Camera Labs

What are the advantages, if any, of using the likes of Adobe Lightroom or Aperture if you already own Photoshop?

As a newcomer to Digital Photography I had assumed both packages where simply cut down versions of Photoshop with a more focused workflow for Photographers. After a little reading though it seems a lot of people are using these packages in conjunction with Photoshop.

Do they offer something extra over Photoshop and Bridge or is it simply a matter of a more streamlined workflow?

Steve

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Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-200mm VR, Micro-Nikkor AF-S 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED VR, Nikkor 50mm AF-S f1.4G

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40447824@N06/sets/

Lightroom/Aperture offer image management and library tools that Photoshop doesn't have. Basically it allows you to organise, label, tag your images and offers a quicker workflow for editing images. Note that you can't edit images in the same way or to the same as with Photoshop - ie. you can't clone parts of the image or remove unwanted elements of your image in Lightroom (and I assume the same for Aperture, which I've not used to any great extent). You can only really edit the image as a whole in LR. I use LR as it's quick and easy to adjust colour, lighting etc. and keep my images organised and then simply upload the images I want to Flickr. I haven't really used Bridge but I don't think it offers the same management functionality as LR. Best thing - download the trial, give it a whirl and see what you think. Aperture has just come out as a 2.0 version and Adobe is releasing LR 2.0 fairly soon too, which you can try out.

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Nikon D700 | 20mm f2.8 | 28mm f2.8 | 50mm f1.8 | 70-300 f4-5.6 | SB800 | flickr | serial photography

Thanks for that Welly, I will download the trials and have a play with them.

Steve

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Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-200mm VR, Micro-Nikkor AF-S 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED VR, Nikkor 50mm AF-S f1.4G

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40447824@N06/sets/