Underexposed

Apple Aperture in action.

(Credit: Apple)

LAS VEGAS--Apple on Monday added support in its software for raw image files from Nikon's top-end SLR, the $8,000, 24.5-megapixel D3X.

Apple's Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.5 also adds support for Epson's Epson R-D1x digital rangefinder camera, according to the Apple support page.

The software enables Aperture 2, iPhoto '08, and iPhoto '09 to interpret the cameras' raw files, proprietary formats that include more information than JPEGs. The update requires Mac OS X 10.4.11, Mac OS X 10.5.3, or later.

A full list of Apple's raw image support is available on Apple's support site.

Aperture's competitor, Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, also got D3X support Monday, which is eve of the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.

(Via Rob Galbraith.)

Updated 9:03 a.m. PST Nov. 9--See additional information below; the plug-in now can write the geographic data to files.

Jeffrey Friedl, an enterprising photographer and programmer, has released a geotagging plug-in for Adobe Systems' Lightroom, one data point in a trend that shows the image editing and cataloging software is gradually acquiring some of the clout of the more mainstream sibling Photoshop products.

Geotagging is getting easier with cameras such as Nikon's high-end compact camera, the Coolpix P6000, but it's a somewhat onerous process that today requires some technical abilities and sometimes specialized software. Writing the location metadata into digital photo files pay off later, though, for example by letting you see on a map just where you took that vacation photo or look up pictures by typing in the name of the city where you took them.

Frieldl's Lightroom geotagging plug-in reads a GPS unit's track log, then deduces a photo's location based on the time it was taken. Although that's the same basic mechanism many other geotagging programs employ, Friedl's plug-in brings some welcome flexibility to the process by moving the process within Lightroom.

Lightroom and Aperture are gaining in popularity when it comes to processing raw images from higher-end digital cameras.

(Credit: InfoTrends)

More broadly, it shows that third parties are making Lightroom a more useful, customized tool. Another example are the wealth of downloadable editing "presets" that accelerate processes such as whitening subjects' teeth or brightening a dark foreground that's been overwhelmed by a bright sky. However, Lightroom still has nothing like the level of add-ons of Photoshop.

A survey by market researcher InfoTrends shows the gradual acceptance of Lightroom for its core ability, editing the raw images from high-end digital cameras. Professional photographers and enthusiasts like raw images for the flexibility, but unlike JPEGs, raw images must be processed by software such as Photoshop, Lightroom, or Apple Aperture.

InfoTrends asked what software North American companies use to process raw images in 2007 and again in July 2008. Lightroom increased in usage from 23.6 percent to 35.9 percent, while Photoshop declined from 66.5 percent to 62.2 percent, according to a blog post by Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty. Aperture, available only on the Mac, increased from 5.5 percent to 7.5 percent.

Lightroom limits
One of Lightroom's advantages is that all changes made to photos are nondestructive, meaning that unlike many Photoshop effects they can be reversed. The approach also means the changes can be saved as a small set of editing instructions stored in the image's metadata, along with captions and camera information. But one drawback of the nondestructive approach is that it limits the variety of plug-ins Lightroom can accommodate.

But Adobe is gradually expanding the software's abilities. With Lightroom version 1, one of the few ways to expand the software's abilities was with an export interface--an interface Friedl used to build a Lightroom plug-in for exporting photos directly to Flickr, Smugmug, and Picasa. With Lightrom 2, Adobe added a metadata interface that lets programmers add customized metadata to images. It's that ability that let Friedl build the geotagging plug-in.

But for now, though, Lightroom stores only the metadata in its catalog, not writing the changes to the actual image file or to an accompanying XMP "sidecar" that can house an image's metadata. (XMP, short for Extensible Metadata Platform, is an Adobe creation that sidesteps complications of storing metadata in proprietary raw image file formats.)

That limitation means Friedl's geotagging records only "shadow" GPS coordinates. That's still useful, though, since Lightroom users can set the software to embed the real metadata when exporting images as JPEG or uploading them to a Web site, for example, but it's not as good as writing it into the file.

But Adobe expects eventually to enable that ability, Hogarty said in an interview.

"Storing custom metadata in the Lightroom catalog is only the first step, and the ultimate goal is to embed the custom metadata in the XMP metadata block," Hogarty said.

It's not going to happen at a breakneck pace, though. "I can't speak to specific timeframes for when that functionality would be part of the Lightroom API (application programming interface), but I will say that any metadata implementation requires a great deal of consideration and testing," Hogarty said.

Update 9:03 a.m. PST Nov. 9: A newer version of Friedl's plug-in now can write the metadata into files so it's not just carried as shadow GPS data, Friedl said in an e-mail.

"It's still more kludgey than it needs to be, but now at least it's possible to upgrade the shadow data to 'real' GPS data," Friedl said. For raw images, the plug-in writes the metadata to an accompanying XMP sidecar, he said. The updated plug-in uses the ExifTool open-source software package to handle the writing.

"Lightroom still doesn't know about that data, so...you have to do a sync," he added, meaning that a photographer must command Lightroom to read in the geographic metadata. "It's pretty silly that one has to go through these gyrations, but that's how it is. I hope 3.0 will be better."

The plug-in also includes some support for reverse geocoding, which converts latitude-longitude coordinates into the actual names of cities and countries. It uses a new Google interface for the service. Reverse geocoding in general can make it easier for people to search for photos based on their location.

Apple's photography software now can accommodate raw images from some newer digital cameras through the release of Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.3.

Specifically, the update to iPhoto '08 and Aperture 2 means that the photography software can deal with raw images from three prominent new digital SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras: Canon's midrange EOS 50D, Nikon's video-enabled midrange D90, and Sony's ambitious 24-megapixel full-frame Alpha DSLR-A900.

Also supported is Nikon's high-end compact camera, the Coolpix P6000.

Raw images are taken directly from higher-end cameras with no in-camera processing into a JPEG. That means photographers get more flexibility when it comes to exposure, white balance, sharpening, and other options, but also that photos require manual processing.

For software companies, supporting raw formats requires either that they have to figure out a host of proprietary raw formats, because each camera model has its own, or rely on the manufacturers themselves to support release codecs supporting the cameras. Adobe Systems and Apple take the former route; Microsoft takes the latter.

To check if your camera is supported, see Apple's list of raw-format camera support. Adobe's raw-support list is a little longer, including support for Pentax's newest entry-level model, the K2000, the esoteric Fujifilm FinePix IS Pro, and Olympus' latest ultrazoom, the SP-565 UZ.

With Adobe Systems' release of version 2 of its Photoshop Lightroom on Monday night, the company no doubt hopes customers will be drawn by a number of new features in the software for sorting, cataloging, and editing photos.

But the company believes an external factor will also help the software: the booming sales of high-end SLR cameras. These high-end models are helping usher in many of digital photography's biggest changes, and Adobe is trying to intercept the trend with Lightroom.

From 2007 to 2008, digital SLR shipments increased a dramatic 41 percent to 7.5 million units, according to market researcher IDC. And though plenty of those cameras went to gadget-happy doctors or to snapshooters who won't exploit the cameras' full features, plenty of others went to the photography enthusiasts at whom Lightroom is aimed.

Lightroom 2.0 is geared for editing flexible but complicated 'raw' images taken directly from higher-end cameras' image sensors. (Click image to enlarge.)

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

"Prices are coming down, so more people with entry-level SLRs are experimenting," said Tom Hogarty, the Adobe senior product manager in charge of Lightroom. "If you pick up the camera for the sake of creating an artistic thing and not just recording a family event, you've really taken the plunge into serious photography. Anyone at that level is an ideal Lightroom customer."

One significant feature common to SLRs is the ability to shoot "raw" photos--the images taken directly from the image sensors without the camera baking in its own assumptions about what's right. ... Read more

Tiffen's color-filter plug-in for Aperture in action.

(Credit: Apple)

Apple on Monday released its software developer kit to let programmers write plug-ins for Aperture, the company's high-end image editing and cataloging software.

OK, I recognize it's not the world-changing, paradigm-shifting, heart-stopping iPhone SDK, but it's still important for the "creative professional" market to which Apple has catered for years.

This tool is designed to let others extend the abilities of Aperture, a move that adds some spice to its competition with Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom. Adobe has scads of third-party companies that create plug-ins for regular Photoshop, but Lightroom still lacks the equivalent for important editing functions. However, many have extended Lightroom's abilities with export functions, image-processing presets, and even a geotagging tool.

Among those creating plug-ins for Aperture are Tiffen, Digital Film Tools, Nik Software, Image Trends, and PictureCode, Apple said.

Programmers can download the SDK from the Apple Developer Connection Web site. Some plug-ins are available for download. Find more information at the Aperture Plugged-In Community site.

Update 6:40 AM PDT: I added some links to Adobe information and further detailed some new features.

The most interesting new capability in the Lightroom 2 beta is localized corrections. This image from an Adobe demonstration shows the control for a brush that can adjust saturation, brightness, exposure, and clarity of the area of the photo you 'paint.'

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

When Adobe Systems launched Photoshop Lightroom, it presented users with an all-or-nothing photo editing philosophy. But with version 2, which goes into public beta testing Wednesday, the company is changing course.

Lightroom 2 offers local editing abilities that permit photographers to edit just a patch of an image--whitening a person's teeth, deepening the blue of a sky, illuminating a child in a tree's shadow. Changes are "painted" on with a variably sized circular brush.

Local editing doesn't open the door to the super-detailed pixel-level tweaking of regular Photoshop, but it's a major step in that direction. It's also a timely answer to version 2.1 of Apple's Aperture, released last week with a plug-in architecture permitting local editing such as dodging and burning to brighten or darken parts of an image.

Regular Photoshop certainly won't be consigned to oblivion. Even within the relatively limited task of editing photos, Photoshop offers a wealth of tools, plug-ins, and options that are beyond Lightroom's scope. But local editing could help free Lightroom fans from the awkward round trips taking photos to Photoshop and back.

The new feature doesn't depart from Lightroom's nondestructive editing approach: the changes are recorded as metadata that leaves the underlying digital file unaltered. Reconciling local editing with nondestructive editing was one reason the feature has taken so long to appear, Adobe has said.

Lightroom is designed chiefly to handle "raw" photo formats that come unprocessed from camera image sensors. Raw images offer more flexibility and quality, but they're proprietary and often tricky to handle, and raw images generally must be converted to more universal formats such as TIFF or JPEG for further handling.

Further details from Adobe are available from Photoshop product manager John Nack, Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty, and the Lightroom 2 beta release notes (in PDF form). The software itself can be downloaded from Adobe Labs.

Other features
Local editing is among several new features and some tweaks to the Lightroom interface. Among the other changes:

• Smart Collections, which enables the software to automatically group photos based on various attributes such as a particular keyword. I like this: I get sick of adding new photos to various ever-expanding thematic collections.

• A built-in panel for better searching with multiple parameters such as time, keywords, camera lens, and photo location. Specific search interfaces can be saved.

• The ability to apply sharpening during the export process, which is useful especially given that sharpening an image often depends on where it's going to be used (printed images generally require more than those published online, for example), so sharpening settings might not be something you want saved along with the master file.

• The ability to export a selection of images directly to Photoshop CS3's tools for merging multiple photos into a single high dynamic range or panoramic image. The composite image arrives handily in Lightroom's catalog.

• Dual-monitor support, which Aperture already has. You can open up a second window that can be devoted to various tasks such as showing close-ups as you move the mouse pointer over various thumbnails in the main catalog.

• A 64-bit version that lets the software take advantage of more than 4GB of memory on Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista.

•  The ability to edit photos 30,000 pixels on edge instead of just 10,000--very handy when dealing with panoramas.

• A "print package" feature for printing custom layouts with the same photo in multiple sizes.

• The ability to add the corner-darkening vignetting effect to cropped images, not just to the full-sized uncropped version.

What's missing? Doubtless there will be developments with the plug-in architecture and accompanying software development kit (SDK) that could let others write plug-ins. Photoshop has a rich selection of plug-ins, but it's tougher with Lightroom in part because of the nondestructive editing aspects.

Adobe said a "primary focus" for Lightroom is an SDK for "workflow"--translate that to tasks for import, export, perhaps file management, but not editing. However, Apple figured a way to produce a plug-in architecture that includes editing abilities, so I wouldn't rule it out as impossible. Notable Apple partners include companies such as Nik Software's Viveza technology for adjusting colors and PictureCode's Noise Ninja for noise reduction, both available as plug-ins for Photoshop.

Local editing details
Adobe's tool lets you "paint" the edits onto a section, with feathered edges to soften transitions and an auto-masking option to limit changes just to a particular color range.

Each change can be selected later and modified. I'm not clear yet on the extent to which painting over the same patch multiple times intensifies the effect, but I'm guessing you'd have to fire up a new brush and make another pass.

Lots of people crabbed about the lack of local editing--I've publicly pined for a local tool to simulate split neutral-density filters, a promised feature. But it might actually be a good thing that local editing is only arriving in version 2. That's because photographers got to try out a new set of Lightroom 1 tools that often could accomplish the same goals with a whole-image editing approach.

For example, I find that brightening dark tones with Lightroom's fill tool often yields an image that looks more natural than what results from spot-editing approaches such as dodging and burning. And I like the "targeted adjustment tool" that lets me click on a particular color range to change saturation or luminance. The change is across the whole photo, but often that's just fine.

Whole-image editing problems crop up, though. Say you want to give a shot that uber-vivid blue sky and green grass that you see in the surreal world of prescription-drug ads--but not throw the colors of other blue and green out of whack. For this kind of thing, local adjustments are just the ticket.

In fairness, Lightroom did have some local-edit abilities, such as one tool to touch up dust specs or skin blemishes and another for fixing flash-induced red eye. I like the first, but find the red-eye tool finicky and often ineffectual. (Update 10:20 a.m. PT April 8: I removed a reference to Aperture that incorrectly described its touch-up abilities.)

Free beta, with a catch
With the beta, Adobe is continuing what it began with 1.0, a much more open development process than the company has used historically. Not only is the approach in vogue, it helps diminish Apple's competitive threat, recruit new users, and shape software that's in flux.

I'm sure Adobe hopes the beta process will help eliminate the fiasco of its most recent Lightroom update, too. The company released the Lightroom 1.4 update in March only to pull it when discovering serious bugs. The company told users to reinstall the older version; it still plans to release a 1.4.1 update after further testing, a release that's separate from the 2.0 beta.

Adobe wouldn't say when the final version of Lightroom 2 will be available, though this particular beta version will expire August 31. If the 1.0 beta series is anything to go by, a second beta will be available by then.

The beta is free to anyone, but perversely it expires after 30 days for those who aren't Lightroom 1 users or who haven't been invited by a version 1 customer. Maybe Adobe is trying to generate some viral-marketing buzz that invitation programs sometimes help new Web sites benefit from, but I'm not sure how much cachet an invite will have with the free 30-day version.

CNET senior editor Lori Grunin contributed to this report.

• Megapixel race inanity continues: Sony's 13.6-megapixel W300 - Sigh. Good thing it comes with adjustable nose reduction, because I bet noise is a problem. "Sony bumps up its point-and-shoot cameras to a new height of resolution with the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W300, the company's first 13.6-megapixel snapshot camera."
• Panasonic UK Offers 16GB Memory Card Free With L10 Purchase - Digital Camera Info - "Panasonic UK has announced customers purchasing its L10 DSLR through the end of April will receive a free 16GB SDHC memory card."
• Lens Test: Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF-S - PopPhotoFebruary 2008 - "This pro-level, superfast, full-frame Nikon zoom for the D3 is practically in a class by itself."
• To DNG, or not to DNG ... - Inside Lightroom - Some discussion and tips on using DNG and Adobe's DNG conversion software. "Not only is this a great format for archiving, its perfectly suited for your workflow within in Adobe Bridge, Photoshop, and Lightroom."
• Lens Test: Olympus Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4 SWD AF - PopPhotoJanuary 2008 - "Overall, this is among the sharpest and least distorting wide-angle zooms in recent memory."
• Apple's list of SLRs compatible with Aperture 2 tethering - Rob Galbraith - Links to Apple resources for tethered shooting using Aperture 2.0. "Notably absent are the latest Canon models, including the EOS-1D Mark III, EOS-1Ds Mark III and EOS 40D, among others."
• Adobe AIR on Linux: Pre-Beta Testers Needed - James Ward - "As of today there have only been releases of Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac but Adobe is committed to also delivering a version for Linux." Interested testers may apply by email at helptesterairlinux at adobe dot com.
• OpenSolaris governance board gloom - Glynn Foster - "OGB made some good positive progress in some areas, it also feels like we lost the ability to talk with our community and proactively work on a plan for growth and prosperity for our community. It would be so, so easy to walk away after a year."
• The Pulse of Open Source - "This is the stream of collective consciousness from the open source community on Twitter." The 451 Group analyst Raven Zachary has set up a feed from various open-sourcers.
• Sun Microsystems to Provide Update on MySQL Acquisition - "Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) will host a conference call on Tuesday, February 26 to provide an update on the acquisition of MySQL. The definitive agreement to acquire MySQL was announced on January 16."
• terrific photo gallery: 34 views of total lunar eclipse 2008 - Some great shots taken all over the world of the Eclipse of February 20, 2008.
• Imagekind | Buy and Sell Art Online - Checking this out: "Imagekind is about three things: * Creating art from digital files; * Providing an online marketplace for selling art without any actual inventory; * Providing the world's largest online venue for shopping for unique fine art prints."
• Matusow's Blog : Microsoft Takes Next Step In Delivering Interoperability - Jason Matusow on Microsoft open-source interoperability announcement.
• Fairies should come out of the sky...a hilarious talkback post from a News.com cynic - "fairies should come out of the sky and make discs out of magical dust which is bonded together by love and happiness..." This in reference to a call for open-standard work with Blu-ray and other technology.
• World's tallest man saves dolphin - BBC - "The world's tallest man has saved two dolphins by using his long arms to reach into their stomachs and pull out dangerous plastic shards."

I was in a pinch a few weeks ago, and Google's Picasa software saved my skin. But now my warm glow of gratitude has begun wearing off, replaced by a simmering annoyance with camera makers for their profusion of proprietary raw formats.

Let me explain. I was covering the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas, toting my Canon EOS Rebel XT camera to photograph products and people. For my personal photography I usually shoot in raw format to maximize the detail and flexibility, but for work purposes I use JPEG because it's faster to process and CNET News.com graphics are too small to require top resolution.

This screenshot shows a raw image from an Olympus E-3 SLR in Google's Picasa software. At right is the low-resolution JPEG preview, at left the garbled view after an incorrect decoding Google's support for the E-3 is on the way.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

But I had a brief moment of panic when I discovered, on a tight deadline, that I'd photographed a Sony full-frame SLR press conference and accompanying photo gallery in raw only. I wasn't happy, because I hadn't installed any software for processing raw images on my laptop. I briefly considered downloading a trial version of Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, which I use at home, but dreaded the time it would take to get myself to a network connection and install the software.

Then I remembered that Picasa supports some raw formats. Sure enough, it did the trick--after I made my usual end run around Canon, which annoyingly doesn't include a mass storage driver on its cameras, requiring me to retrieve raw files using a separate flash card reader.

Picasa lacked some editing tools I like in Lightroom (and now Apple's Aperture 2.0, too), but I wasn't about to complain.

Until Wednesday.

That's when I received an Olympus E-3 that I'll be testing on an upcoming vacation. The camera has been out since November, but Picasa still doesn't support its raw images.

Raw-support challenges
Picasa showed the low-resolution JPEG preview fine, but as soon as I clicked on the thumbnail, the photo became a speckly mess of pixel gibberish.

For its part, Google said Thursday that E-3 raw support is coming. "We're in the process of testing it and plan to support it soon," the company said in a statement. Picasa uses Dave Coffin's freely available dcraw software, which supports the E-3, but Google said it makes its own modifications "to make it run faster."

It's no surprise Google employs outside software for the complicated task. Olympus told me it leaves programmers on their own to reverse-engineer raw formats: "When asked, we will provide sample raw files to companies, but it is up to them to figure out what to do with them. Our raw format is not difficult, and anyone with any experience with graphic file formats will figure it out in a matter of seconds."

For photographers, there are unpleasant consequences of camera makers' opacity and non-standardization. Programmers from Adobe Systems, Apple, and other companies must toil constantly to support new cameras, and camera makers must develop and support their own software. And the obstreperous nature of raw can curtail the innovation of other programmers, too.

For example, software that can embed location data known as geotags in raw files is much rarer than software that supports JPEGs. Adding metadata such as titles, captions, ratings, and tags is another risky operation; Microsoft Vista can do this, but relies on camera makers to supply software to support their various raw formats.

A programmer's plight
Sachin Garg, a programmer in India, is another example. He's been working on software that can compress raw files more efficiently--about 20 percent to 60 percent more than those already compressed by the camera.

Programmer Sachin Garg

(Credit: Sachin Garg)

That's work that conceivably could be useful for those of us with vast archives of raw images, but Garg said the difficulties of working with raw files makes it tough.

"I have started with Nikon's NEF (raw format), and it's a mess. What makes it worse is that even for this single format, there are variations based on each camera, and camera's firmware version," Garg said. "I have managed to read and compress the file, but re-creating the original file again is giving me nightmares."

And that's just one popular format. There are also cameras from Canon, Olympus, Fujifilm, Pentax, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Hasselblad, and others to contend with.

"It's a much different ball game to write an algorithm (than just) trying to put it in a practically usable application," Garg said. He understands the camera makers' situation, though. "Looking at each format, one can see the technical reasons why different camera makers are doing things differently and that adopting a common standard can possibly limit the innovations they introduce in newer cameras."

One possible alternative to the raw plight could be HD Photo, which Microsoft is trying to standardize as JPEG XR, a higher-end alternative to conventional JPEG. My guess is that this file format stands a reasonable chance of catching on--especially given the warm response from Adobe and more recently Canon--but even then it's more likely only to intercept photographers just moving beyond JPEG rather than replacing raw.

That's because HD Photo/JPEG XR requires the camera to process the image for de-mosaicking, noise reduction, sharpening, and white balance, all of which are "baked" into the image. For the folks who want total flexibility, they'll stick with raw.

DNG to the rescue?
A more likely alternative is Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) format, a raw format whose specifications are openly shared if not a neutral industry standard. Adobe explicitly created DNG to deal with the raw format "tower of Babel."

But larger camera makers have been reluctant to embrace DNG. It's hard to get firm answers on exactly why not; I'd imagine a variety of factors are involved, ranging from not wanting to be reliant on Adobe or a fixed format to inadequacies of DNG to fully represent raw images. And Pentax, whose SLRs support both DNG and its own PEF raw format, told me that most customers shooting raw use PEF, so users apparently need more convincing, too.

Maybe Adobe just needs to do a little more marketing, standardize DNG, or come up with an improved version 2.0. But for now, the raw format mess shows no signs of being tidied up.

The good news is that there's some competition again for software to edit and catalog raw images, the detailed and flexible file formats from higher-end cameras. The bad news is that anybody buying the software has a harder choice to make.

With the new Aperture now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?

Please vote in the poll here, and share your reasoning in the Talkback section below to enlighten others.

Photographers would be best to think carefully about which software to purchase, and not just because of the necessary investments of time and money. Unlike applications such as Photoshop, which can easily be substituted or used in conjunction with other software, Lightroom and Aperture are equipped to extend their tentacles to manage your library of images.

In essence, that means the software can be a gatekeeper to your data--not the original images, but the editing settings, titles, captions, tags, and organizational structure. For me, having a rich, searchable catalog is definitely worth it, but tread carefully before you commit, because it'll be difficult to extricate yourself.

Apple was first to enter the higher-end photo software market with Aperture in 2005, but the software languished at the same time Adobe Systems released and rapidly updated Photoshop Lightroom over 2007. But now Apple is back in the game with Aperture 2.0, which reproduces some features in Lightroom, boosts performance, and has a price tag $100 less than Lightroom's $300.

Pros and cons
Both packages are solid overall, but there are some features I preferred with one or the other. Here's how I see things stacking up--be warned, though, that I've used Lightroom for countless hours but by comparison only dabbled with Aperture 2.0.

Let's start with the interface. I like Lightroom's pull-out panels--as many as four--that can be deployed or tucked away as needed. Most of the time I only have zero, one, or two showing.

But I think Aperture makes smart design decisions with a few interface options. Its movable panel isn't very obtrusive, and now in 2.0 you can toggle it easily between editing, tagging, and file management modes. For me, editing and adding metadata such as titles, captions, and tags are much closer operations than the big divide between Lightroom's develop and library modules would suggest, and I don't like switching back and forth between editing and tagging.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Speaking of metadata, though, one option I like better with Lightroom is the ability to assign five colors to photos (but where's the keyboard shortcut for purple?). The one- to five-star ratings that both packages offer is dandy, but I use colors to classify photos in other ways.

It looks to me like Aperture has a better search interface, especially for complicated operations that combine multiple parameters such as keywords, date ranges, and the handy photos-I-actually-edited filter. I've sometimes gotten bogged down swimming through Lightroom search. And I love the smart folders feature, which automatically updates a folder that's been set to watch for a particular attribute. For example, with Lightroom, I would love for the software to automatically add a photo with a specific recurring tag to a particular collection.

On to editing. For sophistication, I'd give the edge to Adobe, though to be fair I haven't looked in detail at important aspects of Aperture, namely noise reduction and edge sharpening. I sometimes find those wanting in Lightroom.

I like Lightroom's targeted adjustment tool (TAT), which lets you adjust the tone curve as well as color saturation and luminance by clicking on the relevant portion of the image directly and dragging the mouse up and down. And Adobe was smart to actually employ user testing to determine which colors are individually adjustable--orange has more psychological importance than most software, including Aperture, gives it. And I'm a big fan of tone-curve adjustments, though I sometimes wish Lightroom divided the curve up into five or six subranges instead of four.

One unknown is the plug-in future of both applications. Right now Lightroom has a software development kit for export options, and there's work of unknown scope to come. Apple said it's future SDK will permit editing plug-ins, too, which Adobe says is a difficult challenge. On the other hand, Adobe's already got some editing plug-ins of a sort, with the ability to import custom settings for all manner of adjustment options.

Apple's Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

(Credit: Apple)

One major edge Lightroom has had is much earlier support of the raw image files of new cameras. Apple said it was held back by an overhaul of its raw-processing engine and that things should now go more swiftly, but it'll take real work to win back the hearts of disgruntled Nikon D300 owners. In the meantime, Apple now can make use of Adobe Systems' Digital Negative (DNG) format as an intermediate step to handle raw files Adobe supports and Apple doesn't.

Something Aperture does better is vignetting, the darkened corners that once were a lens deficiency but now have caught on (altogether too widely in my opinion) as an effect to focus attention on the center of an image. Lightroom can fix lens vignetting or add it to a full image, but if you want to apply the effect to a cropped version of the photo, only Aperture offers that mechanism.

Correcting lens problems is a real issue, though, and Lightroom has a chromatic aberration correction I find very useful. It lets you fix some of the magenta, red, yellow, and blue fringes that show up in high-contrast areas, especially near the corners of images, and it also can alleviate the purple fringing overall. Aperture lacks this.

Performance is better with Aperture 2.0 (it was faster on the dual-core iMac I played with than Aperture 1.5 was on a quad-core Mac Pro I used for Aperture 1.5), and a particularly nice feature is the ability to work in a preview mode that employs only JPEGs--either the images built into the raw image or an Aperture-rendered version. You can't edit with it, but it's good enough at least for the first pass through a photo shoot to delete the duds and add tags and titles.

Looking beyond editing, my expertise thins out because I don't do much in the way of exporting photos to Web galleries or printing at home. But I will note one Aperture advantage: Apple expanded its book-export options with 2.0, and Lightroom has no answer so far. That's a drag for wedding photographers and amateurs (like me) who want to whip up a quick birthday present for the grandparents.

Of course, one of the biggest advantages Lightroom has is a Windows version, and that alone is likely to ensure its market dominance over Apple. And where Apple has a lot going on with iPods and iPhones, image editing is Adobe's bread and butter. Should those externalities be factors, too? Weigh in.