According to John Nack at Adobe, Infotrends recently surveyed 1,026 professional photographers in North America and found that more than four times more photographers use Lightroom to process RAW images than Aperture. Even on the Mac, Lightroom users outnumbered Aperture users by a factor of almost 2:1.
Why is Lightroom so much more popular than Aperture? I don’t know for sure, but I see four reasons:
- Many photographers already use Photoshop. Photographers might have given the initial nod to Lightroom simply due to familiarity with Photoshop and the Adobe brand.
- At its heart, Apple is a hardware company. While it has had a pretty good track record with its pro applications, Apple might be perceived as more likely to abandon them than Adobe, given that Adobe is purely a software company. Of course, Apple has deeper pockets than Adobe, but software is playing a second fiddle there. Maybe even a third fiddle these days given the success of the iPhone.
- Adobe is the custodian of many de-facto public domain photo formats, including TIFF and DNG. There is simply trust in Adobe to keep continuing this role and thus keep continuing to be focused laser-sharp on the photography market.
- Adobe has many existing relationships with camera manufacturers, thus they are able to provide support for new camera models very quickly. Of course, a number of the camera manufacturers are afraid of Adobe’s market power, but then, so are they of Apple’s, let alone Apple’s track record of not really caring that much about its ecosystem.
Personally, I’m not a professional photographer, but there were two more reasons why I ended up in the Lightroom camp: I got my Lightroom 1.0 license for free as part of Adobe’s acquisition of Pixmantec, the developer of Raw Shooter Pro, which I used before. Plus, I keep continuing to travel with a Windows laptop, thus I need Lightroom on both the PC and the Mac. And that rules out Aperture.
Why do you use Lightroom or Aperture?
Keeping with the theme of the Good Enough Revolution (see Joe’s article about the future of imaging and mine about Canon gets it, Nikon only half-way as well as Steve Jobs, the Master of the Good Enough Revolution), here are my thoughs about a camera that I would consider good enough:
- Size of the Olympus E-P1 or similar compact point and shoots, such as the Canon G11
- 9-12 MP APS-C or micro-4/3 sensor
- in-body image stabilization
- inter-changeable lenses
- RAW + JPG
- 8+ fps JPG, 5 fps RAW
- 720p video
- full manual control
- ISO 1600 or better
- Flash hotshoe
- Option to connect an external microphone for video
That’s it. In the spirit of good enough that would do it for me.
Both Joe and I have written (and will continue to write) about the Good Enough Revolution. In Joe’s case, it was about the future of imaging, in mine about Steve Jobs being its (intentional?) master.
But the good enough revolution does not stop with consumer products – in fact, you can see it right when examining professional camera gear. Case in point: Canon.
With the advent of the Canon 7D, Canon now has two complete lines of professional gear: Top-of-the-line professional gear (1D for Action Shooters, 1Ds for Landscape/Full-Frame/Wedding shooters, f2.8 zoom lenses covering the entire range from 16 to 200 mm) and the good-enough line (7D for Action, 5D for Landscape/FF/weddings, f4.0 zooms covering 17 to 200mm). In fact, the good enough pro gear provides them with extra revenue, since not only pro’s and discerning amateurs use that gear, but also pro’s often use good-enough gear as backups to their top-of-the-line equipment. Canon clearly gets it that they need to offer two complete sets of cameras and lenses to the customers that are most profitable to them.
Contrast this with Nikon – they are sitting pretty in the camera department, mainly with the D700 and the D300s as good-enough cameras. But their glaring hole is in their lens line-up (see also bythom’s lens overview). No dedicated f4 pro glass, only variable aperture lenses. As much as I applaud Nikon for their strong camera line-up, they seem to have neglected upgrading their lens line-up and fail to offer two lines of pro zooms.
And that’s the reason why I would not buy Nikon today, if I had a chance to start all over again.
OK, I say it outright and go on the record – the new Panasonic DMC-GF1 will fail!
Sure, it beats the Olympus E-P1 left and right in almost all the specs. But Panasonic made one design decision that is going to haunt them and ultimately cause the failure of the GF1: In-lens image stabilization (IS). This means that only Panasonic’s own, image-stabilized micro four-third lenses will provide IS for the GF1. Put on any four-third lens through an adaptor, even Panasonic’s own four-third IS lenses, and you will lose IS.
This is crazy! They should have followed Olympus’ example. The E-P1 has in-body IS, which means that any micro four-third lens or any other lens attached via an adaptor will not impact IS on the E-P1. Any lens, including Zeiss and Leica glass! It is a no-brainer what I would choose.
Even in the DSLR market, in-body IS will win in the long term. Sure, in-lens IS offers probably one additional stop of stabilization, which is important for professionals. Thus, Canon and Nikon, with their huge Pro base to serve, keep turning out in-lens IS (or VR – vibration reduction in Nikon-speak) and their users keep paying for it over and over again with every lens they purchase. But the rest of the market has already moved to in-body IS, since it makes ANY lens stabilized. Especially the smaller players, such as Olympus, Pentax and Sigma, which are facing tough times, have no choice but to offer in-body IS. They need third-party lens manufacturers such as Tokina, Sigma and Tamron to stay competitive, because they cannot afford developing enough lenses on their own. Once Nikon, the smaller of the two big players, starts to move to in-body IS, the game is over.
Frankly, if I had to re-buy my entire equipment today, I would have a very hard time justifying the extra hundreds of dollars Canon charges for every of their (otherwise great) IS lenses. I would be very much tempted to move over to Sony and use a combination of Sony and third-party lenses instead, especially if you buy any camera with an APS-C crop factor sensor.
For a travel camera like any micro four-third system, I simply do not want to lock myself into Panasonic through their in-lens IS camera. As always, the investment is in the glass, not the body. Going with the Olympus E-P1 will protect that investment even if I were to switch at a later time. As long as the new camera has in-body IS, I’m fine. Which is exactly, why I will not look at the Panasonic GF1, if and when I decide to get a micro four-third as a travel camera.
p.s.
Our apologies that the Weekend Musings appear on a week-day due to the long weekend we just had.
