A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was looking into Adobe's Lightroom and would be following up with a look at Apple's Aperture.  So I'd like to poll the blog readers to see if there's much interest in these hybrid solutions for managing and editing your photos.

Last week I was able to attend the Kelby Seminar on Lightroom in Portland Oregon. I was pleased to see that what I had thought was a pretty nice program was very impressive when an expert showed it off.

Initially, I believed that the digital asset management (DAM) part of Lightroom was the key feature. After the seminar, I came away thinking that if the DAM is the root system of this “flower,” then image handling and editing are the stalk and bloom

Edits are done on proxy images; the source image is never touched and you can use the same source image to generate multiple variations of your image edits. I would have loved this when I use to do color work for agencies. Once the edits are done, you process the image to meet your needs: web, offset printing, etc. Best of all, your edits are saved with the image and easily updated or changed as needed.

So I've chatted up a program that supports digital watermarking if you build droplets in Photoshop. I want to learn if our current users and blog readers are using either of these solutions from Adobe or Apple. If there's enough of you using these applications, we should as well.

So please vote; the poll is open till August 31st 2009. If there's a lot of interest, I'll extend the polling or add some additional questions to see what you are doing with these applications.

Note: Spitfrog commented that I should include ACDSee Pro.  I've only read through the ACDSee Pro website and it appears to be a contender so I've added it to the Poll.

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Thanks for your vote!

Don