Forum Moderators: not2easy
I bought Aperture when I bought my Mac, but I never really liked it. It gets sluggish, and I like arranging my pictures on the filesystem instead of in virtual libraries, so its more portable.
I tried Lightroom out this week and couldn't pull out my credit card fast enough. It's ridiculously fast, and a pleasure to use - in fact, I haven't started photoshop since I installed it.
It fully addresses the workflow issues of digital photography.
- Supports camera RAW format
- Damage-free editing of photos
- Batch editing
- Full Metadata support (IPTC)
- Convenient before/after comparison for each image
- Rating and labeling of pictures (with filter)
I'd never go back to "just Photoshop" after having used Lightroom.
(There are some bugs, though, which is to be expected in a 1.0 version. Nothing serious - I did not have crashes, but little annoying bugs. But heck, the software is still great.)
This program works efficiently with lots of files and you can do all the adjustments at once because they are in one module.