I use photoshop, but what about aperture and lightroom

[stevieh59]

I use photoshop for all my photo editing needs and I've never really looked at the other 2: Lightroom and aperture.

These 2 both seem to offer tethered shooting and Chase Jarvis seems to be in with Aperture (clever apple).

Is there any major feature Im missing out on by not using one of the other 2. Price wise photoshop is the most expensive, so Im presuming its the king of the 3.

[donoreo]

Look at it this way: Photoshop is an editor with a cataloguer in it. Aperture and Lightroom are cataloguers with editors. Lightroom is pretty much Adobe Camera RAW from PS, so it is a good editor.

Myself I am just switching to Lightroom from PS Elements 9 (all Mac). I wanted the extra RAW editing features, but did not need so many other that PS CS has, so Lightroom is for me.

[MattUK]

Lightroom is so fast at doing light editing and helping you to pick one shot from 100. Photoshop is where the editing of all finally selected shots will remain, for me at least

[gestiss-photo]

Aperture 3.0 do an excellent job on Mac. It's a workflow application. You can view thousands of photos, edit or delete them quickly, they stay organised.
I don't use Lightroom, it do the same job, someone says it's more powerful than aperture.

[chris-p]

It's horses for courses I suppose. I've never used Aperture but I tried Lightroom and hated it. Batch processing is a great idea but I've no need for it - I tend to adjust each shot individually so I know I'm doing the right thing to the right shot.

The only time that btach processing is useful for me is resizing and format conversions for clients and web galleries but ACDSee does that much more easily than Lightroom.

[KeithT]

Like Chris, I have no use for batch processing. I use CS4 because it was a gift, and to be honest it is more than enough to put my workflow through. I could just as easily use one of the more humble, even free, image edit software programmes on the market to good effect. I personally feel that a lot of amateur photographers put themselves through too many hoops when it comes to equipment and processing their images, and it's probably because they are more in love with owning the latest software than they are producing great images. If you have Photoshop already, what's the point of having Lightroom too? I can never understand the reason behind that.

[ABERS]

I can imagine Lightroom would be a boon to anyone that goes out and comes back with cards full of images to process, but since that feature is of no interest to me in that respect, I still am an avid fan of it.

I've had it in its various forms for three years now and am still intrigued by the different facilities it has, and what it allows you to play with to end up the image that you want.

The print option in particular is simple and easy to use and understand, especially for a non technical person, (like me!), and the catalogue section allows you to get organised when you print various images for selection for exhibitions, enabling you to not submit the same one twice.

Can't comment on Aperture.