From Aperture 3 to Lightroom 3

[mgreernz]

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I work with an M9, M7, MP (and am passionately attached to a IIIf which still gets a frequent workout).

 

After scratching my head for months about this decision, I'm finally taking the plunge and transitioning my library from Aperture to Lightroom. I want to do it only once, so I want to do it right.

 

I've spent some time getting my head around Lightroom workflow and I've greatly appreciated being able to work my way through a set of 15 tutorials by George Jardine Adobe Lightroom 3 Video Workshop: 15 Tutorials on the Lightroom Library Workflow and Digital Photo Library Management I can highly recommend them.

 

Now I'm about to start the hard yards of moving the Library - which is, whatever way you look at it, rather daunting. My root photo library is in good order i.e. as orderly as it needs to be for import into Lightroom. But to preserve the post-camera editing that's already been done in Aperture (either using the Aperture tools or using Photoshop or Nik), I need to export/import versions of those edited files.

 

So I'd like to check my intended workflow out with some of you who may have been this way before. I intend to:

(1) Do a search in each Aperture album using "Adjustments are applied" as the search criteria.

(2) Export to a new folder (relevant to that album) on the desktop, 8 or 16 bit TIFF versions of those files (suitably prefaced as Ap Edits).

(3) Create the new Cataloge in Lightroom and import into the new library the original masters from my photos folder.

(4) Import (and it will probably be time-consumming) into each new Lightroom subset, the relevant Aperture/Nik/PS edited files (all of which are now identifiable as edits).

 

Am I missing anything?

Any glaring mistakes?

Any words of wisdom?

Do you think the decision to use 16 bit TIFF rather than 8 bit, is a bit over the top (because it makes a substantial difference to file size and storage space)?

 

Thanks for your help.

[esquire53]

After scratching my head for months about this decision, I'm finally taking the plunge and transitioning my library from Aperture to Lightroom. I want to do it only once, so I want to do it right.

 

I've spent some time getting my head around Lightroom workflow and I've greatly appreciated being able to work my way through a set of 15 tutorials by George Jardine Adobe Lightroom 3 Video Workshop: 15 Tutorials on the Lightroom Library Workflow and Digital Photo Library Management I can highly recommend them.

 

Thanks for posting this...

I'm currently going through the same process (M6 mainly slides, with Nikkon slide scans in tif and jpeg and now M9 dng) and I did a few tests with tiff export of the M9 in 16 bit or 8 bit in Aperture and after import to LR3, you can export them in LR3 as .dng, so a 100+Mb file size becomes 70Mb for dng and in case of a converted color to b&w, the file size become 45Mb for the b&w dng. However, I could not import the new created dng into Aperture for a cross check. I used the export <Camera RAW 5.4 and later> all metadata were preserved in LR dng. That's good.

 

I'm not jet clear what to do with my old scans in particular. I think they are fine with tiff in 8 bit. I really prefer the dual screen in LR and a few features in Aperture are nice as well. Also the NIK Aperture plug in's need some re thinking

 

Cheers

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