After hearing a lot of good things about Apple’s Aperture photo editing software I finally installed it yesterday (thanks TG for the serial) and I gotta say that this beats Adobe’s Lightroom by loads in my opinion.  I’ve had Lightroom installed on my windows desktop for about 3 months now, and can’t find a single good thing to say about it.

Some things I like about Aperture:
- Number one thing I like about the Aperture is its ease of use. Within minutes of installing the program I was able to get satisfatory results, unlike Lightroom or photoshop where it takes a while before you can start getting good results. Lightroom may technically be more powerful (more features) and may be faster, but I believe that good programs are those that allow users to quickly and easily get to the end results that the user have in it. The less time spent fiddling around with settings and menus, the more time users will have to enjoy and share their results!
- Changes made to images are stored as “versions”, storing just the thumbnail image, adjustements and embedded information, but it does not create a image file until you export it. This saves space on your hard drive.
- Easy to “lift” adjustments made to one picture and apply it to other pictures.
- I have a e-520 camera, and Aperture’s update to support the e-520 RAW format was released before Adobe (they still haven’t).
- $100 cheaper then Lightroom (Aperture 2.0 is $199, while Lightroom is $299).

To close this entry, here is a before and after screenshot of the first image I edited with Aperture. Its a picture I took outside a cathedral in San Francisco earlier this year. Even though the file was not saved in RAW, I was still able to recover the details that were lost in the underexposed parts of the statue.

Original image.

After editing.