I have been a lightroom user for over an year and just wanted to try out the new Aperture v3. What got me excited about Aperture are the two cool features – making books with professional templates and slideshows with stills, videos and audios.

I tried to evaluate Aperture for my day to day editing which I am pretty fast in LR with the keyboard shortcuts. The feature that makes my workflow fastest is how the arrow keys work with LR. The left and right keys always browse through the photos. The up and down keys modify values whenever focus is on a adjustment slider like exposure, white balance, etc. This makes editing much faster than with wacom tablet and pen, since the increments are spaced apart thereby needing less computations. However, in Aperture, both left/right and up/down movement of arrow keys browse through the photos and I need to use mouse on the sliders – a big disappointment.

I might check out the book and slideshow features, but for the time being LR will remain my workhorse editing tool. Unless someone can show me that Aperture can be configured to be as fast as LR in the editing department.