This is a series of articles looking at the differences between Aperture and Lightroom from the viewpoint of a long time Aperture user.
So, Aperture has a control for "Definition" and Lightrom has a control for "Clarity" that have pretty much the same purpose - to add midrange contrast.
So, which application does this best. Well, here's the original version of a photo:
And in Aperture, we can set Definition to half strength (0.5) and this is the result:
Which is a fairly good midrange seperation, but the blur in the background is being rather trashed. if we increase it to 1.0, we get this:
And now the image is pretty much destroyed. The midrange contrast on the knitted animals is pretty good though, so you might want to "brush it in" to affect only those in this case.
Here's Lightroom's clarity at half strength (50%):
Which looks a lot better than Aperture's half strength. The blur is slightly warped, but not really in a very negative way. Here it is at 100%:
And the background is starting to really look disturbing, but far from the result with Definition at full strength.
So the clear winner here is Lightroom, good job Adobe!
"Clarity" is also the reason why I sometimes use PS Express or Lightroom Mobile to edit photos on the phone, even though they lack oh so much other nice things.
