[mst]

The point is, if you don't stop using it, if you continue to use

an older version, you never learn the alternatives, because

you never spend enough time with them to work with them

as confident as you do wit Adobe-SW.

Very true.


Personally, however, I never really liked the UI of gimp (and that's also true for photoline). But there are no doubts some really nice alternatives. On OS X, Pixelmator was the first serious one IMO, and Affinity designer looks very promising, indeed.


"Back then" Corel Photopaint was a serious competitor, too, but that's history, unfortunately.


Now, regarding LR and C1: it's not just a new raw converter that I'm looking for (in fact, being an Apple user, I have a RAW converter built into the OS). If that was my main concern, I'd just buy C1 and never look back.


But with Aperture, I will some day loose a really powerful media library. And that's the part that hurts the most.


So far, neither LR nor C1 seem to offer the same feature set that Aperture has in this regard.


Now, one thing were Adobe really has the edge is Creative Cloud. I'm not necessarily a big fan of cloud services, especially for images, but with CC, Adobe gets closest to the multi-device support that Apple used to offer out of the box.


-- Markus