On My Bike

DAM stands for digital asset management and covers the entire aspects of structuring, retrieving and sharing your photos. If you're an advanced amateur or professional photographer, you need a wide range of tools to keep your digital projects creative and organised. Many provide all the essentials in one package. Having been an avid fan of iView for many years I was looking to upgrade, unfortunately the iview team sold-out to Microsoft and in turn they sold it on to Phase One and there seems to be very little support or development, but even so it’s still a great bit of software. But! (there’s always a “but”) I recently purchased a new Apple mac and was looking to upgrade the software to use the full power of the Mac, so Aperture was the obvious choice, as with all Apple software it’s easy to use and never lets you down, but Adobe have also thrown their hat into the ring with Lightroom 3 along with Phase One, Bibble and Portfolio so I downloaded the trial versions to compare.
 
Aperture
http://www.apple.com/uk/aperture/
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Lightroom
Lightroom http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshoplightroom
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Phase One
Phase One http://www.phaseone.com/en/Software/Capture-One-5/5-Overview.aspx
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Portfolio
Portfolio http://www.extensis.com/en/products/
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iView
iView http://www.phaseone.com/Phase%20One/Online-Store/Expression%20Media.aspx
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Bibble 5
Bibble 5 http://www.bibblelabs.com/

I settled for “Adobe Lightroom” what really sets this apart from the others and make this the winner for me is the huge array of Black and White pre-sets and plug-ins, up until now no software has been able to compete with the darkroom when it comes to creating beautiful black & white images, but Lightroom has got me excited about mono images again. Its interface is clean & tidy with everything easy to hand, and if you are stuck they have the biggest collect of online tutorials of any software product I’ve ever seen, thanks to Julieanne Kost and Adode TV.
So move over Darkroom and bring on Lightroom.
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Julieanne Kost tutorials can be found at
http://tv.adobe.com/show/adobe-evangelists-julieanne-kost/