A Quick Review of Adobe's Lightroom

By Jim Frost
Last Updated: January 11, 2006

Just downloaded the Lightroom beta and took it for a quick spin. Here are some quick comments and comparison's to Apple's Aperture.

Import blows the doors off of Aperture, it's way better designed, more intuitive and flexible. Not much faster, if at all, however.

In "Library" mode the folder/image selection panel sucks. There's no visual differentiation between the title bars on the collapsible panes (or that the items in the panel are even collapsible panes, or whether they're collapsed or open) and selected folders. The search interface is akin to what Aperture gives you on the thumbnail browser, quick and easy to use. "Browse Keywords" is another story. It is just a simple list of all available keywords which I can't see being useful on a real image database. For kicks I added 26 keywords to an image (one for every letter) and the "browse keywords" feature became instantly difficult to use, requiring me to scroll the panel around. Aperture does kind of the same thing with its large array of keyword checkboxes but those are at least part of a usually-offscreen dialog rather than eating up the whole side of the interface and is still manageable with tens of keywords. Both need improvement but Aperture wins, hands down.

"Quick Develop" interface in Library mode, which is comparable to the Inspectors control in Aperture, is not nearly as well developed. No sliders for things like exposure or contrast and the histogram is so small it's hard to really use.

In "Develop" mode the adjustment tools are better designed, there are a lot more of them, and the color histogram is nicely done. I don't understand what the "shadows/show highlights" selections actually do (looks like some kind of enhancement but what, exactly, I don't know) and "show clipping" doesn't seem to do a whole lot. Like Aperture the histogram appears smooth even when it's obviously not.

The tonal adjustment interface is ... odd. Cool, weird, and disappointing all at the same time. The cool thing about it is that the curve introduced by exposure and tone curve adjustments is shown on top of the histogram. The curve/histogram overlay is like you see in The Gimp and is excellent, you can really see what the different adjustments are actually doing. The weird thing is that it looks like it has quarter-tone adjustments in the arrows under the histogram but they appear from histogram changes to be compression adjustments -- however they don't appear to actually affect the image noticably, at least in my test image (which, admittedly, is rich in mids but not highlights or shadows). The disappointing part is that while it displays a curve you can't actually manipulate it as a curve. And rather than providing band-specific modes in the tone adjustments it has "split toning". I think splitting the capabilities over a large number of sliders makes it pretty hard to make complicated adjustments.

In both Quick Develop and Develop there are more tools available than are readily apparent. Each has a non-obvious and, IMO, poorly designed scrollbar, just a black and white bar with no differentiation. I didn't even notice it for about half an hour. It has the same non-obvious collapsible panes as does the folder/image selector.

Lightroom's sharpening and noise reduction tools are just simple sliders but are effective and easier to use than Aperture's. It does a better job with noise reduction. It has a smoothing tool that I don't see in Aperture (although I can't say I missed it). Like the tonal adjustments the color adjustments are split amongst a pile of sliders. Aperture's color wheels are much more compact and intuitive. But Lightroom has distortion correction features that are not found in Aperture.

There are no HUD-style floating panes and, like Aperture's Inspectors, you can't resize any of the adjustment and inspection panes. I don't like that limitation in Aperture, but at least in Aperture you can switch to the HUD and resize them. No such option in Lightroom.

Overall I give Aperture the win in terms of adjustments. Each has some features the other doesn't, but Aperture's are more slickly designed except for the tone histogram display.

The "Loupe" feature in Lightroom is really simplistic. In "Library" mode it switches to a fullscreenish view; in "Develop" mode it toggles between 100% zoom and zoom-to-fit. It gets the job done, I suppose, but it is not anywhere near as sophisticated or slick as Aperture's tool.

One place Lightroom really shines against Aperture in adjustments is that it caches the adjustment rather than re-performing it every time it renders. While the view can lag behind the adjustment, as in Aperture, once you're done adjusting everything is snappy. Apply certain adjustments to an image in Aperture (especially noise reduction) and the whole interface slows to the speed of molasses, even on my Quad. Apple is depending far too much on Core Image during image display.

Library mode has a comparison interface that's quite similar to that of Aperture but I can't seem to do the same thing in Develop mode. In general there's a clearly predefined workflow in Lightroom, much more like Capture One (but at least it's not designed by utter morons like Capture One). I much prefer Aperture's more free-form approach where tools are available everywhere although the keyboard shortcuts make this a lot better than it would otherwise be.

I can't find anything like the "smart folders" feature in Aperture, which I use a lot. Moreover Lightroom has far fewer sorting options than Aperture; no stacks or free-form sorting (except in Slideshow mode). Aperture is clearly superior when it comes to selecting the best images out of a large number of them.

I have no use for Slideshow, which seems to be more or less Album mode in Aperture but without the slick layout stuff. That mode looks like a poorly thought out toss-in to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

Lightroom has no virtual light table feature, one of the coolest features of Aperture. I admit that I have not actually used this in Aperture for anything other than investigation yet, but I haven't tried to design an album in Aperture yet either -- and that's where it would rock.

The Print mode is vastly superior to Aperture and even Photoshop CS2, at least in terms of interface design. Much, much more professional than either. Assuming the quality is roughly the same as CS/CS2 I think I just found a new printing tool.

I didn't (and won't, tonight) look at rendering quality outside of what I can see in the tool itself. It does not seem to have anywhere near the trouble with noise that Aperture has, a big win, but one which may well disappear by the time it ships.

Adobe calls it a beta; I think it's more like a very advanced alpha. Many of the controls have that "just make it work" feeling. A lot of the design is clearly a very fast knockoff of Aperture, not nearly as slick and very modal; it's trying to push a workflow on me. I think the workflow is reasonable, especially when compared to Capture One, but I still found myself bouncing around between Library and Develop modes a lot. Only in the import and print interfaces do I give Lightroom high marks. The rendering seems to be more or less the quality of CS2 and is easily superior to Aperture with noisy images. With clean images the two tools are not as easily ranked.

In closing, did I mention the printing interface? I really like the printing interface. Adobe should use it in CS3 and Apple could learn about a zillion things from it. Definitely check out the printing interface.
to top