Scott Kelby On Aperture Versus Lightroom

In response to a misrepresentation of his views of Aperture versus Lightroom, Scott Kelby wrote a  helpful comparison the two programs. To summarize: far more pros use Lightroom than Aperture; Aperture lacks many of the features found in Lightroom; Aperture is slow and buggy; and Aperture only has one feature that Kelby favors over Lightroom's -- Aperture's making photo books feature.

Here are a few quick excerpts:

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"I only like Aperture better for one feature -- making photo books. I don’t use it for anything else (I do my slideshows in iPhoto)."

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"...if I had written an Aperture 4 wish list article, it would have gone on to include features already in Lightroom that Aperture doesn’t do well, or doesn’t do at all, like: automated and manual lens correction and perspective correction, or snapshots and history for your edits, or supporting multiple adjustments with one brush stroke like Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush, or built-in Camera profiles to emulate Nikon/Canon in-camera looks, or a fast responsive crop tool, or crop tool overlays for composition, or setting your default adjustment settings by camera model, camera serial number or image ISO, or expertly-tuned sharpening on output, or saving your print layouts as JPEGs so you can send them to a photo lab, and I could go on and on and on.

"Not to mention that there’s a massive worldwide community built around using Lightroom and supporting Lightroom users, and you can find tons of presets, plug-ins, advice, training books, live seminars, hands-on workshops, and even its own conference available to Lightroom users, that simply doesn’t exist on that scale for Aperture users (and did I mention that Aperture isn’t even available on the Windows platform at all?)."

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"An independent study by InfoTrends looked at which programs pros are using to process their raw images. Here’s what they found:

"In 2009 (the most current year for which statistics are available) here’s what the pros use:

"Lightroom: 37%

"Aperture: 6.3% (down from 7.5% the previous year, so their pro user base is actually shrinking).

"Now, although Lightroom is available for both PCs and Macs, Aperture is only available on Macs, and you’d think that would help its case quite a bit, but it actually gets worse when you just compare what Mac users are using. Here are InfoTrend’s results when you just look at pro photographers using Macs:

"Lightroom: 44.4%

"Aperture: 12.5% (down from 14.6% the previous year, so their pro user base is actually shrinking on the Mac, too)."

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You can read Kelby's complete article here.