Last year John was kind enough to post an entry on his blog about how Aperture and Lightroom were faring in the pro community. The results as published by InfoTrends, an independent research firm, were conclusive in that Lightroom was the application of choice for pro photographers.(after Photoshop of course) InfoTrends has repeated the survey and the results are even more telling. Here are the results for both 2007 and 2008.
Question: What camera raw conversion software does your company use? Please check all that apply.
|
2007
|
2008
|
|
| Photoshop Camera Raw Plug-in |
66.5%
|
62.2%
|
| Lightroom |
23.6%
|
35.9%
|
| Aperture |
5.5%
|
7.5%
|
| On the Mac Platform Only | ||
| Lightroom |
26.6%
|
40.4%
|
| Aperture |
14.3%
|
14.6%
|
Even when we remove the Windows responses from the survey, it’s clear that Lightroom is preferred by a large margin over Aperture.
Ultimately numbers are just numbers so please draw your own conclusion but from my perspective, the professional community has already decided that products from the Photoshop family remain their tools of choice.
Footnotes:
- This research is not available free of charge so we needed InfoTrend’s permission to share a small portion of the results.
- The survey was conducted in North America in June & July of 2008, prior to the release of Lightroom 2.
- One question that should immediately spring to mind is how did the Mac only usage stay static while Aperture’s overall usage increased? There was an increase in the number of respondents who are using the Mac platform relative to 2007 so even though the percentage of those using Aperture on the Mac remained constant, the rise in Mac usage overall brought up the total number of Aperture users in the market.