Judging from the increasing sales of DSLRs, more and more people are getting into digital photography in a serious way. You only have to look around any tourist zone in the world, and you'll see a surprising number of shooters using cameras capable of far superior images to those possible with point-and-shoots and smart phone cameras. But even the cameras on-board those smart phones have improved impressively, themselves, with new entries like the "41-megapixel" Nokia Lumia 1020.
All this points to the fact that people care about their photographs, and want them to be the best they can be. Pro photographers have long known that having top-notch hardware is just half the story: You need software that can take the photographic "negatives" from those great digital cameras and turn them into really pleasing images. The choice used to be simple: You used Photoshop. End of story. But while Photoshop is great for working on individual photos, it's weaker when it comes to importing, organizing, rating, and outputting the photos.
In 2005 Aperture made its debut to address just these needs, as a more pro-level version of iPhoto. It offered Photoshop-like image adjustments along with tools for photo organization, as well as for creating slideshows, printing, and sharing to online services such as Flickr. But Aperture lacked, and still largely lacks, the emphasis on workflow, which takes you through discrete steps of the photo processing.
Two years later Adobe came out with Lightroom, which combined just those workflow characteristics with the photo-specific adjustment tools from Photoshop itself, to serve the needs of professional photographers. LightroomVisit Site at Adobe UK left out the design-type tools—typography, layering, masking and all that sort of thing. Lightroom did include the editing tools needed to get photos looking their best—lighting, color, sharpness, and the like.
It's worth noting that there are several things each app does equally or nearly equally well—raw conversion is one. Their ability to work with camera raw files lets you get all of the image data from your camera's sensor, for a lot more powerful corrections to white balance, exposure, and more. There's an excellent explanation of the advantages you get by shooting to raw format on Cambridge in Color.
Other similarities include both programs' ability to correct specific areas of a photo with local adjustment brushes, work with tone curves and histograms, perform cropping, lay out and send photo books out for printing, to create quality slideshows. They also both do a good job of mapping your geo-tagged photos and of directly uploading them to online services such as Flickr, SmugMug, and Facebook.
There's a whole site dedicated just to the topic of Aperture vs. Lightroom at aperturevslightroom.com, with regular features on different specific aspects of photo processing in the two applications. But here, I'll stick to presenting the major differences and strengths of each, to help you make the choice.
Windows? Advantage Lightroom
If you're running a Mac, you have the choice that the title of this article posits: If you run a Windows System, it's a moot point, since Aperture is not available for that operating system. And there are reasons photographers might prefer to run Windows, with more upgrade options for storage and other system components. That's less of an issue if you're using an old-school Power Mac, but iMacs, Mac minis, an MacBooks are not internally upgradable.
And Windows users also have more photo workflow software applications to choose among: in addition to Lightroom, worthy options include ACDSee Pro 6, Corel AfterShot Pro, CyberLink PhotoDirectorVisit Site for Pricing at CyberLink, and Serif PhotoPlus. But that's not to say you don't have other photo workflow options in OS X: ACDSee Pro 3 is available, and there's even the completely free, open-source darktable
Mac User Moving Up from iPhoto: Advantage Aperture
Since the release of Aperture 3.3, the process of importing photos from the entry-level photo app to Aperture has become virtually non-existent: Now iPhoto projects can be accessed directly from within Aperture. This is because both applications now use the same library. On a side note, if you use Apple's iCloud Photo Stream, these two apps are good choices, since support for that online photo storage service is built right into Aperture.
Mode-Based Interface: Your Call
One of the biggest differentiators between Aperture and Lightroom is all about modes and the lack thereof. All this means is that each step in your photo processing has a specific interface, or mode, for getting that particular task done. So along the top of the Lightroom interface are several buttons (you can choose a custom set of these if you like), including Library, Develop, Print, Slideshow, Map, and so on.
Some will prefer Aperture's modeless interface. This lets you use tabs on a control panel to switch among all of the programs.
Face Recognition: Advantage Aperture
The ability to organize your photos by the people whose visages appear in them can be a useful organizational tool for amateurs and pros alike. Bring up all photos showing Aunt Bessie with Cousin Cathy? Face recognition makes that a simple task compared with having to page through hundreds of images. For some reason, Lightroom still lacks this feature, though Adobe's consumer-level Photoshop Elements offering does include excellent face recognition.
Lens Profile Corrections: Advantage Lightroom
If the idea is to get your photo looking as close to the actual scene that was in front of your camera when you clicked the shutter, then one way to achieve that goal is to compensate for any known imperfections of the equipment you're using. Lightroom can automatically correct lens-introduced problems in barrel and pincushion distortion, vignetting (dark photo edges), and chromatic aberration, by adjusting the image based on the known characteristics of the lens you used. Adobe is aggressive about keeping these corrections up to date as new cameras and lenses are introduced.
Geometry Correction: Advantage Lightroom
Lightroom (and Photoshop CC) recently added a tool called Upright, which can fix perspective distortion that results from wide angle lenses or from non-direct camera angles. Aperture still is without any correction of geometry issues in photos.
Geotagging and Maps: Tie
Both applications do an excellent job of placing your geo-tagged photos on a map, though I slightly prefer Lightroom's mini-slideshow right on the map:
Lighting Fixes: Advantage Lightroom
While Aperture does offer a good selection of lighting adjustments, I was unable to get the kind of results Lightroom made possible, particularly when trying to bring out shadowed areas without blowing out the sky and other brights. Another ace in the hole for Lightroom is its unique Clarity adjustment, which can bring a dull photo to life without giving it the oversaturated look you often get with most programs' Vibrance adjustment. Clarity adds contrast only to midtones, for a punchier result. Aperture's Definitiion adjuster now mimics Clarity, though it doesn't offer as much range of adjustment.
Chromatic Aberration and Noise Reduction: Advantage Lightroom
Chromatic aberration is a lens distortion that shows up mostly on very high contrast areas towards the edges of a wide-angle image, yet it can crop up in other situations. Corrections tools in photo software has long been of dubious help: the color sliders the tools have offered often only allowed me to make worse distortions, rather than making those colored fringes go away. Aperture still offers this kind of hit-or-miss CA correction, but Lightroom has adopted the technique of the excellent DxO Optics Pro—just automatically fix CA based on the lens used. This technique removes the distortion with no fuss whatever.
Video Editing: Advantage Lightroom
Yes, it's true that this is a comparison of photo workflow applications, but because every digital camera made within the last few years has video recording capability, the application you use to import from said camera should be able to do something with video files. Lightroom not only lets you import your DSLR's video clips, but you can also crop them and apply some adjustments to them as well. In Aperture, you can import video, but you can't do any editing with it.
The Verdict
By my lights, Lightroom comes out ahead in this head-to-head comparison, in the features that matter most. That's why it's PCMag's Editors' Choice photo workflow application. Of course, there's no hard and fast rule about which photo workflow application is best for you. It's a matter of what's important to you. If being able to do everything the app offers without switching modes and face tagging are important to you (and you're a Mac user), then Aperture is the way to go.
If a structured workflow, lens-specific corrections, and geometry correction are of importance to you, then Lightroom is for you. Of course, whichever of these you choose, you'll be doing yourself a favor over using an entry-level photo app: Each is a top-notch program offering excellent ways to import, organize, adjust, and output your digital photos.