I've been convinced that I need Lightroom in my workflow!

I've been using a combination of Bridge/Photoshop and Aperture to maintain my shots. Bridge to sort out the RAWs and organise on disk, Photoshop for the pre-edit and edit the images with Aperture to keep track of the JPGs and all the photo meta data at the end.

I've been pondering whether to bother with Lightroom for some time but I wasn't convinced I could find a place for it in my workflow. I actually started off by watching Chris Orwig's course on Lightroom 3 from Lynda.com ( been a member for several months now, well worth it! ) just to find out if I was missing anything. I find Mr Orwig's Californian nasal tones a bit harsh but I stuck with it so I could get up to speed quickly before getting the demo of LR. He convinced me I needed it and what's more convinced me to dump Aperture completely.

The most important aspects to me are being able to organise the images without some proprietary structure, I just want to keep my DNGs and PSDs organised my way but have something manage the meta-data and location for the images. ( check! ) Mapping is not essential but is massive bonus as being an outdoor photographer you need to keep track of places you want to go back to at certain times of the year and that could be months and months ahead. ( LR4 check! ). I want a flexible and easy to manage keywording system, ideally with groupings of words. ( check! ). I want something I can store any sort of meta-data about an image and then when I export that image the meta-data gets pumped into export formatted image as well. (check!). Ideally I'd like to be able to stop maintaining three libraries, one for DNGs, one for PSDs and one for JPGs. ( check! ) Down to one library for DNGs and PSDs. I wanted to be able to dump JPGs of any configuration from the original PSDs without a lot of faffing about. ( check! ). The other advantage is that if I ever decide to move off Mac OSX and back to Windows, then at least my Lightroom catalogs should be compatibile unlike Aperture which is Mac only. Unlike the wedding or product shooters who have to wade through hundreds of images after each shoot, I usually only have around 100 raw images at the end of a morning's shoot and I make some very intricate edits to my shots so I can't see me using the editing suite in Lightroom at present but what I've used so far in just the Library and Import modules has convinced me I need it.

The only downside I have found so far is that I had get my machine to spend 4 days solid converting all my PSDs to have "maximise compatibility" as Lightroom won't generate previews from PSDs without that set, luckily you simply run up Image Processor in Photoshop, point it to the top of your PSD filesystem tree, set "Resave with Max Compatibility" and leave it running. I only have around 1,500 PSD keepers as I've only been doing this seriously for the last 4 years, so it could have been worse.

So that's another £70 to find but seems like it's got all the features I had in Aperture, plus a whole lot more.