Product Reviews

Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom combines a range of functions aimed squarely at photographers: image library management, RAW file processing, colour correction, retouching and export to a range of media. Adobe's use of the word Photoshop in the title is misleading as the program bears little relation to Photoshop CS or Elements. There are no creative effects or support for layers. However, in its specialist field of making photographers' lives easier and making photos look their best, in many ways it's better than Photoshop.

The elegant interface is divided into five stages: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. You'll usually start with Library, where you can import photos from your hard disk or copy them from a memory card, rename them, apply keyword tags and various other labels and organise them according to a wide range of criteria. It's easy to flag photos for use, deletion or processing, and create custom Collections.

The Develop module is where the fun happens. Most of its options will be familiar to anyone who has used image-editing software before, but there are two key differences. One is that they're optimised to work as corrective tools for photographs. The other is that they're applied non-destructively. This not only means that the original files are always available should you wish to return to them, but also that extensive colour tweaking won't lead to a loss of colour fidelity due to quantisation errors. All edits are stored in one database and re-applied when you next open the image.

A strip of buttons provides access to crop, red-eye removal and blemish removal tools, all of which are delightfully quick and effective. The remaining editing options appear in the panel on the right. You can adjust white balance automatically, manually with sliders, or with a Picker tool to define a neutral-coloured

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part of the image. Next come exposure controls, which include some well-conceived options that enable you to make radical adjustments without clipping highlights or shadows. Colour-correction options are extremely comprehensive, with separate hue, saturation and luminance controls for eight tones in the colour wheel. If the multitude of sliders is too bewildering, simply click and drag parts of the image itself to adjust the hue, saturation or luminance of a particular colour. If a face is a little too pink but the rest of the photo looks good, you can give the face a nudge with the mouse to fix the problem; it's about as close to magic as we've seen in an image editor.

The Lens Corrections palette includes fixes for vignetting (darkening at the corners) and chromatic aberrations (misaligned primary colours), but it's surprising that you can't also correct barrel and pincushion distortions. Sharpening and noise reduction are included but offer minimal user control, and the results are basic. This is a disappointment, particularly for anyone who wants to process RAW camera files, which is something Lightroom otherwise handles well with support for more than 140 RAW file formats.

The Slideshow, Print and Web modules are less remarkable, covering onscreen and PDF slideshows, various print templates and HTML and Flash web galleries. They generally look smart and serve their purpose well, although we'd appreciate the option to add custom captions to each image, particularly for web galleries.

Overall, the software is responsive, and we love the fact that simply clicking an image flips between fit-to-page and 100 per cent magnification. Another smart touch is the way the resolution drops to allow fast real-time feedback when adjusting colour filters, but releasing the mouse produces a full-resolution preview. Moving the mouse over the undo history shows a preview of each stage in the Navigator window at the top left. It's these details that can make or break the efficiency of an application, and Adobe has it spot on.

Photoshop Lightroom is apparently designed for professional photographers, but its features and price make it just as suitable for amateur enthusiasts. If you've spent £500 on a digital SLR camera, this software is likely to be an equally worthwhile investment. We were amazed at how quickly we could radically improve photos, and we anticipate doing so routinely from now on.