HI,
For a long time now, I have been using Aperture to manage my photos. However, as they are mostly all shot in RAW, I am clearly at the mercies of Apple’s RAW camera updates. I had to wait a few weeks for my Canon to be supported last year, but my recent camera purchase looks like it has been passed over again with 10.5.7 (which I have yet to install). It’s a Leica D-Lux 4, and I guess there is an outside chance that the Leica M8.2 format may be what’s needed, but I am doubtful despite the shared pedigree. The D-Lux 4 has been around since last year. If Apple were going to support it, I expect that they would have by now.
So, I am thinking about moving to Adobe’s Lightroom, which does support this camera, and I will be wanting to move my Aperture library and (hopefully) the edits I have made. Naturally, I will be wanting to move the RAW files masters along with any subsidiary Photoshop Masters I have created along the way.
Is this something anyone else here has attempted? I ask on the off chance that there are people here who have made the move.
my recent camera purchase looks like it has been passed over again with 10.5.7 (which I have yet to install). It’s a Leica D-Lux 4, and I guess there is an outside chance that the Leica M8.2 format may be what’s needed, but I am doubtful despite the shared pedigree. The D-Lux 4 has been around since last year. If Apple were going to support it, I expect that they would have by now.
That is odd as it’s not like they don’t support the Leica’s at all. The page lists the D-Lux 2 and 3 going back to 10.5. I wonder why they haven’t, unless M8.2 is the same.
Naturally, I will be wanting to move the RAW files masters along
with any subsidiary Photoshop Masters I have created along the way.
You can move the RAW files, but you cannot move the edits. Those are
stored in proprietary ‘sidecar’ files that, despite being XML-based,
can’t be translated between different RAW processor tools.
I’ve been in discussions with a developer who’s wanted to do this for
a long time, and he says it simply isn’t worth even trying to
reverse-engineer Apple’s or Adobe’s RAW edit sidecar files.
The M8.2 is a different beast when it comes to the RAW format, it seems. So my camera is not supported in 10.5.7.
I have a trial of Lightroom sitting on my HD now. I’ll have to read the manual and get importing and see how things sit.
On 13 May 2009, 4:38 pm, Joe Muscara wrote:
On 13 May 2009, 8:31 am, Paul wrote:
my recent camera purchase looks like it has been passed over again with 10.5.7 (which I have yet to install). It’s a Leica D-Lux 4, and I guess there is an outside chance that the Leica M8.2 format may be what’s needed, but I am doubtful despite the shared pedigree. The D-Lux 4 has been around since last year. If Apple were going to support it, I expect that they would have by now.
That is odd as it’s not like they don’t support the Leica’s at all. The page lists the D-Lux 2 and 3 going back to 10.5. I wonder why they haven’t, unless M8.2 is the same.
I went through this same debate with the Canon PowerShot G9 a while back. In the end, I decided it was better to stick with Aperture and wait it out. The migration efforts easily eclipsed the pain of manually managing the RAWs.
Plus, when Apple finally got around to support the RAWs from the G9, I was glad I hadn’t gone through the trouble.
At the moment I’m sitting it out. Moving to Lightroom won’t preserve any edits, and there are a lot of files which would need redoing if I moved my library.
What I can do is use the RAW software that came with the camera to convert the files to DNG and import those. It’s the only way to get a file that Aperture will support. Adobe’s DNG app produces files which don’t work in Aperture either.
Doing a bit of reading around, there is a big difference with the DLux 4 RAW files and the DLUX 3 (which is supported). There is lens correction data in the which is probably an obstacle as it’s peculiar to Leica and Panasonic/Lumix, and is likely not documented.