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- - e r i k - - · Jan 9, 2006, 03:13 AM

OK, I got to admit it, while the interface doesn't look as slick, Adobe Lightroom appears to have the speed, as evidenced by this video.

What do you all think? At least Apple should get the incentive to get Aperture up to speed with their other apps. Right now it's a mess.

moonmonkey · Jan 9, 2006, 04:12 AM

I just downloaded it and its fast but rubbish,

Feels a bit like using a flash app, can't quite explain why.

Loupe tool is terrible compared to Aperture.

The app does launch in 3 seconds and only take 8 meg of disk space, which is fantastic, but doesn't make up for the rest of it.

Im not a pro Photographer so my opinion should be taken with a pinch of salt.

siMac · Jan 9, 2006, 05:47 AM

I've given it a spin and it's OK, especially for an early beta. It's not as slick as Aperture, but at least this app will run on my dual 1.8 G5. Lightroom also features non destructive editing and a similar feature-set to Aperture, but doesn't use Core Image (so they can later pander to the Windows users) so has much lower system requirements.

The interface is definitely a bit cheap - moonmonkey hit the nail on the head, it does look like some dodgy flash app, but apparently Adobe are open to suggestions. No mention on final pricing when it's finished.

All in all looks promising.

trancepriest · Jan 9, 2006, 08:13 AM

It does look very promising and a hell of alot faster than Aperture. Now the weakpoints is in the implementation of the loupe tool it's not as cool as in Aperture and support for dual displays is nonexistent.

rickey939 · Jan 9, 2006, 08:14 AM

For a beta, this is a great start I think. All my thoughts can be wrapped up by reading the below MacWorld review...

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/01...look/index.php

slugslugslug · Jan 9, 2006, 08:49 AM

Makes me glad I didn't run out and buy Aperture, even though I can get it for $150. I was waiting to see what iPhoto '06 would bring, but it'll also be interesting to see how Lightroom shapes up.

It's worth noting that Derrick Story, who wrote the MacWorld article linked above, said in his O'Reilly blog that there'd be a lot of cool photography stuff going on at MWSF. Obviously he was alluding to Lightroom, but I'm pretty sure he gets prerelease access to iPhoto as well, so he may have been dropping hints that '06 will rock.

At any rate, it's good to see the competition cranking up a few notches in this space. And especially good to see Adobe make something that competes with Apple on OS X, is Mac first, and is Cocoa.

Eug Wanker · Jan 9, 2006, 09:43 AM

No crop or rotate tools.

They really should have just called it an alpha like it really is (just as Apple should have called Aperture 1.0 a beta like it really is). I look forward to the release though, since Aperture won't run on my Cube.

OreoCookie · Jan 9, 2006, 10:28 AM

I took it for a quick spin, it's kinda slow reading standard jpegs (I don't shoot raws with my camera as the write time scales linearly with file size

). It's kinda slow, but has some nice features. But it's definitely not nice enough (at this stage anyway) to make me consider using something else than iView at this point.

Maflynn · Jan 9, 2006, 11:54 AM

I'm taking it for a spin now. There's things I like in it over Aperture and it does seem faster but I only have 4 photos in it right now and my Aperture library is 7,000.

I'll say this, I hope this will light a fire under Apple, in some ways Aperture feels unfinished and for a beta light room feels pretty good. Not a good combination because Lightroom can only get better and so Aperture has to continue to evolve and improve.

Mike

- - e r i k - - · Jan 11, 2006, 01:16 AM

Gah, tell me about it. I'm thinking about just having Aperture import my RAW-files for safe-keeping and exporting them to iPhoto 6.

Mr Kino · Feb 3, 2006, 03:57 PM

Aperture is slow as ... (insert ms program of your choice.) I run it on an imac g5 (isight) with 1.5 gigs of ram, and well its still freaking slow.

i understand that i just barely hit the minimum requirements but hear me out. i am not using it for raw images yet. I thought the minimum requirements were meant for working with raw images, not jpgs.

i simply do not understand why aperture is so freaking slow. i only have 2000 pictures, and they are all jpgs.

i did try lightroom for about 5 minutes, till it decided it did not want to import more than 20 pictures.!!!

honestly i wonder if this is the same thing that happened when motion came out. what is it with apple these days? they release this awesome software that only really works well on their high end systems.

i wonder if iphoto 6 is really that much faster than 5? oh wells, thats my rant.