Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Lightroom has few of Photoshop's micro-level tools--you won't find any selection tools, for instance. But it offers the same engine for working with digital camera raw-format files, and it gives you a huge variety of color and exposure adjustments. Unlike Photoshop, Lightroom writes your edits to a database rather than to the original files, so they're nondestructive.

When you're applying your changes, you can have Lightroom give you four different A/B choices of before-and-after representations of your image, with the B side showing a live preview of the changes' effects. When you click on the application's tone curve, it shows you a graphical representation of safe or reasonable areas to which you can expand your adjustments. Unfortunately, the feature felt sluggish on the 3.2-GHz P4 system I used.

The program has some of the best printing features I've ever seen. For example, when printing multiple images on a page, you use sliders to adjust how many rows and columns you want on the page, and the application gives you a live, scaling preview of how your images will fit.

Lightroom is a sophisticated, intelligent application, and I'd recommend it to professional photographers. I just wish its features were included in other Adobe apps; I'm a little annoyed that it's an extra expense.

Alan Stafford