Now here's a question for those who organise and process photographs:

Should I look for an alternative to Adobe Lightroom, and if so, why?

For the last few weeks I've been using Cyberlink Photodirector 4 (as a free package via a magazine) and have also tried Lightroom on their free 30 day trial as well as Corel paintshop pro X6 (fails on the raw handling).

The same raw files processed by both LR and PD look different. Lightroom handles images of people really well, producing beautiful skin tones for portraits, especially if the clarity control is backed off a bit, with generally better colour reproduction. PD offers what I feel is a slightly higher degree of control over the raw file and some aspects of the manipulation tools (for fixing skin, teeth & eyes) seem better, and images produced seem to be a bit harder and more detailed. To be honest, PD 4 is so close to LR5 that it's quite astonishing, and I'm more than a little tempted to spring for the current version, with even more tools.

What's the question then?

I don't want to run 2 very similar packages for manipulation and processing. Both have shortcomings, and I'm drawn by the possibility that the Adobe package may be better in the long run and by the portrait processing qualities. Aperture from Apple seemed a little interesting, but I keep hearing about how updates break it, and I can't get it on trial either.

I may look at Photoshop elements at some stage to run alongside too, for deeper manipulation, intelligent removal, layers etc.

So comments from those who know or those who don't - what would you use?