With CS3.. do I need Aperture?

[Mike Guilbault]

Now that I've seen a little of CS3, I'm wondering if I need to pursue Aperture?  I haven't bought anything yet, and for once I'm kinda glad I've been sitting on the fence.  With the new improvements to Bridge and ACR, Aperture seems lesss appealing (mainly because of the poor performance reports).  Maybe Bridge/ACR and something like iView is the answer to a DAM RAW workflow?  Any comments?

[danaltick]

Mike,

To my knowledge, that is the only combination that meets all the DAM requirements spelled out in Peter's book.  Of course with new Raw editors and new catalog managers and upgrades popping up all the time, that may not be the case much longer.  Also, there may be certain features that you need that iView doesn't have.  So it's not a bad idea to at least familiarize yourself with the other catalog managers as well as the other Raw editors before making your decision.

Peter, feel free to follow up/correct if necessary.

Dan

[peterkrogh]

Mike,
Well, you probably can guess how I feel.
I think CS3 (particularly ACR4) moves the ball forward in a big way, and, when integrated with an iView workflow, provides a robust, open-architecture solution to photographic collection management.

I would still caution against Aperture, at least until Apple announces some kind of open architecture solution to wrap RAW data, Metadata, and renderings up in a way that makes them durable across platforms and applications. (Support for DNG export would do the trick).

On PC, I think CS2/3 and idImager is also a good solution.

Peter

[jwint04]

Peter, I attended Macworld today and nobody in the very large large Microsoft booth knew anything about iView Media Pro other than the fact that they had purchased the Company.  Quite discouraging.
Jeff

[Mike Guilbault]

Well since I first posted this question, I've been working more and more with Lightroom.  I much prefer the RAW processing in LR over Aperture.  About the only thing I really like in Aperture is the stacks (which are in CS3), Versions and Compare mode (being able to zoom in on both images).  I'm sure you've noticed in other posts my bent on LR for DAM - hoping that it will be all I need, and I'm confident with v1. it will be.  I think LR, with Bridge (along with ACR which I'm hoping I won't really need with LR v1) and of course PhotoShop, that'll be it.

The Microsoft purchase of iView has me concerned... and as usual, Peter is right to be skeptical about ANY committment to ANY DAM solution.  I guess my thinking is that if Adobe can make PhotoShop into what it is today, they should be able to do something similar with Lightroom.  Anyway... as you can guess... I'm leaning towards LR at the moment.  I guess we'll see if I can hold off until the final release or if something else steals me away in the meantime.

[peterkrogh]

Jeff,
iView is still being run by the London-based team until Expression is released.  Not terribly surprising that the MS people are not prepared to discuss it yet.

Mike,
I would *not* expect that LR v.1 will be all you need for image management (for the pro). Support for multiple computer workflow will not be good, and other file management tools are just not going to be very robust in the first version.

Peter

[Mike Guilbault]

I'm only on a single computer so that part, for now, is fine.  As far as other management tools go, what else do I need besides being able to locate the image I'm looking for?  With the MetaData that's present, and keywords, I would think that is enough.  Now I must say that I've never used an image database before, but I have used databases and have even programmed a few myself.  But if I want to find an image, or images, in my library, I select by keywords, narrow down with star ratings, and then be able to gather these images into some sort of 'collection', what else do I need?  What am I missing?

[peterkrogh]

Mike,
When you rely on a database, you eed a bunch of back-end functionality that is different from browsing software.  File validation, ability to re-connect with the original media, transfer/rename/delete, etc. 

Peter

[Mike Guilbault]

Ok... so are you saying that Lightroom can't do this?  I've just been learning the RAW workflow end of things for now on it, so I really don't know.   

How does iView, for example, handle these differently than LR?  I guess it's this 'back-end' stuff that I'm confused about.

[peterkrogh]

iView has many more tools that LR does for this stuff.  I can't give exact comparisons until LR gets released, but it's definitely not as robust.

Additionally, there are bound to be a number of bugs in the v1 version of LR.

That's about all I can say at the moment.
Peter

[Mike Guilbault]

Fair enough.  Thanks Peter.