Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture

[Ted Harris]

Brett, you are right of course and I do the same thing, using a reduced size version in the Aperture catalogue. I got carried away because I really liked Aperture when it came out and it just frustrated the hell out of me. As I recall now my final decision to go with Lightroom was more its speed of operation than anything else. On a MacPro w/5 GB RAM and on a Macbook with 2 GB it runs at an acceptable speed and Aperture didn't. Add to that the fact that Adobe seems to be paying attention to Lightroom but Im less sure about Apple.

[Hollis]

Im going to throw out another option - iview mediapro. I hate the fact that miscrosoft owns them now but it is a solid program. The nice thing too is that there is already functionality built into photoshop for it (look in the metadata window - you will see an iview tab). It will archive and keyword with the best of them and in my opinion, beats the heck out of extensis portfolio.

[alexchem]

I have Photoshop CS3 extended and lightroom and I tried Aperture. I suggest useing the Bridge with photoshop and processing everything through camera raw. You can open scans in raw and very quickly do anything you need. A sidelight with CS3 is the ability to open jpg and tiff files in Camera raw. It's beautiful. Good Luck actually they all work good. It is your personal taste that decides. Alex

[Daniel_Buck]

I use Photoshop for my scans, bring in the raw scans then do my curves and any other corrections/sizing that I need to do. I have actions setup for things that I do often, and actions that create curve profiles and selections that I do alot. I'm sure just about any program will do just fine, it just depends on how you like your workflow.

[Marko]

For selecting, editing, keywording, creating web galleries, and printing of dozens or even hundreds of photos from a shoot, you need something like Lightroom or Aperture. Bridge gets close, but doesn't offer the detailed controls of either.

This is true, the intended market for both of those apps is mass production.

So, how many LF photographers manage "dozens or even hundreds of photos from a shoot"?