Over the last week or so, I've picked up the updates for these two DAM packages (Digital Asset Management) and have been having a dig around both to see what has changed from the previous versions.

To start with Adobe Lightroom has changed is name to Photoshop Lightroom, which makes me wonder whether it will get packaged with Photoshop CS3. The user interface has changed quite a bit but the basic screen panel layout is still the same. The web gallery that I used below is still there but its intermediate image has gone in b4. The grid chooser has gone graphical rather than using two text inputs. The grid allows for anything from a 3x3 page to 8x5, but I think that horizontal range seems a bit excessive as there aren't many systems that would be able to display 8 thumbnails across. I think it would have been better to have the maximum range go to 5x8.

Onto Aperture 1.5..

To get some of the new features in Aperture, the update procedure involved three steps: updating the iWork/iLife applications; then a OSX 10.4.8 update and finally a 125MB Aperture update.

Once Aperture has been started after the update, the Aperture Library needs to be modified to a new format and all the image thumbnails are regenerated. This last bit can take quite a long time. If you modify a batch of images then Aperture will regenerate the thumbnails again. One nice touch is that the regeneration process pauses if you do anything in Aperture, but it won't let you quit the application if its not finished the regeneration.

I'll add more when I've had chance to do a bit more digging.