Lightroom vs. Aperture - What's Best?

I have just purchased LR for 94.00 from Academicsuperstore.com
As a teacher this is a great site, but you can also use your childs' stuent status as proof also. Hope this helps.

Sam

I'd also vote for Aperture, much more intuitive and powerful. Lightroom does have a few things going for it, but on the balance I have to say Aperture is much better suited to my needs as a pro photographer.

Lightroom outperforms aperture hand over fist on my G5 and my core 2 duo. There is really no comparison between the two.

I like Aperture's broader feature set, but it's pretty much unusable to me speed wise.

here is my comparison

http://ww2d.org/blog/?p=14

I fairly extensively tested both Aperture and Lightroom (LR), and until LR B4.1, the two were fairly close with different strength. Aperture's important plusses for me were a couple of features like stacks and nondestructive healing. However, LR 1.0 now has those features two, and Adobe manages to better implement the healing than Apple. Aperture still has a few other strengths (like the freeform light table, the and the more intuitive loupe tool (unfortunately, the latter is sluggish even on my MBP C2D), but in my experience it just doesn't make up for the completeness of LR 1.0.

Some of LR 1.0s strengths for me:
- The import dialog is both simple and very full-featured, even allowing re-organization of existing folders into a date-based folder tree (that is not "owned" by LR) -- this is a change from B4.1.
- Survey mode to quickly identify "picks", plus explicit support for selecting and batch-deleting pictures with a "reject" flag -- another change from B4.1.
- The best set of RAW development controls bar none. Features like the "vibrance" control (inherited from RawShooter) and the "targeted adjustment tool" are genuinely useful. (And the healing tool can be applied whiile at any level of zoom; something that turned out to be a bit of a frustration with Aperture).
- A super-simple yet very flexible Print module (Aperture's printing features are quite the let-down after having gotten a taste of LR's; I'm sure that Apple will address that in the next release).

(I think the LR 1.0 web module also beats its Aperture counterpart, but I base that on seeing demos only. I've not used those features myself yet.)

So IMO, Lightroom went from "worthy competitor" in beta 4.1 to "clear leader" in 1.0. PMA is coming up next month: Maybe Apple will respond with some cool upgrade, but the LR deal right now ($199 vs. $299) is sweet enough that I've made my choice. There are rumors out there that Adobe might actually produce an update to LR relatively soon to address the need to "merge" field-work done on a laptop into the main database. (Beta 4.1 had some support for that through "Binders", but LR 1.0 dropped that feature.)

Received my copy of Aperture in the mail this morning after trying both in recent months. Aperture just matches my workflow and needs much better even though I was very impressed with Lightroom. Hopefully the competition will drive both companies on make the products even better.

I've been using Lightroom since it went up on labs. At first I didn't really use it very much, but soon it became a mainstay in my workflow. I don't think I'd ever purchased a 1.0 release, but I preordered this one as soon as it was announced.

I really like the changes they made between b4 and 1.0, and am sold on the product.

mungler: Lightroom's Develop controls work like Aperture's... there is no ordering of operations. If you use split toning to go sepia, you can change just that or you can turn that module off and on.

I've also used both for some time now, and I do prefer Aperture in almost every way, but only by a very margin. From a user interface and workflow standpoint, I think Aperture is better. I do wonder how many more Photoshop-like settings will come to Lightroom. Clearly Adobe could do this to take some competitive advantage. As of right now, I adore the "Vibrance" setting in Lightroom, and wish Aperture had something similar. I expect there will be more settings like this one to come...

Aperture all the way...