Adobe Lightroom - kind of nice

Adobe Lightroom 1.0 Win/Mac isn't cheap - $300 list. There's a month free trial though, and since I'm kind of disgusted with Aperture I thought I'd give it a try.

I'm not using it to manage photos, for that I use iPhoto '08. I'm using it for my standard heretical workflow:

1. Import JPEG and RAW images from our Canon SD1000 and Digital Rebel XT.
2. Rename files to embed some roll and date info in the file name.
3. Import into Aperture, Adobe Lightroom or iPhoto for post-processing.
4. Export as JPEG 98%
5. Import into iPhoto '08 for archival storage and uploading.
6. Delete the RAW images.
   

So, for this purpose, how does Adobe Lightroom compare to Aperture?

It's better. Much faster for image browsing, a bit faster than Aperture on my slowish PPC iMac for image editing. LR is easier to learn than Aperture, even though I think the Library/Develop division is dumb.

It's even a better Macintosh application! Aperture uses weird GUI elements, LR sticks mostly to the Apple standards. It's the most Mac-like of all Adobe's apps, because it began life on the Mac.

Aperture's theoretical big advantage is that it can import an iPhoto Library -- but it can't handle video, Photo Books, etc. And, of course, Aperture doesn't support editing of image dates - so I can't use it as an image store anyway.

For what I do today, LR is a better solution.

Aperture is not looking very happy these days ...

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: Impressive

I'm impressed. I tried Adobe - Photoshop Lightroom (OS X) when it was in beta and I wasn't that keen on it, but it's come a long way. Editing tasks are quite fast on my G5 iMac, certainly faster than Aperture, but even quicker than iPhoto. You can actually edit a date in Lightroom, which you can't do in Aperture (still). (Ok, so there are bugs in dates prior to 1600 or so ...)

The relatively small number of keyboard shortcuts are just right to make quick work of editing. I quickly got the hang of ~, R, G, Cmd-U, etc. The auto-correction and several tools for saving and applying sets of editing operations worked quickly and well.

I don't see the powerful querying and image management tools I used during my Aperture trial however. They may be there, I haven't finished looking at the app yet.

If Adobe had decided to support migrating from iPhoto I'd be strongly tempted to buy it. Of course they didn't. Lightroom is not a good option for anyone with a great deal of metada in iPhoto, but it may be the best bet for just about everyone else. This 1.0 release of Lightroom seems better put together than Aperture 1.52.

Did I mention the user interface is clear and readable -- unlike Aperture's bizarre non-Apple GUI?

Apple needs to get in gear. They're already losing a race that's barely started.

Update 3/8/07: I've found my first nasty bug. On occasion Lightroom reports it cannot import an image. It may even say it can't be read. On a retry Lightroom reads it. Image Capture, iPhoto, etc have no problem with the same image.