Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

I believe that Photoshop CS3 would do most of what I want, but I don't need all the complication and expense of that product. So what else is there?

I've tried Aperture, Lightroom, Lightzone, iPhoto, Bibble and Seashore plus some of the freeware/open source options for OS X. Considering the scope of the group, this review will be relatively lightweight, and perhaps subjective. I'll try to be objective, I'll mention if there's a variable that affected my decision.

The scenario was to manage, edit and export RAW images for as cheap as possible, even free. I also recognise that there is IPR and associated effort involved, so I'm prepared to pay for software that makes my life easier.

My starting point was iPhoto 6. It comes with iLife with most if not all new Apple Macs. Like most software it has good and bad points. I wasn't happy with how it manages files, importing copies of files into its own directory structure, much like iTunes does. This made it awkward when I already have my images nicely catalogued. iPhoto doesn't allow for much editing, it has basic features, spot removal but no cloning. The spot removal has some hidden features that take the software almost to the next level away from the home consumer. The features allow for changing the size and transparency (effectiveness) of the spot removal tool. Worth searching for if you don't know about it yet. The adjustment sliders are also basic, but do the job that they're meant to. I found the histogram to go awry sometimes and I could flatten the Himalayas just by moving a slider by one point at times. I think this was an bug.

Exporting from iPhoto created issues. I wanted to export jpgs at the maximum quality. What I found was that the jpeg export was fixed so I couldn't change the quality. I ended up with iPhoto exporting TIFFs, then using another tool to convert to JPEG. This lost the EXIF data along the way (even with the added patch updates), and even the IPTC conversion tools didn't help here. I'd have preferred just the one conversion from source. It's all to easy to end up with too many files as it is.

I found iPhoto to slow down on large libraries, e.g. over 2-3000 images which could make navigation time-consuming. iPhoto does allow for integration to image-editing software to make the process more powerful, but I don't think I'm happy with using it as my image management application.

iPhoto allows for keywording of photos and using a separate keyword assistant plug-in, users can add keywords to many photos at a time. The downside is that keywords only really seem relevant to iPhoto. You can't export them (easily). I did try a few of the automator actions and scripts, but couldn't get any to work in a way that would allow me to export from iPhoto in a format that retained keywords.

Aperture 1.5 (with the relevant patches to increase speed) was my next try. In short, this was a resource hog. I really liked the application once I'd got used to it (a few minutes), but it was so slow. This was on a 2.66 Mac Pro with 4Gb memory and RAID 0 from 2 drives for data. I admit, the Mac Pro has the basic graphics card (mainly because the workstation is used for music and audio) but even so, it could hang for 10 seconds to 2 minutes at a time. For a more detailed assessment of the speed of Aperture, I've written another review including filesizes and processing times. I like the stack function, the loupe and how the windows layout worked. I didn't like how I couldn't remove the horizontal viewer/menu (but that may be a RTFM issue). Overall, Aperture was largely unusable because I value my time. Aperture's spot removal/clone tool just seemed to work. I couldn't find much in the way of customising it, but whatever the default operation is, I liked it. I also liked that tool for its simplicity. Out of all the features, I liked the Black and White conversion parameters, especially being able to change how the colours affected the B&W image. A definite step-up from iPhoto. The retrieval of detail in the shadows and mids was also the best out of the tools available. Like the better image editing packages, it provides a tool to change the sliders on the histogram so that shadows can be increased or decreased, or adjusting the frequencies that fall into the highlight category.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom was illuminating. It runs quite happily on a MacBook with 1Gb RAM. Yes it does slow down if I'm trying to do too much, but it does work and responds quicker on the MacBook than Aperture did on the 4-core MacPro. It has very similar editing features to Aperture. One of the most criticised features of Lightroom is that you have to manually select whether you're viewing, editing, printing, exporting images. It's a niggle. I didn't find it obstructed me, after all the buttons are on the page anyway. If anything it helped prevent making adjustments by mistake. Like Aperture, it allows for adjusting the frequencies on the histogram, this time on the histogram itself or by sliders. I found these to be better that Aperture's for what I wanted to do with them. The clone and spot removal tools had more functionality than those in iPhoto and Aperture, but I found them to be a bit heavy-handed. The results didn't merge as well with the rest of picture. Having said that, I did get effective results and that's what counts. I just had to be more careful. Lightroom now allows for stacks as does Aperture, although Aperture handles these more readily probably because they were a late addition to Lightroom. So far, Lightroom is the top of the pack for me.

Bibble - I'm afraid I just could not get the hang of this application. I even read the help pages, something I haven't had to do for Lightroom and only had to do with Aperture when I was trying to remove a panel from the screen. Even after reading the help, I still couldn't get anything useful out of it. It's a shame since it looks promising. Even ignoring the hyped promotion of the application on the company's website (nothing different there, all companies do it), it does have an impressive feature list for the money. I wanted so much to like it since it seem perfectly placed to do what I wanted, having grown from an image editor to include image management as well. Partly what stopped me getting anywhere was that it took too long to do anyway - again on the Mac Pro. And perhaps again, the graphics card was the bottleneck, but even so I'd expect more from an application. If I can try it again, I will and we'll see how far I get that time.

I used Lightzone at the same time as Lightroom, but after the Aperture trial had expired. I found it awkward to use at first (without reading the manual). What confused me were the styles on the left that added templated actions on the right. I understood the tool more when I realised that the actions on the right are what are being applied to the image. The styles on the left are shortcuts to pre-defined actions on the right. It shows that persevering and/or reading the manual. At this point, I'd already spent less time on Lightzone than I had on Bibble. I was then pretty happy adding actions to the images. What I liked is that actions or adjustments can be added in any order and the order can be altered. So for one image, adjusting to black and white, then adjusting contrast could potentially be better than the other way around on another.

Lightzone has a few features that I think made it stand out from the rest:

1) regions have an area and a feathered area beyond that. In the simplest form, this is two concentric circles. The adjustment is applied to the defined extent within the main area, then the feathered area blends between the main area and the background. The size of the main area and feathered area are individually adjustable. That's very useful. So to remove a spot, you can highlight the majority of the spot with the central main region and use the feathered edge to blend out the edges. Great.

2) adjustments have a property that defines how they are blended with the image that the adjustment is being applied to. Not only can the user choose the type of blend (e.g. normal, darken, colour burn, etc), but you can also choose the percentage of transparency of the adjustment. None of iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom provided this functionality. 

3) you can create regions of different polygonal shapes, complete with optional with bezier curves. Means I can create a region overlaying of the one of the guitar picks in the Award Sounds logo and change just the colour (or other properties) of that one pick. That would be independent to the other picks. I can see how this heads towards the layers feature found in Photoshop.

Lightzone also has 16 lightzones. Essentially this the image equivalent of a multiband compressor. Whereas Aperture and Lightzone had 3 or 4 bands, this has 16 bands. From an audio point of view, I'd struggle to find a use for more than 4 bands and struggle further trying to manage the effects of more that 4 bands on the music. However Lightzone's ZoneMapper tool makes it easy to drag the boundaries of the zones. I can't figure out if this is the best thing since sliced bread or a gimmicky tool. My impression is that once I get the hang of it, I'll love it. Right now though, it's a play-and-see tool, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

On the bad side, I found that the noise reduction in Lightzone wasn't as good as Aperture or Lightroom. In fact, Aperture made it easier for me to achieve better noise reduction than any of the other software. I also found Lightzone as a whole to be cumbersome to use. I preferred both Aperture and Lightroom in this respect. What I should say is that Lightzone's interface is usable, so don't let my comments stop you from trying it. I have an odd feeling that Lightzone is too simplistic but I think that's the way that the interface has been designed. Both Aperture and Lightroom have more professional-looking interfaces, but in the end it's not how the interface looks but how you can work with it. Considering the extra image-editing tools that Lightzone includes, it should be included in your short-list.

I used Seashore when I was converting a photo into a background for the website. First things first, Seashore is an OS X implementation of some of GIMP. I don't think it's a complete implementation, but it has most of what you'd need. Being based on GIMP, it's also 8-bit. So straight away, I'd discard it for anything that you still want to end up being a photo image; we don't want to lose that bit-depth. But for image editing when the final target is a small logo or a gradient background, Seashore is great. I'm still getting used to it, I'm pretty sure some of the commercial products are easier to use, but with a few minutes you can get the hang of Seashore.

So which one have I chosen?

Well, Seashore is definitely in for image editing, but not for producing and editing photo images

I would have liked to have chosen Aperture but it just wouldn't run happily, so I discounted that.

I discounted Bibble because I couldn't get on with it.

I still can't decide between Lightroom and Lightzone.

I'm finding Lightroom easier to use whereas I think Lightroom has more tricks up its sleeve. I'm tempted to go with Lightroom and the basic (non-image management) version of Lightzone so I get the best of both worlds. And to pick up a well-recommended book such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book, The: The Complete Guide for Photographers to improve my understanding of the product

I'm also keeping an eye on Bluemarine which seems to be aiming to provide an opensource alternative to the commercial photo management applications. The version I tried back in February 2007 was flaky, but the authors are very upfront about the QA status. That's a good thing to see. I've just noticed that there's a new version out, so I may have to try that again before making my decision.

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