Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture are two most popular solutions for pro photographers who shoot raw images using DSLR cameras.

A user who has worked with both Lightroom and Aperture compares these software and suggests Lightroom though it was a tough calls. He says - “More than anything though for me it’s the speed and response of the application, and Aperture is way too heavy in the system usage/resources area compared to other applications that do similar tasks. If Aperture could run as smoothly as Lightroom I would say the choice of application is a lot harder.”

Another user says - “Lightroom is a warmed over iphoto, meaning that it is a jpeg workflow with a database to manage raw files while it is my understanding that Aperture has the computer do all of the heavy lifting in real time. Lightroom slows down if you disable previews.”

An Aperture fan calls Lightroom as Camera Raw on steroids, that fails in the workflow department.

Full comment comparing the features of Lightroom and Aperture:

1. Clearly the performance of Lightroom is far beyond that of Aperture on the same machine, 2gb ram core duo blah blah. For some reason Aperture is slow regardless of library size, even the screen refresh can be testing at times (yes I’ve done my homework and tried all the how to speed up Aperture tweaks).

2. Lightroom is quicker to get around navigation wise, Aperture has done a good job but Lightroom clearly shows the attention to detail that extensive discussions with photographers and beta testers shows in every day usage.

4. The one thing that Aperture appears to have the edge on though is in the area of highlight reclaiming. It may be that I do it wrong in Lightroom, but after extensive trials in both apps I’ve found that Aperture can recapture things like skies much better than Lightroom (which I assume means Camera RAW), it just seems more natural when done in Aperture.

5. Lightroom’s ability to let me move projects/libraries among machines and suck them back into my master library (1.1 update). I could be really unfair here and say that I have PC’s and Mac’s so that is a huge plus for Lightroom, but for the sake of argument lets assume I’m talking two Mac’s and not a multi platform workflow. Link.