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Adobe’s Lightroom 3 is currently in beta testing, and, as expected, comes with more features specially aimed at the more professional photographer. On the other hand, Apple’s Aperture is, arguably, a bit easier to use (in keeping with Apple’s traditional interface capability when compared to Adobe products).

What Does Aperture Do?

Let me cover the basics. First, Aperture lets you work faster (blazingly fast on new Macs) than Lightroom. Imports are faster. Photo sorting and management is faster. Photo enhancement tools are faster and more numerous.

And, photo organizing is faster, thanks to the ability to scan and organize thousands of photos by facial recognition and location (thank you, iPhoto).

Faces is the face recognition function from iPhoto, made even faster in Aperture. Places uses data from GPS-enabled cameras and displays locations on a map.

Aperture also lets you organize photos by keywords, ratings, flags, and labels, or dates, then store your photos on your Mac or another hard disk drive, and provides one click back ups of the entire Library.

Bring photos to full screen with a click and compare enhanced photos with originals. Moving photos around on screen is blazingly quick, faster than Lightroom.

Photoshop Effects Without Photoshop

One thing I noticed about Aperture 3 is how it’s positioned against Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop duo. Adobe wants serious photographers to drop the bigger coin for Lightroom and Photoshop.

Apple’s approach is to give Aperture 3 users more adjustment presets—a quicker way to add professional imaging effects and filters—on a single photo or many photos, including some auto correction tools.

Unlike Photoshop, Aperture provides nondestructive brushes so you can alter a section of a photo without having to create and manage masks or layers.

Looks Are Everything, Fernando!

Apple eye candy is evident in Aperture 3. Sure, you can create a photo slideshow from a project or library, but now you can add audio. And video. In fact, Aperture 3 will create a full on multimedia slideshow—still photos, HD video, audio.

In true Apple fashion, sharing is at the top of the list—Flickr, Facebook, or MobileMe—all choices which make it easier to display and share photos online.

I’ve used iPhoto to create photo books as gifts for relatives. It’s just so freakin’ easy to do. Create an album. Select a book design. Click. Click. Done. The book shows up a week or so later.

Aperture 3 brings similar ease-of-use and professional results to book making. There are more book themes and more printing options.

The New Stuff: Good, Bad, Ugly

Apple claims that Aperture comes with over 200 new features. That’s good, right? Sure. But it’s also a problem with 20th century feature creep. Features are overwhelming. It’s the 21st century already. Make features easier to use.

Aperture’s full screen projects view is made for the 27-inch iMac screen. Fill the whole screen with thumbnails and drag and drop to reorder images in a project. Want to see a close up? Double-click. Done.

How do you navigate dozens of albums in iPhoto? It’s that giant list in the left hand column. It’s growing. Aperture makes navigating a bit easier with the full screen browser attached to a drop down menu navigation.

That means you can bounce all over the place looking for photos, never leaving full screen browser mode. Importing photos is better and bewildering. Better as in more import options, especially if you’re bringing in hundreds of photos, and want to set up adjustment presets on import.

The problem is the options. There are so many—autosplit projects and headers, change import locations, checkboxes, checkboxes, checkboxes. Join RAW and JPEG images or separate. Add specific AppleScript options to a project after import.

Did I mention importing photos is fast? Just drag and drop a folder onto the Aperture icon in the Dock and it takes care of everything else—including much faster thumbnail loading.

The ugly of Aperture 3 is the bewildering complexity. No, I think it’s worse in Lightroom. After all, Adobe, like Microsoft, loves to smother users with more features, more features, more features. And regular update that cost more money.

Apple’s approach with Aperture 3 is to position it between the iPhoto crowd who yearn for more capability, but don’t want to get into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom expense and complexity.

Despite the few hundred new features, Aperture’s learning curve is also typical Apple. Not too bad, but there’s a healthy jump between Aperture 2.x and Aperture 3. For me, the highlights are as follows:

Audio and Video: Apple stays on the curve by giving you ability to bring in HD video (all the rage these days on digital SLRs) and some editing tools (looks and works similar to iMovie). It’s not Final Cut Studio, but it’s integrated nicely.

Slideshow: Nothing in Lightroom matches Apple’s ability to put on a good show. There are more slideshow themes, more transitions, and the ability to mix and match photos with video and audio, and even add text (character generation) overlays.

Printing and Photo Books: Better, better, better, more options. That’s all good, right? Except that’s where the ugly begins. There’s no way to cram that many features into an app without scaring somebody. I’ve been using Aperture (and Lightroom) for a few years. The former is easier for the non-pro. The latter is scary, even for pros.

Aperture 3 fits well between iPhoto and the Lightroom-Photoshop duo. Well done. Worth the upgrade price, for sure, but be prepared to spend some time learning where Apple put all the pieces.