Digital BW, The Print

As a mostly hobby photographer with a small amount of exhibition work, I find it most useful as a fast import device with the ability to do my first cut editing before using APS6 for heavy-duty editing, final adjustments and printing.

Like some of you, I obviously don't want to spend the time it takes to have to learn a new program every time something *NEW* shows up, thus the APS6 and LR2.7 - they have what I need, I know and can use effortlessly, with a decade of experience in the case of APS6 (I've tested versions of CS and found it to be unbearably slow, in comparison, and too different to re-learn; there are some tools I wish I had, but they aren't worth the cost).

LR is useless for serious image editing, but great for importing hundreds of images quickly and making initial adjustments of images with right-shifted exposure out of the camera, light initial sharpening and keep/delete decisions.

I tested LR3 on my Intel Core 7 PC and found it to be no improvement over 2.7, but 4 beta on a Win7-64 clean install on the same machine might be a worthwhile upgrade for me, being faster and having a simplified top-down editing workflow that actually makes sense to me.

My take-away experience is: use what works for you, not what you think is supposed to be the hot-shot setup.