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I spent some time playing with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom yesterday and found that I liked a lot of the things it did, but for me, Aperture beats it in a few key areas. The cross-platform nature, Adobe's Camera Raw platform (which isn't tied to the OS and which, by most accounts, beats Apple's in terms of quality), and the years of experience editing digital images all give the Adobe app a lot of strength.

One of the areas in which I feel Aperture could really stand to be improved is image processing. While the basics are covered, some of the more advanced techniques still require trips to Photoshop. There are a lot of good noise reduction Photoshop plugins (or standalone apps) out there. Or good vignetting software (both to add or remove). I shouldn't have to go into Photoshop to apply a white gradient margin to product shots I want to place on websites with white backgrounds.

There may be various reasons why Aperture doesn't yet support "processing" filters of this nature (I have two plugins, currently, but they're both for exporting). APIs, once opened, are tough to move, so perhaps Apple is holding off from opening up the API until they're certain they've got it right. Or perhaps they never intend to open it up, or they're preparing a separate Photoshop competitor, or they simply don't see the need, or Adobe has threatened to stop developing Photoshop, or… it's all speculation. I just know I'd like to see some image processing plugins.

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