Aperture versus Lightroom

I just found a blog post by an acquaintance of mine (Ted), comparing Apple's Aperture with Adobe's Lightroom. It's well written, and I think I agree with everything he says in there (well, some things I hadn't tried doing, but everything I've tried...)

I, like him, am frustrated with the lack of an update for Aperture lately. I really liked it for a while there, and I miss it, now that I'm predominantly using Lightroom. And yet, that's the situation: I'm predominantly using Lightroom, because of issues with performance in general, and also, something Ted doesn't mention (because I presume he hasn't tried it), the way that Aperture utterly fails to behave properly with a project whose RAW files are on an NFS-mounted drive, once you quit Aperture. There's a way to work around it ("reconnect" the masters), but boy is it a pain. Those files are in the same place they were last time, and the drive is online and mounted, so very frustrating for Aperture to claim they're missing. Not to mention slow to reconnect a large number of them.

So, here's hoping Apple is still working on this -- both because I want Aperture to improve again, and I want the pressure of continued competition to make both options better.

Alas, for a variety of reasons, the notion of writing my own competitor is unlikely to ever happen... it's very tempting, though. I think the world could have a lot better than either of those programs, in certain ways.

If anyone wants to start an open source project, though, I'd be glad to contribute some time and ideas, and likely code, to the effort.

Am I really ready for this?

In August (the 11th, in case anyone wants to save the date), it seems I'll be teaching my first workshop at the Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW). The working title for this workshop is Beyond Photoshop: Photo Editing Software. I'll probably be talking about things like Aperture and
Lightroom, on the one end of the spectrum, and Picasa and iPhoto on the other, along with ACDSee, and probably a number of others. The idea is to just give some info on what else can be used... from the free stuff to the professional packages. Oh, and we mustn't forget The GIMP.

I believe, you see, that Photoshop is the wrong tool for many a photography job. It can do some amazing things, and it does a number of things really really well, and it's certainly the right tool for some jobs. Ever tried using it to sort and rate 1600 photos from a full day of shooting an event, though? Forget it. That's not what it's for. And that's just one example of stuff it's not for. And a lot of things that it is designed for, and does really well, it's still overkill for for a lot of situations.

So, I'm going to talk about alternatives.

But yeesh, I've got a lot of work to do to be ready for this thing... not to mention the emotional preparation for being up there at the front of a classroom. I've done some informal teaching before, but not a whole lot, and I've never done anything this formal.

Hopefully I'll do OK.