Adobe announced a public beta of Lightroom 5 today so I decided to take it for a spin. As an Aperture user who once used Lightroom (1.0), there’s one thing that really struck me: Lightroom wastes a lot of screen space! This is no trivial beef as it translates into real-world inefficiencies. With everything a little bigger and a little less efficiently laid out, performing the same tasks requires additional clicks and scrolls. When you’re working on hundreds and thousands of images, that adds up! Here’s what I mean:
the Viewer
I’m a big advocate of a content-first approach. I don’t use a photo management suite to admire the interface. Images are the priority. Aperture simply dedicates more space to the photos. To compare and contrast, I opened up an image in both applications to see how they compared. Both were set to “default” views.
Lightroom 5: 1366 x 720 (983,520 pixels)
Aperture 3: 1588 x 859 (1,364,092 pixels)
In short, Aperture provides 39% more screen space for displaying the images. Of its available space, Lightroom takes advantage of even less. Adobe enthusiasts may downplay the importance of this, but as one from the “other side,” believe me when I say that it’s frustrating.
- Lightroom 5
- Aperture 3
the Menus
Another shortcoming of Lightroom’s interface is the layout and design of its menus. In comparison to Aperture, everything takes up more space. As a result you have to scroll, scroll, scroll in order to get at the tools and folders you need. In fact, everything is so large and bulky that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was designed for a touch interface. Lightroom features some exceptional editing tools, but it makes you work for them. And for organizing and managing large libraries of images, I’d much rather use Aperture; that aspect seems like an afterthought for Adobe.
The library navigation pane is just one example of the difference between the two applications. On my monitor (1920 x 1080) the default Aperture layout gives me access to 35 “folders” whereas the inefficient Lightroom navigation panel only provides immediate visibility to 13! Granted, there are ways to customize both applications and there’s always the option to use keyboard shortcuts (which I do), but Lightroom has a lot of catching up to do.
- Lightroom 5
- Aperture 3
Conclusion
I don’t hate Lightroom. The quality of its image editing tools are above reproach. But after my experiences today (and in the past), I find it unfortunate that Adobe hasn’t improved the application interface as much as it has the feature set.
Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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