Lightroom 3 Beta 2 – Hobbyist Review Part 2

It has been a few weeks since I posted Part 1 of my Lightroom 3 Beta 2 Review and a few things have changed. Adobe has released Camera Raw 5.7 beta which fixes the issues I was having when editing in Photoshop and Apple released Aperture 3.0.2 with many fixes. After finding out Aperture 3.0.2 had several bugs fixed and also supports the iPad so I decided to give it another shot. This time I evaluated Aperture 3.0.2 on my MacBook Pro. It didn’t last long. It just takes WAY too long to create the image previews and overall performance is much slower then Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta 2.

I also enjoy the very deep integration of Photoshop with Lightroom vs Aperture as I do a lot of HDR editing where I open up multiple images as layers in Photoshop. This is very easy to do in Lightroom, not so much in Aperture which is another show stopper for me. I also found out my Photomatix Pro license wouldn’t work with Aperture rather I would have to buy the Aperture plugin.

On flip side, there is one feature that keeps Aperture on my radar – the ability to connect to the library from another computer. I want to be able to open up my Library on my MAC mini media center so I can show off my images. This is impossible with Lightroom which drives me batty. I’m stuck manually exporting my images to an ‘itunes’ folder on my unRAID file server. Then I have to go into iPhoto on the mini and import in all the photos. It’s a major pain which continues to motivate me to look at Aperture but for now I’m holding off and staying with Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta 2.

I watched some Adobe CS5 launch videos this week and it looks like Photoshop CS5 will have a new enhanced HDR wizard which should be interesting to compare to Photomatix. It’ll also be interesting to see how CS5 integrates with LR3 compared to Aperture thus the saga continues… Look for Part 3 of this review after CS5 is released!