I remain very frustrated with my Photography workflow. No-one seems to get this right and it drives me nuts. (I’m unwilling to pay Apple lots of money for a ridiculous amount of iCloud storage, which might work quite well, but it still wouldn’t have simple features like prioritizing images that I’ve rated or looked at closely over others automagically, or allow me to rate JPEGs and have the rating carried over to the RAW later.)
Anyway, Aperture is sufficiently out-of-date that I’ve actually uninstalled it and Photoshop still has some features (e.g. stitching) that its competition cannot match. So, $120 for a year of Photoshop + Lightroom… let’s see how it goes.
Lightroom
I was expecting Lightroom to be awesome what with all the prominent folks who swear by it. So far I find it unfamiliar (I did actually use LR2, and of course I am a Photoshop ninja) to the point of frustration, un-Mac-like, and ugly, ugly, ugly.
A large part of the problem is terrible use of screen Real Estate. It’s easy to hide the menubar (once you find where Adobe has hidden its non-standard full screen controls), but it’s hard (impossible) to hide the idiotic mode menu “Identity Plate”. (I found the “Identity Plate Editor” (WTF?) by right-clicking hopefully all over the place, which allowed me to shrink the stupidly large lettering but it just left the empty space behind. How can an application that was created brand new (and initially Mac-only) have managed to look like a dog’s breakfast so quickly?
But there are many little things that just suck.
- All the menus are horrible — cluttered and full of nutty junk. Looks like design by committee.
- The dialog box that appears when you “Copy…” the current adjustments is a crime against humanity (it has a weird set of defaults which I overrode by clicking “check none” when I only wanted to copy some very specific settings and now I can’t figure out how to restore the defaults).
- The green button doesn’t activate full screen mode. There are multiple full screen modes and none of them are what I want.
- Zooming with the trackpad is weird. And the “Loupe” (nothing like or as nice as Aperture’s) changes its behavior for reasons I cannot discern. (I finally figured out that the zoom in shortcut actually goes to 1:1 by default, which is useful, although it’s such a common feature I’d have assigned a “naked” keystroke to it, such as Z, which instead toggles between display modes.)
- The main image view seizes up after an indeterminate amount of use and shortly afterwards Lightroom crashes. (This is on maxed out Macbook Pro 15″.)
- IÂ can’t hide the stupid top bar (with your name in it). I can’t even make it smaller by reducing the font size of the crap in it.
- Hiding the “toolbar” hides a random thing that doesn’t seem to me to be a toolbar.
- By default the left side of the main window is wasted space. Oh, and the stupid presets are displayed as a list of words — you need to mouse over them to get a low-fidelity preview.
I found Lightroom’s UI sufficiently annoying that I reinstalled Aperture for comparison. Sadly, Lightroom crushes Aperture in ways that really matter. E.g. its Shadow and Highlight tools simply work better than Aperture’s (I essentially need to go into Curves to do anything slightly difficult in Aperture), and it has recent features (such as Dehaze — I’m pretty sure inspired by a similar feature DxO was very proud of a while back). After processing a few carefully underexposed RAW images* in both programs, Lightroom gets me results that Aperture simply can’t match (it also makes it very tempting to make the kind of over-processed images you see everywhere these days with amped up colors, quasi-HDR effects, and exaggerated micro-contrast).
(* Quite a few years ago someone I respect suggested that it’s a good idea to “underexpose” most outdoor shots by one stop to keep more highlight detail. This is especially important if the sky is visible. These days, everyone seems to be on the “ISO Invariance” bandwagon which is essentially not doing anything to the signal off the sensor (boosting effective ISO) when capturing RAW, in essence, “expose to the left” automatically — the exact opposite of the “expose to the right” bandwagon these clowns were all on two years ago — here’s a discussion of doing both at the same time. Hilarious. On the bright side, ISO Invariance pretty much saves ETTR nuts from constantly blowing their highlights.)
Funny thing though is that the new Photos app gives Lightroom a much better run for its money (um, it’s free), has Aperture’s best UI feature (organic customization), and everything runs much faster that Lightroom. The problem with Photos is it is missing key features of Lightroom, e.g. Dehaze, Clarity, and (most curiously) Vibrance. You just can’t get as far with Photos as you can with Lightroom. (If you have Affinity Photo you can use its Dehaze more-or-less transparently from Photos. It’s a modal, but then Lightroom is utterly modal.)
On the UI level, though, Photos simply spanks Lightroom’s Develop mode. Lightroom’s organization tools, clearly with many features requested by users, are completely out of Photos’ league.
I also tried Darktable (the open source Lightroom replacement) for comparison. I think its user interface is in many ways nicer than Lightroom’s — it looks and feels better — although much of its lack of clutter is owed to a corresponding lack of features), but the sad news is that Darktable’s image-processing capabilities don’t even compete with Aperture, let alone Photos. (One thing I really like about Darktable is that it applies “orientation” (automatic horizon leveling), “sharpen”, and “base curve” automagically by default. Right now this isn’t customizable — there’s a placeholder dialog — but if it were it would be an awesome feature.)
At bottom, Aperture doesn’t look or feel like an application developed by or for professionals. It’s very capable, but its design is — ironically — horrible.
Photoshop
Photoshop’s capabilities are, by and large, unmatched, but its UI wasn’t good when it first came out and many of its worst features have pretty much made it through unscathed by taste, practicality, or a sense of a job well done. Take a look at this gem:
This was an understandably frustrating dialog back in 1991 — in fact the attempt to provide visual cues with the lines was probably as much as you could expect, but it hasn’t changed since — every other application I use provides a GPU-accelerated live preview (in Acorn it’s non-destructive too). What’s even worse is that it looks like the dialog’s layout has been slightly tweaked to allow for too-large-and-non-standard buttons (with badly centered captions that would look worse if there were a glyph with a descender in it). At least it doesn’t waste a buttload of space on a mode menu: instead there’s a small popup lets you pick which (customizable) “workspace” you want to use, and the rest of the bar is actually useful (it shows common settings for the currently selected tool).
In the end, Photoshop at least looks reasonably nice , and its UI foibles are things I’ve grown accustomed to over twenty-five years.
I can’t wait until I get to experience Adobe’s Updater…