1) You cannot defend Lightroom’s separation of Library and Develop. It was clearly done for performance considerations during LR’s initial development and they’ve been stuck with it ever since, but it is still a stupid design that no one actually *likes*. Oh, we tolerate it and have gotten used to it, but like? No way. Adding Collections to Develop doesn’t fix the problem. For example, you can’t view more than one image at a time in Develop. In Aperture you can bring up two or mores images (or versions of the same image) at the same time, side-by-side and edit one of them, comparing while editing. You can’t do that in LR’s Develop because of its one-image-at-a-time limitations compared to the Library module.
*Correction* Your comment comparing LR’s modules to Aperture’s tabs is not accurate at all. In Aperture you can load a floating or locked Adjustments HUD while the Library tab is selected and view/edit both at the same time, so they aren’t comparative concepts. Aperture is much more flexible and dynamic here.

2) LR’s Camera Profiles, Undo History, Lens Corrections are indeed better and the Graduated Filter is nice, but beyond those Aperture pulls way ahead. LR *needs* tight integration with Photoshop because its tools are more limited. Aperture’s editing tools are modular, can add as many as you like and they can all be brushed in or out like layer masks. This includes a true levels tool, a deep curves editor (covering luminance or independent RGB channels, shadow, normal and extended range), modular color editor that not only lets you choose the exact hue, but the range of its influence (all stuff LR cannot do), excellent skin smoothing brush, multiply/overlay brushes, VASTLY superior and more natural looking highlight recovery with a deep Shadow&Highlights editor that produces amazing results, halo reduction and much more powerful retouching tools not bound to those limited spot circles and you can adjust your masking brush in all cases to influence shadows, midtones or highlights. Heck, you can even brush in the Chromatic Aberrations adjustment to only select areas of the image. What about the Vignette? You can brush it out too, if you didn’t want it to darken every corner at the same intensity. I could go on and on. The point is that with Aperture this is all non-destructive and doesn’t require bouncing into Photoshop nearly as often. With Lightroom I almost always bounced into Photoshop with images I genuinely cared about, which also meant ballooning my 10mb RAW file into a 70-500MB Photoshop project every single time. I do this far less frequently in Aperture because almost all of its tools run much deeper than the LR equivalents.

3) Printing? How can you even discuss this without mentioning Lightroom’s glaring lack of soft proofing, a feature that we have all been begging Adobe to include for years now. Unfortunately, Adobe is in the unsavory position of having to compete with itself and they would of course much prefer the LR+Photoshop one-two $1000 punch.

4) ACR/LR’s noise reduction and sharpening algorithms are great, but their achilles heel is that their global (save goes for the Vignetting), making them mostly useless for gallery images. No matter how much you tweak the detail and contrast sliders, reducing noise in a monochromatic sky or shadow area will always reduce some detail somewhere else where you don’t want it to. This is unacceptable. I apply sharpening and noise reduction selectively where its needed and almost never to high detail areas where its usually invisible and actually contributes to the texture and sharpness. I have nothing but praise for LR’s color NR though. It works splendidly. I just wish you could brush in or out the luminance NR. When it comes to the final image, Nik’s Define is hard to beat and can be launched as a plugin by both LR and Aperture.

As a side note, one other very distinctive difference between these two apps is that Lightroom is primarily bound to the OS’s file system, whilst Aperture is abstracted from it. I can see how many people who are still stuck on the hard drive files/folders mindset will prefer LR. Aperture disconnects you from files/folders and therefore allows for much greater organization flexibility. The folders, projects, albums and smart albums of Aperture are much more powerful than LR’s rather simplistic Collections because they aren’t limited by the file system’s limitations, such as with special characters or rigid folder hierarchies. Being able to dynamically put folders within projects, or vice versa split any way that you like and create relative smart albums in any of them makes for mind boggling organization possibilities that simply aren’t possible in Lightroom. Aperture more smartly leverages the power of metadata. But that’s been my general feeling as I explore Aperture in greater detail. It’s just more smartly designed in the majority of cases. Dare I also mention price? Aperture’s now $80 is a steal vs. Lightroom’s $299. Something to think about for prospective DAM buyers.

With all that said, I still like Lightroom. It continues to manage my enormous photo library, as I’m pretty deeply invested, but I haven’t decided on new images. I do prefer its keyword library system and LR3′s new watermark tool is unparalleled. I also like its wide variety of cropping patterns and being cross-platform is a huge advantage for some people.

Matt, I love ya. You’re a great trainer and I have much respect for you. I know you and Scott are majorly invested in the Adobe ecosystem, but this article came off as terribly misinformed and while I won’t go so far as to call you a shill, I can understand why Ariadne might have thought that.

I think, as a LR user considering Aperture, it comes down to these two points:

Pro: Great integration and consumer features in a pro-level app. I.e. Made by Apple.

Con: Poor update cycle and support and serious bugs at release. I.e. Made by Apple.

Given that I trust my computer, phone and tablet to the same folks, I’m inclined to go with Aperture once I get my new camera. Are there and will there be frustrations? Yes, absolutely. But then I survived all those years with Windows, so it shouldn’t be so hard.

Before we raise Adobe on a pedestal and claim they are focussed on visual (and indeed audio) arts, consider the debacles of Flash and PDF. Both great ideas which are failing badly due to corporate greed – the very same accusations being leveled at Apple.

I was flying from San Francisco to Paris to meet a Dutch colleague to fly on to Mali, West Africa, to do our first long shoot there for a book we were planning around a medical project. I was quite happily using LR-2 beta, when my access was terminated by Adobe upon the release of the commercial version. I immediately went to Adobe’s web page, to download and pay, but I could not get through… for 8 hours, until I had to leave for the airport. Jet-lag & all, I spent the next afternoon in my friends Mac shop on Blvd. San Germain, using his broad band to connect with Adobe’s page. Never got in.

With 45 minutes left to catch a plane for Bamako, I ran up the street… literally, to FNAC, where Lightroom was unavailable… but Aperture was. Desperate, I spent over 300 euro, including VAT, to buy a retail copy of Aperture that I did not want.

I guess, at this point, I should admit that I am a Mac evangelist. I admire the elegance of Apple products and have since I first rigged up a portable battery to an Apple IIc, and dragged ti around the world writing foto notes and reports. Which brings me to my point.

Although Aperture had some nice features, I hated using it every day of the rough month on some of the world’s worst hard-drive-busting bad “roads.” I never felt that I knew where my photographs were in a deep well of a proprietary data base, that kept growing larger & less manageable — this became a great concern for making multiple backups as hard drives failed one after another due to dust, 115° heat and a very bumpy ride. (fyi: rocstor drives saved the shoot…) It’s nice to know the monolithic storage defect no longer cripples a decent product, but that didn’t help me through this formative experience.

One of the first things that I did when I returned to the states was to walk into a store in Manhattan and buy a boxed Lightroom II, Since importing my images from Aperture I don’t think I’ve opened the program since, except to convert some old personal iPhoto shots.

Reading though the posts it seems like many of my Aperture complaints were fixed in Apple’s routinely excellent manner. I’m glad of that but it inspires me with no desire to run that experiment again.

A Matt wrote so incisively “Whether you’re a working pro or an avid hobbyist, nobody has the time to play the “switcharoo” every 18 months.” He got that right.

Aperture 3 has all the functionality I was missing in Lightroom. All the brushes and tools that I need for not using the destructive Photoshop. The synched connections to Flicker, Facebook and MobileMe and my portfolios. And the REAL FULL SCREEN editing.

I moved. I have more than 50.000 photos now managed by Aperture on all platforms.

Lightroom is a tool. Aperture is a photo manager. And it makes a big difference when you try to look at the application the way it was made – and not i the way you want to see it or use it.

Apple is serious, but honestly I hope they don’t. I personally like the idea of the Apple Pro apps being just that “Mac based only”

Elitist comment ? maybe, but it goes beyond that for me.

Once in a while I’ll fire up LR2 and no sooner just get back to AP. In terms of simply workflow and access to adjustment tools I’m sorry but you can argue until you are blue in the face – LR just isn’t written with non-linear thinking people in mind and that pretty makes up most creatives.

For what it’s worth 3 LR users here are simply going to start future projects in Aperture 3 purely for the adjustment qualities I’ve shown them with AP3.

I love Adobe and naturally use the CS4 but heck even in PSCS4 they’ve done something wrong wit the way curves effects adjustments.

any way,merely an opinion but not into detailing specifics just a simple general vote for Aperture.

Oh and “HUD in A3 blocks image in full screen mode” not a huge issue and now in AP3 try holding the shift key when you adjust a slider – see what happens.

Like I said I own/paid for LR so it’s not as though I’m sponsored by anyone