Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1

And, despite Adobe's public-beta development efforts, Lightroom is in some ways restrictive: what the end-to-end approach gives you in terms of speed and efficiency it can deny in terms of ultimate editing flexibility, with the current lack of third-party plug-ins.

Lightroom is a superb application, however, particularly for a first effort. It will need plug-in support to tear fiercely loyal and often idiosyncratic photographers away from their favourite tools, but it's already well on the road to becoming a standard for PC-based digital photography workflow. The price is lower than we'd have expected too, and if you're quick there's an introductory price reduction.

Author: David Fearon