Scott Bourne writes about 18 Ways That Aperture Is Better Than Lightroom. Yeah, yeah, how about countering that with the point that Aperture will never run on 95% of computers?

There's a well-written article “Establishing a Metadata-Driven Workflow with Portfolio 8” by Veit Irtenkauf at Digital Outback. While Veit rightly emphasizes the real value of Portfolio 8's new automated cataloguing and smart galleries, apparently small but very powerful features. Yet it's hard to disagree with his first sentence: “There do not seem to be many new features in Portfolio 8 that immediately wow photographers as must-have features.” No product exists in isolation, especially not one in a fast-maturing area like digital asset management. And after 18 months Portfolio's steps forward are small by comparison with the strides made photographers' existing alternatives like iView, let alone the new or coming choices like Aperture and Lightroom.

For a month or two now, during which time we've seen the demise of Agfa's film arm and Nikon's virtual cessation of film camera production, there have also been question marks over Photoshop's dominance of digital photography. Two new programs, Apple's Aperture and now Adobe's Lightroom, have been generating a lot of digital photographic heat. Scott Bourne writes Have the Reviewers Got It Wrong About Aperture?:

I have heard from countless photographers who ask me how to make Aperture do this or that like Photoshop does. Well folks, you have to understand that Aperture was not conceived as a Photoshop replacement. It is designed to complement Photoshop. Aperture is about workflow, not pushing pixels. Apple's goal was to improve the entire post-capture experience. It wasn't trying to replace Photoshop. I remember when photography conventions were about photography. Now what are they about? Photoshop. The fact that training at conventions and workshops is dominated by Photoshop gurus doesn't reflect the goals of the photographic community.

Also see this Lightroom thread Why not part of Photoshop? with contributions from George Jardine, Pro Photography Evangelist at Adobe, and Jeff Schewe:

Photoshop is a pixel based editing tool that is particularly well suited to the editing of actual pixels. Photoshop, without Camera Raw can't even open RAW images…there is no current method in Photoshop/Camera Raw to apply the exact same edits to RAW and tiff/jpgs. The RAW controls of Camera Raw can't easily be applied by using Photoshop's image adjustment controls.

Lightroom is designed for doing things that photographers need done…Photoshop is designed for things that digital imaging artists need done. There is a HUGE difference. Lightroom will never be the image compositing/retouching tool that Photoshop is and Photoshop, because of it's [sic] size and feature set can never be the workflow tool that Lightroom can be.

Lightroom, as simple as it may look now, is potentially _FAR_ more but for a smaller segment of the user base that is served by Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Digital imaging artists, retouchers, web artists, graphic designers, video artists, digital illustrators, prepress pros-all the groups that make up Photoshop's user base may not have any use for Lightroom. That's fine…Photoshop will continue and serve all of those groups.

Digital photographers - those people dealing with hundreds or thousands of digital captures - however may find that Lightroom serves their purposes perfectly.

I point out both of these discussions because in neither case is Scott Bourne's photographic community talking about artistic merit output quality, all the talk's about saving you from drowning in pixels. Nor do I buy into this idea that the volume raw processing tool has got to be a separate application because you're dealing in instruction set processing rather than pixels. What after all is Bridge's Dr Brown's Image Processor or the Save button in Adobe Camera Raw?

The volume issues, the organisation and management of your images, do indeed belong outside the digital darkroom - to the realm of databases and cataloguing programs like the iView and Portfolio. But that's not the case with the processing of raw images, their conversion, adjustment, and printing, in whatever volume. Like a lot of photographers, I think, I experience periods of wanting the production line workflow of an Aperture or a Lightroom, and others of dealing with individual images. Just like I want my car to handle well in crosstown traffic and when I head out on the highway, I don't want my raw image processing to printing workflow to be split into two programs dependent on the volume. But hell, they're not letting us PC users have a say anyway.

Peter Krogh on Adobe Lightroom:

The spread of digital photography has brought a different set of imperatives to the development of imaging software. Challenges that were faced by few people three years ago are now commonplace. The central issue is no longer, “how do I make an image look the way I want it to”, but rather, “how do I deal with all these ^%#*& files?”.

The more I've thought about Lightroom today, the surer I feel that our biggest problem isn't new raw conversion interfaces or capabilities. It's managing, grouping and finding the files in the first place. So I think Peter's spot on.

I'm a little, well a lot, more cynical about Adobe's spin on releasing Lightroom as such an early public beta, and at this stage only for the Mac. Cynical, though not at all critical, and it reminds me of the early days of Macromedia Dreamweaver which I've always thought was a model for developers interacting with users and rapidly improving the product.

I'm eager to get my hands on Lightroom, but it'll be a while before the beta will be on the PC. In one sense that doesn't worry me as I always like software that's developed to Mac usability standards. But I'm impatient to have my say. Since Peter quotes my line about the relationship with digital asset management software being like serial monogamy, for us PC users it's as if Lightroom's a pretty face you've spotted at the other end of the bar and you've got to wait till the Mac users have finished whispering in her ear before you get your chance….

Luminous Landscape reports on the beta of Adobe's Lightroom. Apparently it's been in the works for 18 months and looks like it has both photo managment and raw processing features, so it's not just Adobe's Aperture-killer, it's also going to threaten the rest of the digital asset management tools. The beta's only available on the Mac for now but a PC version will be coming soon:

By releasing Lightroom now Adobe likely hopes to further side-swipe Aperture's early sales momentum, though Apple bears considerable responsibility for Aperture's generally negative early reception by reviewers and many users. With Lightroom out in the wild as a free beta for much of 2006, and with availability for Windows computers coming in the relatively near future, Adobe clearly hopes that huge numbers of photographers will explore and then start using Lightroom. Then, when it launches as a commercial product, a very large installed base of pre-sold buyers will exist. It also means that Lightroom (hopefully) will contain features and functions that are a result of feedback from these early adopters, and thus will engender a loyal user base. A pretty smart strategy, in my view.

And as for Aperture, if history is any teacher we can expect to see Apple turn its newest baby into a powerhouse, especially now that it has Adobe breathing down its neck with such a promising alternative. In the end the winner will be all of us ? photographers who will have choices, and a rich new set of tools with which to pursue our art and our craft.

Also read:

• the story behind it
• Uwe Steinmueller
• discussion forum

Probably not an original tactic but it's a nice variation on the old vapourware trick - introduce a public beta and kill off competition in its infancy. I must say I'm not surprised - such a cataloguing program was what I'd hoped for when Adobe released Photoshop CS2 and its increasingly-halfbaked Bridge.