Blog Of Rick Pepper

I haven’t spent a ton of time with these applications, but after some productive use of them thought I’d offer these observations; both seem way too bloated and clumsy, really what I think would get the job done is just a more robust RAW import tool for Photoshop, designed to be just that – the front door to Photoshop. Being able to browse a group of photos that may have something in common i.e. hard-to-get white balance shot in fluorescent lighting or some other odd environment, where you want to be able to copy the settings from one and rapidly apply to all the others en masse is nice, but I don’t need [yet] another black hole to store my photos or even a database of previews of my photos in, I just need a robust RAW access point for Photoshop. But I think Lightroom wins here as far as easily dropping in images from a shoot, processing them and then just deleting them (source files included if you wish.) That’s close to a transparent front end for Photoshop.
As far as GUIs and such, Lightroom feels more like Elements than Photoshop – the interface kind of has that dumbed-down feel, too much navigation garb that gets in the way. But I’ll give it this; it will install and run on my [ancient] Mirrored-drive door G4, and with patience gets the job done whereas Aperture has to be hacked to even install and then performance is decidedly not.
Here is an image processed first with just Camera RAW in Photoshop CS, and lots of fiddling with layers and screening and such to lighten up the grass and trees in the foreground, 10 minutes worth at least (well, okay, 5 minutes.) Now compare that to about 1 minute in Lightroom and only a noise filter pass (Noise Ninja) in Photoshop.

Photoshop Camera RAW

Lightroom