I’ve been using aperture since the (horribly buggy) v1.0 and lightroom since beta2. I kept going back and forth for a while, but finally I settled on lightroom, for 2 reasons-
- Better performance (aperture could bog down my macbook pro in no time flat)
- better editing tools – at the time aperture didn’t have things like clarity adjustment and the targeted curves thing was great.
Aperture v.2.0 seemed to fix some of the performance issues, but was still not compelling to tempt me back from lightroom.
However – in my mind both offerings were missing one *key* feature – some kind of dodge and burn tool. I mean, it’s pretty much the most basic “darkroom editing” technique – bread and butter to anyone with a background in “wet” printing. I was actually kind of surprised that both pieces of software were designed to be a “digital darkroom” (unlike photoshop which is a straight up “editor”) and yet were missing this key feature.
Till now:
With v. 2.1, aperture has finally added plugin support and real targeted “brush based” editing including a burn/dodge tool.
Crap. now I’m going to have to switch again.
I think this is a great move on apples part – opening the software up to 3rd party plugins will ensure a breadth of options that can’t be matched by just the software itself. Heck, I currently only use photoshop for dodge/burn and selective masking/adjustment layer editing. If we’ve got plugins for aperture that do all this now – I may simply never touch photoshop again (not really I know).
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And just as you’ve swapped over Lightroom 2.0 will be released, it must surely be just around the corner (its been over a year since v1), and you will have to switch back again!
Arrrrgh… I know… and each time I have more and more photos, so it gets harder and harder to switch
I’m seriously considering just going through lightroom, filtering out my “best” pics (4 or 5 star rated), importing them into aperture and then just using aperture going forward, leaving the old stuff “archived” in lightroom.