Comments invited
I have always been pretty harsh on Photoshop in this journal, complaining about what has to be one of the worst user interfaces (after the IRS’s forms, I suppose) on the planet. Adobe’s case is not helped by the wonderful user experience offered by Aperture. Assuming the user has good hardware, of course.
I tried a very early beta of Lightroom a while back – encomiums to Adobe for adopting a user testing approach, in contrast to Apple’s arrogance in this regard – and found nothing to get excited about. I had been using Aperture for a while at that point.
Times change and Lightroom is now on the market for purchase, after an extended beta testing period of many months. I do not have the time to really get into Lightroom (and my happiness with Aperture doesn’t especially incent me in this regard!) so it would be interesting to hear from Lightroom users, especially if they have experience with Aperture, how the applications compare.
Thanks.
Follow up:
Here is a guest piece from Roy Hammans describing his experiences.
I started using Lightroom (beta) before my move back to Mac, so had already become familiar with it and liked the ability to share my image database between PC and Mac while I made the transition.
CS3 universal binary on the Mac was, of course, a key factor in my switching platforms, as I’ve been a long-time user of Photoshop. The integration of Lightroom, Camera Raw and PS (running as fast as on my PC), plus the unalloyed joy of the Mac interface again, is a winning combination for me.
I’ve since tried Aperture, and Capture One and iView, and find them all absolutely fine, but none of them offer the integration advantages of the Adobe suite for the kind of work I do.
Also, I must say that I find the LR interface a joy to use, but I know some dislike it. Had I started off by using Aperture maybe I would feel differently, but I don’t think so.