Thomas Boyd has posted results of his head-to-head comparison of two pro photo cataloging applications: Apple’s Aperture 3 and Adobe’s Lightroom 3. Seeing a bias in news and blog postings trumpeting Lightroom’s supposedly superior speed, Boyd has done his own tests, and found that Aperture 3 is much, much faster, using a MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM running an SSD – a fairly representative system for a serious Mac-based professional photographer.
“The rendering performance of Lightroom was dramatically slower than Aperture. Not only was rendering slow, there was a one or two second lag between the time of pushing the right arrow button and the time it took for the next image to appear…unrendered. It was excruciatingly slow. I wasn’t prepared for that.”
Aperture 3 workflow four times faster than Adobe Lightroom 3 [MacCreate.com]
A few weeks ago I downloaded the demo version of Aperture 3 to give it a try. I like it and have ordered a copy that should arrive before the demo runs out.
“a fairly representative system for a serious Mac-based professional photographer” who said that?
Have a mbPro with 3gb RAM, connected to a cinema display 30″, just decided to switch from aperture 3 to lightroom 3 as the last is faster (editing) on my machine
I’ve been using Aperture for several years, actually since it first came out. Every time that I’ver given Lightroom a try it has run significantly slower than Aperture. It is a more complicated workflow, and it renders images much slower than Aperture. If you’re doing simple edits and basic processing, Aperture is a solid racehorse of a performer. But, it does have annoying bugs, such as when making virtual copies, sometimes it gives the copy a new number than happens to be the last day of the year with a random counter: ex: 123111_342. I have to pay close attention to my editing to make sure it doesn’t happen and then I have to rename the file and then make sure it gets renamed in the actual image as well.
I’m learning more about Lightroom because it is a more powerful program as far as deeper editing of individual images goes. And, it is simply more popular, meaning that my assistants know it more than Aperture.
There’s pros and cons to both software programs. I like Aperture for its efficiency, ease of use, and totally because of its speed. There is no question that Aperture is far faster importing, shooting tethered, and processing images. It also has the nice ability to load up mobile me galleries really fast, and make books and many other finely tuned conveniences.
Lightroom is nice because of its deeper processing ability (I’m still learning more about it all) especially in black and white. But other than that, I’m still wondering how & why it became the leader.