From Nikon ViewNX to Aperture or Lightroom?

Question

Currently my main DSLR is the Nikon D300 and I am happy with the way Nikon's ViewNX organizes my RAW files.
But I am considering Aperture or Lightroom because I am going to buy one more camera and it will not be a Nikon, so I want ONE application to manage all my RAW files.
I've been test-driving the Aperture 2 and Lightroom 2 free trials for one week or two and I'm pretty satisfied with the organizing capabilities of both. The only point I'm not satisfied with is that the colors and sharpness of the NEF files are not quite right when opened with either Aperture or Lightroom.
Is it true that RAW files are best opened by the original camera manufacturer's own software? This issue aside, I'm not sure whether Aperture of Lightroom is better. Also, as I'm using a Power Mac G5 and I'm not likely to upgrade to an Intel machine in the near future, I'm concerned that the upcoming
Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 will not support PPC Macs anymore. So if I'm going to purchase a copy of either Aperture 2 or Lightroom 2 for commercial use, I want to do it quick.

Answer 1

The colors and sharpness in the default rendering from Aperture and Lightroom will differ from Nikon View. That's largely a given, as the "default" rendering that View uses is based on proprietary Nikon information. So Aperture and Nikon will both do a default render based on the RAW data and on the work that the respective engineering product teams did to get a result that looks "good."
Sharpening should be easy; RAW files themselves are typically not that sharp - the RAW converters apply little sharpening. You can easily do this yourself in the respective applications… Aperture's default edge sharpening is fairly good but not very aggressive. Lightroom's sharpening can be a more manual procedure, but can also achieve very good results. I would absolutely encourage you to spend a fair bit of time experimenting with the sharpening in both programs and look at some specific parts of images at 100% and seeing which you prefer.
As far as color goes, I prefer the default rendering of Aperture to Lightroom at this time, but that's for my Canon camera. Lightroom 2 brought camera profiles which does help a fair bit. But I'd encourage you to look at Aperture's default color rendering, versus a few of the Lightroom profiles, and decide if you have a preference. Lightroom 3 is attempting to improve their default renderings, but running a PPC machine you don't have that option. Given no such product as "Aperture 3" has been announced by Apple who knows if/when/what it will look like or support from an OS or architecture perspective.