Adobe Photoshop is the standard choice for photographers, graphic artists and Web designers. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom  & Apple’s Aperture are also in the same league but the usage is vastly different. Although Photoshop is most popular & widely used by photographers, but in many ways it’s less relevant to photographers than ever before. As Lightroom & Aperture is aimed squarely at photographers for photo-processing. With this write up we are going to help you choose what is right for you and why.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the most liked tool for the detailed photo editing & designing work. Photoshop provides great features for rollover and Image slicing. Adobe Photoshop includes comprehensive optimization features for producing the highest quality Web graphics with the smallest possible file sizes. You can also create startling animations with it. Designers & Editors know how important precise masking is, PhotoShop lets you do that with various detailing tools. Art history brush, contact sheets, and history palette are some of the smart features, which add to its viability.

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Whether you’re producing printed pages or moving images, you can work more efficiently and produce better results because of its smooth integration across other adobe applications. Buy supporting layer effects, it allows you to quickly add drop shadows, inner and outer glows, bevels, and embossing to layers. It also provides Seamless Web Graphics Workflow. Photoshop is hands-down the BEST for editing.

Photoshop Cons:
• Slower, less precise editing features in Bridge
• Processing lots of images requires actions and can be slower than exporting images from Lightroom
• Much slower with editing and processing a large number of images

Aperture

Apple Aperture is aimed at the professional photographer who shoots predominantly raw files. It helps them to manage their workflow and perform their initial Raw conversion in a better way. Aperture provides adjustment tools such as Histogram to modify color and white balance, but most of the editing of photos is left for Photoshop. It gives users the option of seeing their photographs laid out like slides or negatives on a light table. It boasts of – stars, color-coding and easy techniques for filtering and picking images.

Aperture has moved forward few steps than Photoshop, but most of the editing work has been left for Photoshop as it features seamless Photoshop integration.

Aperture Pros:
Aperture is a step up from the iPhoto software that comes with every Mac, and fairly easy to learn. Adjustments are made in a logical order from top to bottom of the menu. You can store the images in a library or any folder you choose. Aperture also works really well with direct Canon files.

• It is just $79 if you buy it through Apple’s App Store
• Moving forward, it will run on the iPad, and possibly the iPhone – Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop may never offer these options
• It is much nicer and simpler user interface.

Lightroom

Lightroom does a smashing job of basic fixing and editing. It is more advanced tool for photographers. They can use it to have a startling photography effect. Light room has many advanced features, which makes it one of the best tools for photographers and far ahead of the other two. They are

• Nondestructive editing. Nothing is actually changed in an image until the photo is exported.
• Better controls over organizing your photos. Lightroom helps to gather a group of photos to use in a slideshow.
• Lightroom has larger Compare and Survey views of images.
• Quickly customizable interface. Simple keystrokes allow you to perform different
• All Lightroom controls are kept available in panels right next to the photos.
• Always-available History palette, it doesn’t go when you close lightroom.
• You gain more colors to work with compared to Photoshop and with more precise control.
• Local control, or adjusting small parts of a photo without affecting anything else, has long been an important part of photography. In Lightroom 2, you can darken, lighten, and affect color and change sharpness and other aspects of specific areas in the photo simply by brushing your cursor across the areas.
• Photoshop has far more power in its Cloning and Healing Brush tools than Lightroom, but Lightroom offers simple cloning and healing that’s nondestructive.
• Lightroom supports the RAW formats of more cameras than Aperture. Lightroom provides the option of storing images outside the application in the file system.
• It costs less than photoshop.

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Why PhotoShop is advanced than Lightroom?
There are countless image processing plug-ins on the market for doing specialized processing in Photoshop. For example, if your image needs sophisticated noise reduction, you can use the Noiseware plug-in with Photoshop to do a much better job or noise removal than Lightroom can do.

Lightroom’s advantages over Aperture 3
Will always have better integration with Photoshop. Lightroom is backed by bigger and more active user community (So abundant availability for tutorials, etc.) Better noise reduction tool. Especially for photographers the Lens-distortion correction tool  is perfect

Lightroom Cons:

• Have to Import images to work on them
• Slows down with over 10,000 images in the catalog
• For processing just one or two images this is a slower workflow

Photoshop Pros:
• ACR has the same RAW processing controls as Lightroom
• ACR Histogram is specialized to the chosen color space (Lightroom is locked into ProPhoto RGB color space with an sRGB tone curve)
• Don’t have to Import images to open in Bridge or ACR
• Ability to customize processing of RAW images with Photoshop Actions

Pricing and Availability

Get LightRoomGet PhotoShop

Latest version Of Photoshop can be purchased from Adobe store and Adobe authorized reseller and it costs US$999. Latest version of Aperture can be bought for US$199 from Apple Online store or Mac App Store. You can buy latest version of LightRoom from Adobe Store or Adobe Authorized reseller for US$299.

Related posts:

1. Adobe Photoshop CS5 vs Photoshop CS5 extended
2. Web based Alternatives to Photoshop
3. 10 Free Alternatives for Adobe Photoshop Software