Late yesterday afternoon I pulled the trigger and bought Lightroom 4. Yes that’s right I haven’t had Lightroom before. You see previous to this year I was on a mac and I used Aperture, you may remember me posting about building my own editing work station around Christmas last year which ran Windows 7. Unfortunately no Aperture for me.

Up until now I have managed with the “management” module on Paint Shop Pro x4 and various other solutions but they were clunky and not very efficient. If there was one piece of software that I was missing on my new editing workstation it was Aperture.

[pullquote_right]It’s definitely no Aperture[/pullquote_right]Late yesterday afternoon while I was doing my usual backup routine I decided to get Lightroom 4. My first impression after installing it was, it’s definitely no Aperture. Apple make a very sexy user interface. Adobe on the other hand are not that way inclined.

I haven’t gotten over the user interface yet but at least it’s usable and pretty self explanatory.

My experience so far has been great. My only annoyance with Apple’s Aperture is the way the library was built. A flat file with all the images inside. With Lightroom I was able to import all the images, reference them with their locations on the various drives all without having to read any help documentation. It was just a simple process.

I’ve had a little play around in the Develop module creating to images and sending them off to a client from this mornings shoot. It only required minor adjustments but the whole process was quick and simple.

Some of the things that I have noticed so far are the recovery options work pretty well, and the noise reduction. I’ve been using NoiseNinja for noise reduction for as long as I can remember. What I’ve seen in Lightroom 4 may just rival NoiseNinja, I’ll need to do some further testing.

I’ve only scraped the surface of Lightroom 4 in the couple of hours I have used it but I will have a more in-depth review in a few days.

Do you use Lightroom 4, what are your thoughts?