So I made the jump. I’ve downloaded Aperture 3, the 30-day trial version. Just to see what the fuss is all about.

I’ve been using Lightroom for a few years now and I’m quite happy – and more importantly, familiar with – its workflow, quirks, abilities and shortcomings. But Apple’s generous gesture (doesn’t happen often) of allowing us mere mortals to test drive something for free for a month meant I couldn’t resist. Even if that meant losing almost a gigabyte of space on my hard drive (that’s how big the software is).

So I have 30 days to decide whether all those nice tutorial videos promising fantastic cool features mean much or whether Apple is simply repackaging Lightroom’s existing functionality and applying its usual glossy finish to deliver a shinier, but comparable tool.

I should probably compare the latest version of Aperture with the beta release of Lightroom 3, but to be honest I’m more interested in determining which package copes better with the functions I use every day rather than which package offers redundant functionality, which makes great headlines, but remains unused. I’m hoping to test the extras too (although I do realise that what I consider extras someone else may view as essential functionality), but my aim is clear: I need to know whether for the basic, day-to-day functions it actually makes sense to make the jump.

If you, like me, are also looking for an answer to this question, I’ll post something on this subject in the next, er, 30 days. But hopefully sooner.

If you have however made up your mind already, I’d love to hear what you have to say.