that the trade-off in speed and capability far outweighs any advantages in file management. I can rename folders for myself, you know. Fact is, the Flash thing aside, Adobe has much more experience in digital image manipulation and they know what photographers want and need in their workflow.

Note: Because I re-re-edited the warehouse photo into monochrome in Lightroom without making a copy first, the previously posted color edit is gone. Which kind of makes this post pointless.