Sara Collaton Photography

Good point Sean and thanks for elaborating a bit more on the brushes. Your website has always been a great resource for Lightroom information.

Michael – yes, faces does not fit my workflow at all. Places is great – geotagging with a map function in lightroom would be an amazing addition. For the pros, I think lightroom still looks more professional. I personally don’t like how aperture changed their look to fit more to the consumer level product (iphoto) than keeping it’s professional look. For anyone wanting to get into photo management that has a V-DSLR and is not at a pro level (FCP), I could see Aperture as a great way to get into it for photos and video work.

Philip – for you, especially with the amount of cameras you own, the tiny ones being able to do video as well I could see aperture working for ya.

Josh – LR2 has a plugin for Flickr integration and the LR3 beta has direct connections with their flickr accounts as well.

David – from what I hear with Aperture users, A2 to A3 has massive improvements so if that’s your application and have been using it for ages, it’s an amazing upgrade. I’ve played around with aperture a bit more and I still find it impressive. The two things I hope LR3 includes in their official release is geotagging and something similar to brushes (which I find is close to masking with layers in Photoshop. Extremely powerful). There are a few things that throw me off with Aperture 3:
- I’ve never seen before in a product, consumer level features put into a pro level application (thinking of iPhoto faces and places). While Places is a great feature for anyone with a large collection of photos, I don’t see the point of faces in a pro tool. I’d much rather use keywords/tags. Even in iPhoto, I rarely tag every photo with faces.
- I find the actual look of the application a bit simple looking. Maybe it’s the faces/places mixed with the iPhone style icons for facebook and flickr integration but to me, it takes away from that professional slick look a lot of other (pro) applications have, and I don’t necessarily mean Lightroom. I know this has nothing to do with how your photos will turn out after processing them, it’s just another observation.
- I myself, rarely go into Photoshop for photography editing. There’s very little that can’t be done (with some work) in applications like Aperture (or Lightroom). I do agree, if there’s one application you need and you’re just thinking about Photographs, skip the pricey cost of PS and go for something powerful and affordable.