Capturing The Essence

« An afternoon with Jef… | Home | Groomed to perfection… »

The great RAW debate

.. Aperture vs Lightroom vs Capture One vs ACR

You may be aware from my earlier posting that I've been on somewhat of a RAW crusade in regards to my workflow. An adamant Aperture user for many years I started realise all wasn't well, the time had come to start examining other options.

So what's wrong with Aperture then?

Between it's sluggish speed and inflexible plug-in architecture (that causes me to open Photoshop far more often then I'd like) it's just not cutting the mustard.

To some extent it's a culprit of my current workflow process. My compulsive desire to import every single picture and scanned negative causes bloated libraries and painfully slow performance during import whilst it generates thumbnails and previews. This however doesn't explain it's sluggish performance when applying adjustments or exporting to external editors.

The turning point came when looking at the quality of it's RAW conversion. Curious about it's comparitive performance I made the mistake of downloading Capture One 4 and processing some images, the difference was quite startling!

You want Lightroom governor!

Well actually I don't. Despite putting aside my various preconceptions and downloading the latest version, within ten minutes I was ready to throw it out the door on it's ass. I find the interface ridiculously unintuitive, it's feature-set sorely lacking, and it's lack of customisation infuriating.

It's speed is however impressive, which in 64-bit mode is sometimes blinding in comparison to Aperture. I'm not talking about perceived speed (such as it's "initial preview" import setting that will allow you to skip generation of RAW files and use the embedded JPEG instead), I'm talking about applying adjustments such as WB/colour/curves.

Worthy of mention is the quality of it's RAW conversion (which is basically ACR), and some ingenious features such as allowing alteration of H/S/L, and gradients. However any program that devotes development time to 'panel end marks' needs a good kicking.

Why not just use Bridge/ACR?

This is actually a very good question. As Jeff Ascough pointed out in the seminar I attended this week, if you already own Adobe Photoshop CS4 you already have everything required for an effective and efficient workflow.

Admittedly some of the usability aspects of the interface in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) aren't implemented quite as nicely as Lightroom, but they are there. More significantly Bridge (Adobe's media manager) will allow you to quickly organise, view, and rate your photographs ready for editing.

If you don't require library management aspects of Lightroom or Aperture, this is an excellent option.

Capture One 4 Pro

The staunchest of Capture One followers can usually be found complaining about the new UI in version 4. I don't understand why, I LOVE IT! Not only is it pleasing to the eye, but will allow you to create your own tabs with specific palettes/tools (thus creating your own workflow), drag palettes into free space or a second monitor, and save this as a custom workspace.

The feature set and tools are fantastic (I'm still drooling over the colour editor); however most impressive is "quality" - it is truly outstanding. Some may have seen me tweeting two different versions of the same photography from Capture One and Aperture, for me the difference is very apparent.

But..

It's not all good news, I have some definite problems. Some of these are quite trivial such as not being able to use the Option key to isolate highlights/shadows (changing background to black), or alter levels on individual RGB channels. The MAJOR problem with this software is PhaseOne and their support.

To say their website doesn't work half the time would be an understatement. Not only does it take moments of genius to navigate to documents you'd found the day before, but it's takes days to unsuccessfully lodge a support ticket. I can find no telephone numbers for support, and the response from fellow forum users can be described as "frosty" at best!

So what's the solution for you?

What this journey has achieved for me is to clarify in my mind a workflow that is best for me. That is to separate the different elements of the workflow into different stages, and most likely different programs.

I would like to use Capture One 4 Pro for shot selection and RAW conversion with adjustments (e.g. WB, colour correction, cropping, etc), then use Photoshop for extensive editing and fine-tuning. Finally I would export HQ JPEG's or PSD's into Aperture for library management.

You're sorted then!?

Well, depends on PhaseOne. Without some serious confidence building by their support department I will have to ditch it, I can't use software that isn't adequately supported. As a replacement I could use Bridge/ACR, but at that point you have to question if just to use Aperture or Lightroom.

Ah well, it was an interesting journey!

two comments

After your presentation of CaptureOne I downloaded it and I tried it, but I was not so impressed with its UI. I simply did not find it intuitive enough (Aperture rules).
I also tested lightroom some months ago, and I was not satisfied as well. Aperture is my choice!

Honestly I use external plugins very rarely, and even if I feel the need of a version 3, lighter, a little bit more responsive and with some nice new feature (face recognition?) I would not leave Aperture right now!

Good comparison thought! Thanks Ian!

Carlo (URL) - 03-05-’09 10:13

@Carlo: I think like many thinks it’s a matter of personal choice, although the more I use CO the more I like it. Let’s hope Apple do something great with Aperture soon! Thanks.

Ian (Email) (URL) - 08-05-’09 18:01