sf1 wrote in post #13955350
I went home and decide to try LR3 out. Still hate the layout and workflow, but it produces much better skin tones than Aperture. Both photos below adjusted with the same grey card shot (temp at 5450), then minor adjustments for exposure. Aperture picture has some skin softening added (very little) and the LR photo has the clarity decreased. No matter what I do in Aperture, I cannot reproduce the file that LR is giving me.
I've used both programs for years, so I don't even need to see your examples to know that they render images differently. Aperture favors green & yellow while Lightroom favors brown & red. While I recognize that there are noticeable differences, I have never seen anything so drastic on unedited raw files. If you are working with JPG images, then Lightroom will apply the effects of your camera profile and Aperture will not.
Here's an example of the differences I see in images. The same image was imported into Aperture 3 and Lightroom 4 beta. No adjustments were applied. I exported to my desktop as a 16 bit TIFF, opened them in Photoshop, then saved to JPG. This image is split right down the forehead and nose with LR4 on the left and A3 on the right. You can click it for a 3168 pixel version.
IMAGE LINK: http://www.msbphoto.com/img/s3/v38/p269966556.jpg Which converter looks better depends on the specific image, but they can both be made to look nearly identical. You can't rely on the numbers for this though, because 5450 white balance is not going to look the same in Aperture as in Lightroom. It's also hard to compare saturation and other adjustments since Lightroom uses whole numbers on a 1-100 scale for their adjustments and Aperture uses two decimal places from 0.00-1.00 for their adjustments.
My best tip for you is to get the white balance just about where you want it in Aperture, then use the green & red curves and/or levels along with the gray and/or white tint wheels to get the skin tone exactly where you want it. You can also go to the color brick and lower the saturation and/or luminosity in the yellow section.
I do agree with you though - once you get used to the very sensible workflow in Aperture, it can be very difficult to go back to Lightroom's narrow minded way of doing things.
If you want to put your RAW file somewhere that I can download it, I will give it a run through Aperture and see if I can manage to get similar colors to your Lightroom edit.
!
