I've downloaded the test versions of Apeture and Lightroom and, to be honest, I can't see the point of them.

They seem to have less features and harder to use than the free tools provided with Windows and OS X... On Windows the only advantage I can see is being able to view the RAW files, but actually doing anything with them - cropping, adjusting or exporting them to the file system or to Flickr seems to be an excercise in frustration, at least with Lightroom.

Apeture seems to retain some of the ease of use of iPhoto, when it comes to MobileMe and Flickr, but is incredibly slow. Whereas iPhoto needs about a second to load an image, Apeture needs around 10 seconds to load a standard JPEG, I haven't tried it with a RAW image yet, I just get too many beachballs, trying to wade through my collection.

On Windows, it seems quicker and easier to use Windows Live Gallery for doing post effects and Paint.net for cropping and resizing than it does Lightroom.

I thought these tools were supposed to make the workflow quicker and easier, somehow I seem to be missing the point of these applications, at the moment.

I just tried exporting an image at 1024x768 from Apeture. In the same time, I had cropped 2 photos in Paint.net and uploaded them to Flickr, then posted them in the Random Photo thread...

I won't comment on Aperture because I don't use it but cropping in Lr is a doddle, and certainly not slow on my Mac.
After import, select the image you want to crop and press 'r' on the keyboard an Lr automatically opens the image in crop mode in the Develop module. After that, crop as desired and either double-click the cropped image or press 'r' again.
This is with a 17" 2.93Ghz MBP.
there's certainly nothing slow about the process, and I have over 10k images in my library.
What specific features are you looking for?
If you're not using RAW images then perhaps iPhoto (or whatever Windows one is called) is a better option for you.
Just because I (and others here) use it does not mean it's for everyone.

Mark

I think, on the Mac, I will stick with iPhoto. The machine is dog slow anyway and Apeture seem to totally kill it (2006 iMac 24" 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM)... I've reinstalled OS X 3 times now and it still runs like a dog - and I don't have an menu bar extras etc. installed, no widgets, just the core apps I use, but it seems to struggle, even with just Firefox, iTune and Mail open, throwing iPhoto at it takes a while to load, but works, Apeture just kills the machine.

Thanks for the tip on Lightroom. That certainly opened up another side to it. I found lots of extras there that were useful. I'll keep trying.

Also, does iPhoto not create numerous copies of your images when you make alterations to them? If so, people with large image libraries would soon be running out of free hard drive space.

Mark

I try to use keyboard shortcuts when I can remember them.
I think I only know four Lr ones at the moment, but that seems to be enough for now. (8+)

Mark

Dave - although I don't use Lightroom I would persist with it if I were you. It's much cheaper than Photoshop and there's not much a photographer can't do in this prog (layers coming soon). Have a look at a couple of tutorials if you can Tutorials Clicky

Al

I find the non-destructive nature of lr ideal.

LR2 works fine on my laptop which is a Centrino Duo @ 1.66GHz with 1.5Gb RAM, not paired obviously.

Yes it does. Whenever you make a change to a master photo, iPhoto creates duplicate. Your library can bloat as a result.

Aperture handles things differently - it will create a mata file of changes, and will apply them to JPEG previews - and you can control the size of these previews to help eke disk Soave down. When you export, it works the XML changes to a full size copy.

The are times when Aperture makes a copy:
1 - when you use a plug-in which does not use the XML file method - for example there are some film simulation plug-ins which do this.

2 - when you export the image to an external image editor - Aperture will generally create a compatible external file and "nest" it with the original. For example, if you edit the file in Photoshop, a Photoshop file will be created and that will be used.

Note that in both examples above that this is a 1-way trop for the image. Note that you can still access the original master file, but that any changes to the master won't be caries over to the externally edited one.

I can't comment on Lightroom in this respect. I would imagine better photoshop integration, but I suspect that any Lightroom based edits won't be superimposed on any external edits either. It depends how clever Adobe have been with their integration.

Aperture can be very resource hungry - on my old G5 iMac, Aperture was very slow at times. On my Intel machines, it's very nippy, and handles the large library I have very easily.