In-Depth Review of Presets in Aperture 2.0 vs. Lightroom
Aperture 2 Review
Get 9 Free Lightroom Presets
I wish to shed a little more light on my previous post and explain my thoughts on presets. Lightroom does presets very well. Aperture 2, it seems, really missed the mark.
The following is Aperture 2.0:
In the photo on the right, each of the red circles represents a different groups or set of adjustments (ie. exposure related adjustments, sharpening tools, etc). There are sixteen 
of them. To make some photos look just right, you will likely need to change settings from many or even most of those 16 groups. You can lift all of those adjustments and then paste them on to the next photo. This is obviously a plus. What if you close Aperture? What if you have 2 or 3 styles/techniques that require completely different looks but you want to see how the photo would look under all three of the conditions? Maybe you don't want to make all those changes each time. Aperture does let you save presets. Unfortunately, when you save adjustments, you have to save each group individually.
What does that mean? That means that presets in Aperture are divided amongst the 16 groups. There is no adjust all setting that can be saved and called upon for use on another day. As far as I am able to find (and correct me if I am wrong), there is NO simple way of saving all 16 presets to one "super-preset" that represents the changes you made all every group. The closest thing you can do is lift and stamp the adjustments from a previously altered photo...but you can't save it for later use.
So selected the 16 presets you want to use in order to make the photo look better. Now what if it doesn't quite look the way you thought that it would. Well, you guessed it! For a completely different look, you may need to select 16 different presets. You have now made 32 adjustments to see the 2 different looks you wanted to go for.
Tired yet?
Now lets use Lightroom.
Okay, make all of your adjustments. Save any combination of the 21 (Lightroom has 21) preset groups. Each look can be saved into ONE preset. The image below show all series of changes being saved into on "super-preset" named sky enhancer.
What if you want a completely different look? Do you have to select 21 different adjustments? No. This is the nice part. YOU MOVE YOUR MOUSE!! That's right! You move your mouse over the list of "super-presets" (shown below in the red circle) and you can PREVIEW (in the blue cirlcle) dozens of different looks, all without ever having to undo or even click. When you have found an adjustment you like...just click the mouse.
That means I can test out 30 or 40 completely different looks in less than 5 seconds or so!!! I can see the same photo as a high contrast black & white, a dull sepia, a vibrant colored, an intensely surreal photo, and endless other looks in literally seconds as I move my mouse over each of my presets. Never do I have to press undo.
This photo below (on the left), for example, can be changed in a endless number of ways. As you move your cursor over the items in the red circle, all changes will be seen instantly on the images in the blue circle. To preview ten different looks, just move your mouse over ten different presets and each one will display in the blue circle. To cycle through ten different looks would take me less than 2 seconds in Lightroom. The photo below, on the right, is a demonstration to show how 10 different presets can really make one photo look completely different.
Is this even remotely possible in Aperture?? This would probably take me several minutes, especially if the looks were more unique than the ones I am showing here. This means a world of difference when editing! I think most photographers know how to utilize this, otherwise there would probably be a lot less Aperture users. You can save practically ANY combination of adjustments. When you need to recall that "super-preset" (complex combination of adjustments) or the 100 super-presets you may have set up, plan on cycling through 5 images in about one second as you glide your mouse over the presets.
You may want the adjustment only to change the vignetting. I have 5 different vignetting combos that I use. Another preset may change blues to look bluer. I might have one present that not only changes blues, but also applies a medium vignetting, increases contrast, and adjust the desaturates reds, AND shifts the white balance a little.
Look at the original photo on the right. This required dozens of adjustments but because I have lots of presets, it took a few seconds for me to chose the preset that I liked best, then I made some minor tweaks.
Lets see how this effects a standard wedding that I might edit. Lets say I am trigger happy and I have 1000 images. Some were in the shade, some were in low lighting, some were in cool lighting, some were in the bright 
sun. Some were family pictures with room left on the sides for cropping and some were taken with the intention of be processed to look like a vibrant painting.
Let's assume that I have already created hundreds of presets in both Aperture and Lightroom. Lets begin! In Aperture, for each desired look I will need to choose up to 16 different presets from 16 different pull-down menus to get there. If you knew exactly (and I mean exactly) where each of those presets were and it there was no hesitation whatsoever, it would still take about a second each. If you have a lot of presets saved, this may take you 4 or 5 seconds (especially if you have to open the preset manager). So anywhere from 1-5 seconds for each of the 16 adjustments. That means a you could be spending as much as to 80 seconds to get your one completely different look, not to mention if you chose any adjustments incorrectly, you will have to undo the mistakes. So it really isn't unlikely to spend that full minute or two on your one look. In Lightroom, just move your mouse over 5 completely different looks in about a second (it is hard for the brain to really process changes much faster than that). Thats about 120 seconds compared to 0.2 seconds.
Some of the looks may not need adjustments made to ALL 16 of the adjustment groups. They may only need adjustments from one. Even still, you are looking at a minimum of two or three seconds to make a change. If you want to see 10 different looks count on 20-30 seconds at the ABSOLUTE minimum. Again, compare that to Lightroom and its 2 seconds or so.
So as you go through your thousand photos with dozens and dozens of changes in lighting, white balance, cropping, etc., you can choose 2 routes. You can use Aperture 2.0 and select hundreds of different group presets, one at a time from their different pull down menus and just lift-and-stamp to similar photos. Or you can get Lightroom and do a better job in less than one tenth of the time.
For a 9 free Lightroom Developer Presets, click on the link below:
9 Free Lightroom Presets
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Aperture 2 Review (Lightroom vs. Aperture 2.0 on Presets)
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10 comments:
Nice review, thanks. I started out using Aperture, and being a total Mac geek, really, really wanted to love it - but I just don't! I do think that eventually, Apple will produce a great tool, but from what I've seen, they aren't there yet.
Well, I don't know what to say about your review. I think maybe YOU missed the mark of what a tool such as Aperture should be about. As a professional photographer I want to sort and apply light adjustments to my images. As a pro I require my images to have a certain base line quality standard so I don't have to make excess adjustments in any photo software. So when you tell me I have to fiddle with 26 adjustment groups per each image - that is simply not the case. Rarely will I make more than 2 or 3 adjustments per photo. And as you pointed out - a great tool in Aperture is the "lift + stamp" tool. It will lift all adjustments from an image and apply it to another. That's all I need. If I would have had all these saved presets I wouldn't be able to recall what they were anyways. As it is I just find an image that is similar in color and lighting and I can try the same adjustments with the lift and stamp tool. If I would want to. And I could do that the next day or anytime after I had closed Aperture. Still totally there and very accessible.
In your opening comments you mention:
"To make a photo look just right, you will likely need to change settings from many or even most of those 16 groups. You can lift all of those adjustments and then paste them on to the next photo. This is obviously a plus. "
Just a thought... Can you not apply all the setting you want to a photo and then keep that photo as you "super preset". When you want to apply all the same settings to another photo just open the old photo and lift all the settings and apply to new photo. This is simple. You can even have a whole gallery of styles!
Or am I missing something?
I agree with Jon! Aperture needs to com up with a MUCH better way of applying saved preset values to images. Making another library with "preset images" ins not a good, viable, long term solution and is nowhere near as fluid as lightrooms preset system.
Lightroom sets the bar here, I hope aperture catches up with it!
I'm by no means a pro, but I inherently dislike most of Apple's software, even though I love their computers. Like the absence of a simple "queue" option on the iPod, I think Apple developers secretly like to leave out easy-to-program options.
to Anonymous #1
I pretty much agree but just because you probably wouldn't use the presets for all you images, it doesn't mean that Apple's cumbersome system is good or time efficient. Sometimes having a uniform (unique to that project) look on projects is a good thing and being able to sample those instantly would be gravy
I haven't tried Aperture 2 mostly because I like the improvements but I'm unconvinced that I $100 like them...
Marlon - you can make an on the go playlist by simply holding the center button on each song. So you can make a playlist on the fly... aka queue.
But on to the point... I also wish aperture would have the presets like lightroom does. From what I've experienced, it seems that you can get the same quality results from both programs, but lightroom lets you get there a little faster and more intuitively.
I don't think you missed the mark at all ast to "what a tool such as Aperture should be about." Part of being a photographer is discovery through experimentation. If every person with a camera were only capable of seeing things one way, there would be no new and interesting photos out there. With presets, whether built in or custom made, you can quickly experiment with different looks for a given picture. You can compare this to the dark room of traditional film photography. Photographers would record their "recipes" for different effects, cross-processing, dodging, burning, increasing contrast, etc. so they could repeat the process. The problem with the recipes was that unless you were super precise with your timing and measuring, your results weren't always 100% the same. Now with digital photography, you can experiment in your "dark room" and find a look you like, you "record" it in a preset and ta-da, you have a quick, repeatable outcome for any photo you wish to try the effect on. "Base-line standard" has little to do with creative expression.
anonymous was right (posted on few 17th) While it is true that saving individual presets for each of the adjustment settings, all those settings are saved in the image they are applied to. For instance, you apply the your raw conversion and your color settings to an image and then want to apply it to several others later. Hit the "o" key, click on your source image then simply click on the images you want to apply the same effect. Want to change the source image, hold down option and click on a different image to lift the settings.
You could very easily have a hole library of image styles that could be accessed at any time - its not a pull down menu, but it still works.
I have used both Aperture 1, Lightroom ans now Aperture2. I dropped Aperture 1 & 1.5 because they were so slow. I then started Lightroom and liked it but it has one limitation, its tethered ability. I use both Canon and Nikon cameras tethered. With Lightroom you need to use either Canon or Nikon capture software and that involves extra expense in that Nikon'd software is over £100 here in the UK, though Canon's is free. However, Aperture 2 allows both at no extra cost. It has got over its speed problems and I like the new features. I just may stick with Aperture!!
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