Lightroom made a believer out of me. There are a couple factors in its favor that don’t entirely have to do with its feature set, one is the $99 educational buy I qualify for as a homeschooler, the other is it’s performance on less-than-bleeding-edge hardware. For right now my MDD 1.25 dually has to do the job, and Lightroom officially runs on it and can get the job done. Beyond that the loupe is the only thing from Aperture that I’m jealous of, but at least the RGB values are displayed and dynamically follow the cursor in Lightroom. The main selling point beyond that is that it seems to be a more transparent and less demanding front-end to Photoshop, it’s just easier to relegate it to being a “pro” RAW converter to replace the Camera RAW plug-in, and skip all the library features. “Fill light” rules! (UPDATE 3/18/10) I take back my narrow-minded view of the product and will say that I use the library features as much as the rest of it.
