Aperture 3 V. Lightroom 3

I haven't used Aperture, but can give advice on two things:

1) Lightroom 3 or Aperture 3 You should be looking at Lightroom 4. The beta is out and it's been bug-free for me so far. I haven't yet seen any reports of major issues. You can run the beta until it's released.

2) My instinct is to go with Aperture, mostly because I am a Mac guy Everyone I know using Lightroom, including me, is on a Mac. I've never heard any negatives about using Lightroom on a Mac.

Jeff, what is it about Lightroom that makes it worth the extra $200+? I get it, the beta is free and I've seen some screenshots of Lightroom 4, very nice. But at some point I will have to pay for it.

You have to decide where the value is. Things that keep me from looking seriously at Aperture:

1) Lightroom is a core product for Adobe, it's not for Apple. I'm not convinced that Apple will support Aperture as separate from iPhoto for the long term.
2) There is a feature in Lightroom called Collections that I would have a very hard time abandoning. Collections fits my workflow far better than the Projects viewpoint of Aperture.
3) When I was doing my own printer, I bought an Epson. The primary reason I bought an Epson was the huge support community around Epson printers. I could get a question answered in minutes on the web. I could get utilities, third party stuff, and profiles for Epson that were not available for other printers. The same thing is true of Lightroom. There is a lot to consider beyond the product, and Lightroom has a huge community of educators and developers around it.

Jeff, you have made some good points. I was initially leaning to Aperture, but I think now I will download the trials of both and see which fits me better. Any tips on how best to compare the two?

Maybe this will help:

http://rickellis.com/journal/aperture-vs-lightroom.html

I use both and prefer Aperture. Even more-so when you consider the price difference and at one time Aperture was crazy, $499, expensive! If choosing Aperture, be advised that Aperture has two ways of managing your images: referenced and managed. Lightroom only uses referenced. In a referenced library, your images are still located on your hard drive within your typical folder hierarchy. You can navigate to them outside of using program. But if you move of delete the image, then the program won't "see" the image. Again, both Aperture and Lightroom can have referenced libraries. Aperture can also use a "managed" library. In this case, Aperture imports the image into it's own directory system (inside a package not available outside of Aperture unless you want to go digging around in the package contents). In essence, this means you can't see the image outside of Aperture.This also means you can't move or accidentally delete the image outside of Aperture as well. Personally, I prefer managed libraries. I bought the program to manage my growing library of images!

Steven, I tried them both. I spent a couple of hundred hours using Lightroom on my wife's Mac, and then used the trial of Lightroom 3 on my machine. I like Lightroom a lot, but ended up buying Aperture. The price difference didn't make any sense -- I feel that Aperture is priced appropriately and the Lightroom (like all Adobe products) is expensive. Aperture works just as well, and intergrates very nicely with the rest of the Apple ecosystem (I also use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro.) Aperture has all of the editing tools I need for 99.5% of my photos. The RAW support is fast and seamless -- other than the extended dynamic range for adjustments, you can't tell the difference between working in JPEG or RAW. Workflow is fast - importing files, reviewing and rating shots, editing, export. I haven't used the printing/books features but they seem very well done.
I am not a huge user of plugins. The big-name plugins are available on Aperture but not nearly as many as for Lightroom. That's the one area that Lightroom wins. If you can mostly live with the tools provided by Aperture, then it doesn't matter. If plugins are everything to you, then look at Lightroom.

This http://www.twin-pixels.com/raw-processors-review-aperture-bibble-capture-one-dxo-lightroom/ seems to be a good comparison between LR and Aperture (and a few others). I'm a PC guy so I use LR3 (and Canon DPP). LR3 requires frequent switching between library and develop modules. I agree on the review that switching between modules is less than perfect. A friend of mine uses Aperture and she's always faster than me in presenting pictures but perhaps that's personal and not software related.

I just read Rick Ellis' comparison (linked previously) last night, and agree that it's one of the more balanced comparisons. I've had Aperture since I bought my iMac in 2008. Last weekend, I did some HDD housecleaning/memory upgrades, and did a clean install of both Snow Leopard and Aperture 3 on my internal boot HDD. Here's how I'm running it:

1. 2008, iMac, model 8,1 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo with 6GB of RAM (1x4 in slot zero, 1x2 in slot one).
2. Clean install of Snow Leopard.
3. Primary 300GB Aperture library file resides on its own, dedicated 500GB Firewire external drive.

Note that 2007-2008 (models 7,1 and 8,1) iMacs can actually support 6GB of RAM, not just 4GB as Apple states; 2009 and later iMacs support 8GB-16GB of system RAM. If you own a more recent Mac, I would recommend no less than 8GB if planning to run RAM-hungry plug-ins such as onOne's Perfect Photo Suite, etc. However, with a clean OS X install on a wiped boot drive, Aperture runs very well, even on just a 4GB iMac.

I'm still figuring out my workflow, but I liked Aperture enough to invest in its current version and some books. I bought the only three titles available on Amazon--all three are pretty good, and I highly recommend them if going with Aperture:

Apple Aperture 3, McMahon & Rawlinson
Focus On Aperture 3, Hilz
Aperture 3 Portable Genius, Anon, Anon

The first is the most comprehensive, the latter two sell for below their published price, and are a good bargain at only about $12 each.

>>> What I want to know is which is technically superior?

Adding to what Jeff said above, for me it is not about which is technically superior (though I believe LR is). It's about which company will be in imaging for the long term supporting my needs.

At this point if I needed to switch from Lightroom to Aperture, and retain all of my edits, with >100K images it would pretty much be impossible. And the same would be true if I were using Aperture now, and for whatever reason needed to switch to Lightroom.

Also, Adobe has been very responsive with updates, new features, and moving RAW processing forward with better and better algorithms. And I'm confident that will be the case over then next 10 or 20 years.

Will Apple? Hopefully yes. But with their huge emphasis on mobile (with amazing results), and letting some video professionals down with Final Cut Pro X, I'm just not willing to take a chance.

Choose carefully...