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Adobe are coming to the party against Aperture:

http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/

Thanks for the link Chris, I think it was only a matter of time.

I have downloaded the Beta version and I believe this will eventually give Apple a run for its money.

Aperture will only work on certain macs - Lightroom will work on anything - hooray for Adobe

Is it for PC also

Looks like we have to wait

Please note that we are currently working on a Lightroom Beta for the Windows platform. Subscribe to the RSS feeds on Adobe Labs to be notified when the Windows version becomes available.

Just watched the video - will be good when it's available for PC! (if it lives up to the hype )

The Beta version for the mac works very well - Adobe do make mention of the problems in the Beta version but they are not that important and are being worked on for late 2006 release.

Hmm. I'm gonna go see if I can get on to the beta for PC.

looks very interesting........ a bit of bridge, a bit of CS2, and a bit of iphoto,........ the software race is on.......... we can all only benefit...... looks like I will be busy having a play.......

Had a play with light room and at my first experience has been that I think it is a very easy program to work with....... all the controls are simple and easy to understand. I loaded up a series of RAW images and had a play...... process one of the said pix's and then opened the same image in PSCS2 and did a process using ACR. This was only a very quick comparison between the 2 programs on color and ease of use to process a RAW image. Light room had the edge over PSCS2 in the time to process an image and the quality

I found that light room was easy to use and gave me very quick results. If I had been working in the field and needed to sort and process a number of images to show a client I would use this program over PSCS2 mainly due to the ability to work very quickly.

There is a lot of similarities with bridge, and ACR, but with a bit more control, all in the one area which I like. I am yet to do a test printing from the program

Edit: Looks like an upgrade for the powerbook

It's a shame I don't have OSX on the G3. I'd be willing to see how this chugs along...

big pix wrote:Had a play with light room and at my first experience has been that I think it is a very easy program to work with....... all the controls are simple and easy to understand. I loaded up a series of RAW images and had a play...... process one of the said pix's and then opened the same image in PSCS2 and did a process using ACR. This was only a very quick comparison between the 2 programs on color and ease of use to process a RAW image. Light room had the edge over PSCS2 in the time to process an image and the quality

I found that light room was easy to use and gave me very quick results. If I had been working in the field and needed to sort and process a number of images to show a client I would use this program over PSCS2 mainly due to the ability to work very quickly.

There is a lot of similarities with bridge, and ACR, but with a bit more control, all in the one area which I like. I am yet to do a test printing from the program

Edit: Looks like an upgrade for the powerbook

Thanks Big Pix wish i had a mac to try it out on

Kevin

for those who would like to know more.........

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/revie ... oom1.shtml

Thanks for the link bp - very informative

Thank you BP for the link I wasn't quite sure where it fit in the scheme of things, that is alternative to PS CS@ or complementing it
cheers
marco

Having had a bit of a play with both of them, I think Aperture has the lead in workflow at the moment with stacks and versions and the Apple loupe is much nicer

However, from reading some of the comments from the dev's in the forums, it certainly sounds like Adobe are going to bring similar features in later on as well.

Aperture has some quite heavy hardware requirements and I do have to admit that it doesnt sit very well with me that some of Apples recent hardware (the last iMac rev for example with the GF5200) wont run it. You can hack it to run on the GF5200 which I have done here since my Powermac has the same card. It will be interesting to see how it runs on the new MacBook Pro (what a horrible name!!) once there is a universal binary.

Adobes lower hardware requirements might just win the day here I think, not to mention better raw development (at the moment, I expect Apple to catch up with this eventually and in some cases its already fine) and the ability to both house and point to files.

Its certainly an interesting time for photography in the Mac world

robboh,

Aperture's specs are higher especially in the graphics card area as Aperture relies on the CoreImage API to implement a number of features.

CoreImage essentially uses the processing power available in the GPU (Graphics card) to offload the processing from the CPU. Unfortunately the Nvidia GeForce 5200 isn't that flash. Fortunately, the GPU was upgraded to a much more suitable chipset in the rev-B iMac G5's (the one's with the iSight) and now the new iMac intel duos.

Adobe's Lightshack implements all routines directly and doesn't use CoreImage optimisation as far as I can figure out - and on my PowerBook with the ATI Radeon 9600 it is noticeably slower at some tasks.

With Aperture, I'm not happy that the vault feature must use local/direct attached drives. I've submitted a feedback already on this as it has serious implications for my users who need to save on the 6TB of networked storage I manage.

I do like the stack management and 2/multi-image up comparisions in Aperture though, and the Loupe works well.

D.

daniel_r wrote:Aperture's specs are higher especially in the graphics card area as Aperture relies on the CoreImage API to implement a number of features.

CoreImage essentially uses the processing power available in the GPU (Graphics card) to offload the processing from the CPU. Unfortunately the Nvidia GeForce 5200 isn't that flash. Fortunately, the GPU was upgraded to a much more suitable chipset in the rev-B iMac G5's (the one's with the iSight) and now the new iMac intel duos.

Hiya Daniel,

Yup, fully agree regards the higher spec requirement for Aperture being mainly related to the graphics card and that the GF5200 doesnt have the capabilities to do Core Image properly. You see it when using the loupe, it often only loads part of the pic into the circle

My grumble in this regard is pretty much along the lines of the fact that Apple have known what was coming in Tiger for at least 18 months and that I think its more than a little on the nose that they have released a number of machines in that time period which DONT support Core Image.

This is the primary reason why I have refused to buy the All-In-One models in the past, short of RAM and HDD, nothing is upgradable. Its why I decided to buy a PowerMac G5 when I decided to give Apple a try several years ago, it was the most future proof option with a brand new processor model (though will be interesting to see how long OS updates keep coming for PPC now), room for bucket-loads of RAM and upgradable graphics card. Having said that, graphics cards are still a disgusting price for PPC Macs, hopefully the move to Intel will drop the requirement of specifically Mac-biosed video cards.

Adobe's Lightshack implements all routines directly and doesn't use CoreImage optimisation as far as I can figure out - and on my PowerBook with the ATI Radeon 9600 it is noticeably slower at some tasks.

Supposedly Core Image should gracefully fall back on the processor when a certain function isnt implemented in the graphics card. Why this doesnt happen with Aperture, who knows?? Lightroom is definitely slower updating the thumbnails and previews. I presume this is because its updating thumbnails and reading them in again, rather than realtime.

With Aperture, I'm not happy that the vault feature must use local/direct attached drives. I've submitted a feedback already on this as it has serious implications for my users who need to save on the 6TB of networked storage I manage.

That IS a PITA, along with a few other things
I really do feel that they have upset a lot of people with Aperture, but I have no doubt it will mature into a great product. The concept and base is there, they just need to execute it better.

In the meantime, that Luminous Landscape article has been a great help figuring out how to drive the tone curve and Im starting to become quite impressed with LightRoom and the raw conversions its doing.