I love Apple software. I’m a recent convert, but time and time again the Apple approach seems more elegant, visually enoyable, and efficient than the Windows counterpart. And so I enthusiastically look for Appleware whenever the opportunity presents. Lately a competition has sprung up between Adobe and Apple’s new products for the photographer – Adobe Lightroom (beta) and Apple Aperture 1.5. Each is a suite of advanced tools for the serious to professional photographer, and, at the risk of being flamed by the followers of each, the feature sets are roughly comparable.
I know that only because I can read the capsule summaries of feature sets that each makes available, and can review the related materials – video tutorials and the like – that have sprung up on the ‘net. I don’t know it from my own experience, though, because only Adobe has released its app as trialware. I suspect that Aperture is superb. The reviews are generally adoring, the screenshots look fantastic, and there is that thing about the Apple way. Lightroom is certainly superb; I’ve been using the trialware for several weeks now and it’s a profound improvement on existing tools for the digital photographer (and the recently released Beta 4 is particularly well done).
But I can’t bring myself to spend the US$300 they’re asking me to spend before I can experiment. Better the devil you know, I think. Come on, Apple, let us take a test drive.
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Rob, this is a perfect excuse to go to an Apple Store. Aperture is almost always installed on the computer that has the 30″ display hooked up to it. I spent a couple of hours at an Apple store with my own media playing with it before I decided to buy. I didn’t regret it (and I’m really picky).
A couple of hours??? Well, that would be worthwhile. I wonder if they’d let me bring in my HD with all my RAW files. Very curious to see how fast it is managing a library of thousands of RAWs.