Professional photographers are about four times as likely to use Lightroom versus Apple's competing application Aperture, Adobe's Photoshop product manager said Tuesday.

According to data compiled by research firm InfoTrends, Aperture's market share in the segment stands at about 5.5 percent. The rest are using some type of Adobe product: 66.5 percent use the PhotoShop Camera Raw plug-in, and 23.6 percent use Lightroom.

Aperture was the first to come out with its professional photo tool in October 2005. Adobe responded in January of 2006, releasing a beta of Lightroom (the official version didn't appear until February of this year.)

Comparisons between Apple and Adobe may be a little unfair to Cupertino: even long before Lightroom, the company's Photoshop program was widely considered a standard-bearer for photo editing.

However, it shows what a steep hill the program has to climb. Mac users seem to also be choosing Lightroom over Aperture -- the survey found Adobe's program leading in market share 26.6 to 14.3 percent.

"Lightroom is clearly off to a tremendous start, and everyone here is really pleased & grateful to the photography community for such a warm welcome," Photoshop product manager John Nack said in a blog post.