What use is Aperture? Or Adobe Lightroom?

Apple's Aperture is a RAW converter and image management system for Mac OS X. It is a high end program with a vast amount of options and functions. It supports RAW files from a large number of manufacturers, but not as many as the competitor Adobe Lightroom.

As so often, it is very difficult to tell which program is "best". If one of the programs does not support your camera, you should clearly stay away from that program. If you have Windows, you do not have to consider Aperture, as it is Mac OS X only. If you need to batch process files, either program will do fine. If you need to script a program, Aperture can be scripted with AppleScript, but it seems like Lightroom 3 still has very limited scripting capabilities.

Aperture uses the same RAW converter as Mac OS X, which means that any image that can be opened in Aperture, also can be opened in Preview or Quick Look. Lightroom uses the same RAW converter as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw, even though the version may differ.

Both programs have the following main purposes:

• Adjust RAW files.
• Sort and manage images.

If one already has other programs that do this well enough, one probably does not need either of the programs.

Both Adobe and Apple often have trial versions of the software to download to further explore the programs.