To get the lowdown on the latest features in Lightroom, check out NAPP's site below where you'll find the very enthusiastic Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski waxing lyrical about Lightroom 2 - I 'felt' sorry for poor ol' Lightroom 1 which they were equally enthusiastic about just recently...! (nothing to do with book sales.... much!)

http://www.photoshopuser.com/lightroom2/

To sum up the features:

Price:

Lightroom 2 £205.62 plus shipping

Aperture 2 £129 FREE shipping

1. LR2 adds a very clever 'brush' which you can brush colour, vibrancy even sharpehing! - basicly it's a selection brush mask tool but very smart and good you can vary the brush size, it has 'intelligent' edge 'magnetism' and allows you to paint many types of correction. Aperture doesn't have the same tool, it has one which is closer to Nikon's Capture NX which allows you to target instances of a colour and then to adjust them. This is the biggest new and desirable feature in LR2 and for some reason enough to get Lightroom. This feature will almost certainly make it into Photoshop CS4 (my guess) so if you use CS3 and know that you will upgrade then....? I find I'm using Photoshop less and less as Aperture does most things I need.

2. LR2 has added Smart Collections, Aperture has this already, it's called Smart Project and is probably more flexible.

3. Slideshow now has a black start and stop slide that you can add your nameplate to - it's simpler and better to 'photoshop' a standard image and use this instead. Apple suggest for clever slideshows you use iWork's Keynote - and they are right!

4. Printing - LR2 has a neat ability to mix sizes on paper and best fit them, so a 4x5 a 6x7 and three 2x3 and fit them, how you cut them out successfully or how often this feature gets used remains to be seen. A better feature is Aperture's Light Table where you can adjust images on a lightbox and print the areas you desire - effectively the same as LR2 but with ultimate flexibility - Aperture shares the repositioning tools of other Apple apps that mean you can line things up just so.

5. Keywords - Aperture's keywording is neat in that you can save keyword sets that then have an onscreen mini keyboard approach to placing them. LR2 takes this futher in that it looks at where you last used 'sea' and offers 'sand', 'beach' and 'shingle' as words you might want to use - neat!

In investigating this area of Aperture I've discovered that not only can you build virtual 'keyboards' of keywords - a set for 'Boating', a set for "My Italian Hols' and so on (thus effectively matching the clever LR2 feature (which in reality only adds suggestions of keywords from images you have formed 'groups' from in the past)), but you can also edit the ITPC and EXIF information that accompanies each image in the viewer and grid panes. Put another way, selecting 'Capture and Keywords' as the set choice for the info below each image can be anything you like - Lens Used, Date, anything!

6. Second monitor support - new to LR2 - already gorgeous and intelligent on Aperture.

7. Output sharpening - LR2 adds it, Aperture has it.

8. Multiple drive support - in both.

9. 16 bit printing, 64 bit compliant - you know who you are....!

10. Plug-in architecture - now in LR2 - don't like this as all it adds is another route to spending extra for functionality which would otherwise be built in - just look how much it costs to build in the Capture NX functionality into Aperture by using the Nik Software plug-in - I'll pass!

11. Vignette - it appears this didn't work in LR1, if you set a vignette and then cropped the vignette applied to the full image meaning you might end up with one dark corner... to overcome this LR2 has post crop effects. Aperture doesn't behave incorrectly, I didn't know, I just checked!

Conclusion: Lightroom is better than it was, it was already nice to use, it's now better.

Aperture, if you use Mac get it, if you've got it, there's little in LR2 to change from Aperture for (the local adjustment brush is the main reason - although if I regularly took photos that needed that amount of piddling I'd give up!).

For me, as a previous LR user, Aperture still wins because it's fast, it integrates with other Apple apps, the RAW processing is better out of the box than LR, the auto-adjust works (Lightroom now admit it wasn't good in LR1 and that now it works better....thanks!), Apple don't make Photoshop so they have a compelling reason to 'not hold back' in Aperture ... get Aperture!

This is Apple's page for Aperture tutorials - you'll be suprised at what it can do:

http://www.apple.com/aperture/tutorials

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