Next week is going to be an exciting one for Adobe. The long awaited release of their much talked about Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 will take place on Monday following a public beta testing period that has spanned an entire year.

For many, Lightroom has already become a favorite app. Not only is it a lightweight program with a snappy interface, Lightroom runs on both the Mac and the PC. For others, it has probably made more sense to wait for an end to the beta period. So we can be sure many folks will be eager to download the free trial and see how the first version stacks up.

There have been many articles written on the differences between Lightroom and Aperture over the past year. So many that at first I thought I would be beating a dead horse to bring up the “Aperture vs. Lightroom” equation once again. But, I really have been pretty excited about Lightroom, and I feel I needed to do something.

So, for the entire week, beginning Monday, I am going to take you on a journey into the heart of both applications. All week I will be shooting a travel documentary of the tiny island of Dominica. Each day I will alternate between applications. One day I will use Aperture, the next I will use Lightroom and back and forth until the end of the week. I plan to use this as an opportunity to pick apart the two programs and really put them to the test, side by side, in the field.

I also plan to publish a web gallery of my selects each day so you can follow along with the results, and yes, I will be talking about the photography in general and not just the software.

The shooting for this event will begin this weekend with a boat trip to the nearby French Island, Les Saintes, and then we will really begin to get into things on Monday when I go down to the capital to cover “Carnival.” If all goes well, I should have my first web gallery and blog entry up by Monday night or Tuesday morning. During the rest of the week I have a number of shoots lined up so keep checking back to see how things are going.