Lightroom vs. Photoshop vs. Aperture

Brendan O'Connell · Jun 4, 2015

Which is best for a pretty tech-savy person with a Mac? I'd like a program in which I can both organize (Lightroom?) and perform intermediate/advanced level edits to my photos. Also, do any of these have a watermark/digital signature function? Loaded question, I know.

Thanks for the suggestions!

The_Traveler · Jun 4, 2015

aperture isn't being supported anymore

difference between lighroom and photoshop - Google Search

and yes

sashbar · Jun 4, 2015

CaptureOne 8.3 Pro

Derrel · Jun 4, 2015

Aperture has been end-of-life'd by Apple...so...that's now a dead-end. Depends what you mean by intermediate/advanced; Lightroom would be my recommendation for day to day work and actual, real-worl;d efficiency and speed and compatibility as both an organizational app and an editing/workflow app. I came to Lightroom only in 2012, having listened to so-called "experts" on here who constantly belittled Lightroom, and blew lots of hot air about the superiority of Photoshop, or whop constantly trumpeted about the "identical engine found in both Photoshop and Lightroom"; the fact is, within a month of moving to Lightroom, I found that I barely ever needed to open anything in PS.

Lightroom is vastly more-efficient at handling many images than Photoshop ever will be. If you are doing "photography", Lightroom is the answer for many people. If you want to convert two or three or four RFAW files out of every one hundred, there are many standalone RAW developers that work well. If you want to do photo-illustration, Photoshop has the pixel-level editing advantage that most other applications lack.

Forkie · Jun 4, 2015

I'll always advocate Adobe Camera Raw/Photoshop for editing, but if you have no plans to do any advanced editing like compositing or layering and masking and need organisational functions as well, it has to be Lightroom.

pixmedic · Jun 4, 2015

if you dont mind $10 a month, get photoshop AND lightroom.
95% of our work is done strictly in Lightroom, so if I were going to recommend just one program, it would be that one.
I have been using PS since CS2, and LR since LR4. I have no experience with any other editing programs, except a tiny bit with GIMP, but that was so long ago, Red Hat and Yellow Dog were new at the time.
Photoshop does more on the heavy editing end, but lightroom does plenty and is a far better organizational tool.
when Adobe dropped the PS/LR CC subscription to $10 a month, I jumped on it.

chuasam · Jun 4, 2015

Aperture is dead, baby.
I prefer Lightroom, my GF prefers PhotoMechanic. Depends on your workflow.

Dave442 · Jun 4, 2015

LightRoom, or now as part of the CC photographer bundle with PS.

KmH · Jun 4, 2015

Lightroom was designed by Adobe as a front end application to compliment Photoshop.
That's why Adobe's Photography Program includes both LR and Ps CC 2014.

The_Traveler · Jun 5, 2015

Derrel said:
Lightroom is vastly more-efficient at handling many images than Photoshop ever will be. If you are doing "photography", Lightroom is the answer for many people. If you want to convert two or three or four RFAW files out of every one hundred, there are many standalone RAW developers that work well. If you want to do photo-illustration, Photoshop has the pixel-level editing advantage that most other applications lack.

Just to comment on what might be a little misleading about the term - photo-illustration.

Lightroom is excellent at managing images and at doing global changes to an entire image or group of images.
It is rather clumsy at doing changes to very specific areas and doing complex editing because of its inflexibility in selecting areas and then managing the selections.
If I want to change the brightness, contrast, sharpness etc in specific well circumscribed areas, it is possible to do this in LR but it isn't possible to manage those changes individually retrospectively because LR doesn't have a good mechanism to separate the edits.
When I am done with a complex edit, doing lots of different changes in lots of different places, I can look at the PS file and make change in each of those edits no matter where it is in the process - early or late. With LR, edits are piled on top of each other and you can step back through the process (if step 4 was wrong, you can remove steps 10-4 and redo them all; PS allows you to go to any step and edit only that one)
Flexibility, degree of control and variety of edits available are just not available in LR. For that reason, high end retouchers don't use LR.

Where LR is particularly poor is in selective sharpening and I usually sharpen in some other application, mostly PS.

If you usually do just global edits and don't need the control of PS, LR will do it for you.

sashbar · Jun 5, 2015

When I switched to Mac recently I used both Lightroom 6 and CaptureOne 8 in parallel for a month, and by the end of the trial period I just could not justify keeping LR, apart from the fact that it was twice cheaper.

fjrabon · Jun 5, 2015

I am gradually switching to Lightroom from aperture. For now aperture is fine, but I want to make the switch slowly before I HAVE to.

I use Lightroom with the Nik Software plug-ins and then photoshop occasionally if I need to layer mask anything.

99% of the time it's just Lightroom for color photographs. For black and white I pretty much always use silver efex pro 2 as the Lightroom plugin.

Brendan O'Connell · Jun 6, 2015

Derrel said:
Aperture has been end-of-life'd by Apple...so...that's now a dead-end. Depends what you mean by intermediate/advanced; Lightroom would be my recommendation for day to day work and actual, real-worl;d efficiency and speed and compatibility as both an organizational app and an editing/workflow app. I came to Lightroom only in 2012, having listened to so-called "experts" on here who constantly belittled Lightroom, and blew lots of hot air about the superiority of Photoshop, or whop constantly trumpeted about the "identical engine found in both Photoshop and Lightroom"; the fact is, within a month of moving to Lightroom, I found that I barely ever needed to open anything in PS.

Lightroom is vastly more-efficient at handling many images than Photoshop ever will be. If you are doing "photography", Lightroom is the answer for many people. If you want to convert two or three or four RFAW files out of every one hundred, there are many standalone RAW developers that work well. If you want to do photo-illustration, Photoshop has the pixel-level editing advantage that most other applications lack.

Thanks for the insight.