Lightroom 3 vs. Aperture 3 for an amateur

[tgold]

Hi,
I have downloaded the aperture trial and the lightroom beta and am unsure on which to purchase when available. I am a mac junkie so I love the ease and relatively low learning curve with Aperture but I am really diggin' all of the cool features in Lightroom.

I take mainly portraits and outdoor animals (birds, etc). I take more serious photos on the same camera that I will shoot snapshots of my kids. I have been shooting in raw + jpeg because I do not have time to process all of my photos (or maybe there is a quick way to process them all??).

To my point, I seem to have outgrown iphoto and would love some input on which program to buy.

Thanks in advance for your help! Please be kind as this is my first post

[Sime]

Welcome.

I don't think anyone can realllly advise you - we've all got opinions, but for example, I started with Aperture a couple of years back, after three weeks I was using Lightroom and still am - the workflow just suited me more.

You can apply a pre-set to your photos when you import to Lightroom or Aperture - means if they were all shot in say the same lighting conditions, you could apply a filter / setting to all of them. You can also cut and paste actions (What you did to one photo you can copy to another)

Try them both - see what fits you.

Sime