I am thinking down the road, when I actually would have some time to play with them, I might like to own one.

Rich

I was using Aperture 3 prior to Lightroom. You can read my comparison of the two in this review: http://www.mymac.com/2012/03/adobe-announce-the-release-of-lightroom-4-0/

It is always difficult to give one winner over the other. But I must say that for the workflow I’m using (reference files in Aperture, default/only mode in Lightroom) and with the better integration of Photoshop in Lightroom, I finally gave up on Aperture.

With this new version, Lightroom also bring two things that was missing from Aperture: Maps and Books. Not that I really used the book feature that often, if ever, but the Map feature is something I like very much. The face feature in Aperture is not something I used a lot either. With LR you have to give up the iLife media sharing dialog (LR don’t add its library to it) and iCloud Photo Stream as well. But one can easily point iPhoto to the Lightroom directory and still get the functionalities with just a few more steps.

LR4 (new licence) is still a bit pricier than Aperture, but performance is there and from an editing and cataloging point of view, Lightroom is very good, if not better than Aperture on some point.

I hope this help.

Rich