LR vs. Aperture

Question

I've just started playing with the demo that is now available and I'm looking for reviews/and or opinions on LR vs. Aperture.
I posted in an older thread how I'm considering LR and is there any conversion software. For now the easiest approach for me (since I'm sill playing with it) is just export the masters out of aperture.
Here's some things I'm wondering if LR has
What I like about aperture
1. Stacks
2. easy rating system (I type 1, 2,3 etcs and the image is rated with 1 star, 2 stars, 3 stars etc.)
3. Smart albums.
4. lift & stamp tools
I'm not sure which package does a better job on sharpening and/or exposure. I use the lift & stamp tools quite a lot and I've not been able to mimc its ease of use in LR. I generally set the WB to a specific setting for a group of shots and its easy to just keep stamping in aperture. I don't know if there's any short cuts with LR, but I have to chose each image and then click on paste, a little more cumbersome.

Answer 1

There are a lot of Adobe insiders/loyalists on this board, so don't expect Aperture to get much love. I'll try to give a more balanced reaction, although bear in mind that as I'm not an Adobe insider, I've only been using the v1.0 Lightroom release since yesterday.
What I think you'll find is that overall, both programs offer ways to accomplish the same things. They both give you good tools for examining, comparing, and rating images. Both of them now let you make stacks and work with your existing file structure (Lightroom betas had no stacking, old versions of Aperture couldn't handle files in place.) You may find you prefer one way or the other, but you can get most jobs done in both. For example, Aperture has 'albums' and Lightroom has 'collections' -- they're a bit different from each other and each implementation has some minor advantages over the other, but both give you ways of arbitrarily grouping your images into various sets.
Of the two, Aperture probably will be a bit more daunting at first (unless you've previously used another Apple pro app such as Final Cut) because a lot of its power features are most easily invoked by keyboard shortcuts. Once you've used it enough to learn the shortcuts you need most, it's very, very slick and you can work quickly. Lightroom looks a bit more cluttered but also is a bit more approachable at first glance because most of its features have visible interface elements (although there are still a lot of shortcuts to speed things up.) Again, you'll probably prefer one interface over the other, but you can get your work done with either one.
Aperture's hardware requirements are somewhat taxing, especially for older machines -- although the latest 1.5.2 release seems better, and it should run fine on any current-model Mac. At the entry level, Lightroom seems to run better on lower-end machines -- although my own (limited) experience is that once you get a few thousand images in the database, that advantage disappears. Again, it'll probably come down to cases -- some operations will seem snappier on one than another, and which you prefer depends on which operations are the most important to you.
Aperture still offers a few key features that aren't available in the v1.0 release of Lightroom. Dual monitor support is one (although you won't care about that if you don't have two monitors.) I still think Aperture's loupe
tool is more useful than Lightroom's loupe
view. And if you often deal with groups of images (in layouts, for example) and need an easy, freeform way to see which ones work best together, Aperture's lightbox is a very intuitive way to do it. Lightroom's synchro-scrolling compare view (new in v1.0) is very, very nice and much appreciated, but doesn't do quite the same thing -- it's great for picking which image of three is best, but doesn't help with "how does this one look next to these two?" decisions.
On the other hand, I personally feel that Lightroom has better exposure controls, and that its printing options are more flexible and more useful (although Aperture's ability to generate and order presentation books is appealing; the books are beautiful, if a bit pricey.)
So I suspect that for most people, the choice will come down to individual "must have" or "can't stand" features. For example, I preferred just about everything about Aperture - the interface, the slick shortcuts, the easy ability to move editing projects from one machine to another - but its limited camera support was a deal-breaker for me. I'm a heavy user of an Epson R-D 1 camera, and there's just no way to get Aperture to recognize its raw files.
Apple rolls its own highly-optimized conversion code for the cameras it
does support, which is nice -- but that also means Apple probably never will be as responsive in adding support for new camera models as Adobe can be (Adobe has more incentive, since its libraries support not only for Lightroom but Photoshop, ACR, and Bridge.)
It's great that both programs offer 30-day trial versions, and they'll be similarly priced once Lightroom's introductory price goes away. So I think the only way to find out which is "better" is to give both trial versions a real workout, and see which one feels better to you. It's kind of like choosing Canon vs. Nikon -- they'll both get good shots, but one is going to feel better to you than the other.