Citing Lightroom adoption, Adobe pats self on back

An infotrends study shows Adobe's Lightroom is more widely used among photo pros than Apple Aperture, even among Mac users.

Apple Aperture beat Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to market as a tool for processing raw images from higher-end cameras, but Lightroom has taken a solid lead in adoption among professional photographers, according to a survey touted by the image-editing powerhouse.

Market researcher InfoTrends surveyed 1,026 pro photographers in North America, and of them, 23.6 percent use Lightroom and 5.5 percent use Aperture, according to the blog of Photoshop senior product manager John Nack Tuesday.

Photoshop's raw-image converter beats both out, though, with 66.5 percent using it, though.

Windows is more widely used than Mac OS X, and Aperture is available only on the latter operating system. But even among Mac users, Aperture is used by 14.3 percent to Lightroom's 26.6 percent.

It's not immediately clear who had the idea the survey. Asked if Adobe sponsored the study, an company representative said only that the study was independent.

In other Photoshop news, co-architect Scott Byer offers some detailed advice on maximising Photoshop performance, and Nack said Adobe is preparing fixes to Photoshop CS3 printing problems.