Light(room) is Better

Filed under: Tech

Posted 1 year ago at 8:52 pm. 2 comments

(By the way, Web-one-point-o-ers, if you subscribe to the RSS feed, you get to see more pretentious and overdone shots like the above from my flickr. )

I am still a newbie when it comes to RAW post-processing, but every google result seems to suggest Adobe Lightroom is more preferred than Apple’s Aperture, so I have to try it myself.

One thing that bothers me in Aperture is, I could never get the Color Profile preview to work. You know how Mac people live in the beautiful Neverland with gozillion of colours, but the dream shatters as soon as you view the photos on other OS’s or Firefox (even on Mac). I did all the profile conversion and monitor calibration, but the preview given by Aperture is still way off. Everything works fine in Photoshop and, naturally, in Lightroom as well. I know it probably has something to do with my settings, but Aperture made me (who has worked as a print lab assistant) feel stupid.

Lightroom is light. The whole program extracted is under 50 MB. I guess it is more like an extension to Photoshop (its full name is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom), instead of a full-blown application. It feels way snappier than Aperture, especially when you zoom in. The “Loupe” in Aperture is eye-candy but impractical. I don’t like how it spins around cleverly when it hits the border, too flashy.

The other advantage of Lightroom is it defines a well-guided workflow for you. Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web are grouped into tabs. The built-in slideshows and web galleries (HTML and Flash) are simple yet elegant; which are good alternatives to the iPhoto/iWeb ones.

I might be wrong, it seems to me Adobe borrowed a few UI ideas (such as stacking) from Aperture. They are forgiven because they chose the good ones selectively, otherwise Lightroom will be as bloated. In short, Lightroom is lighter in features that are less related to photo processing, such as browsing and archiving; and more powerful in those that matter.

Tags: Photos