I finally got around to thinking through my digital photo workflow. For over 18months I have been taking photos with a Nikon D80 in RAW format and storing them in iPhoto. It’s quick and dirty, keeps the original RAW files and spits out the jpeg’s I need for most jobs. I know it’s not 16bit and there is no lens correction, but it was all I needed at the time.

So the choices for software seem to fall between Adobe Light Room, Aperture from Apple and DXO Optic Pro. They are all in the $200-300 range and have trial version for evaluation.

Some reviews:
Aperture vs. Lightroom: The new digital darkroom
Aperture vs. Lightroom: What do the pros use?
Aperture 2 Review (Lightroom vs. Aperture 2.0 on Presets)
Review: Lens correction plug-in Kekus LensFix for Aperture 2

For a week I bounced back and forth between all three applications and made some observations:

• DXO processes RAW with the best color matching & lens correction is very accurate
• Lightroom is amazingly fast and has simple navigation
• Aperture has great metadata tools and mac integration

I had problems with DXO crashing all the time, which is well documented online. It was the latest version and promised much more stability but not for me. Shame as it was the real winner for natural RAW processing and lens correction. Although the file management was quirky.

Lightroom lacked the lens correction features, which was one of my main requirements. But I love the speed and simplicty.

Aperture was a simple migration from iPhoto, it does most of what I want in processing RAW and moving back and forth to Photoshop CS4 in 16bit. It does lack the lens correction of DXO, but this can be fixed with kekus lensfix, ($30 plugin). None of the offerings have any geotagging features, but ovloab’s Geophoto is great for the job, ($24).

So the winner was  Aperture & Kekus Lensfix & GeoPhoto