Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

We recently reviewed the latest version of Adobe's professional image-editing tool Photoshop.

It's a powerful program and gives you complete control over any kind of photo. But this kind of editing is only part of the process. If you want to organise collections of images, process and edit them in bulk and output them for clients or show them on the web, then Adobe sells the more suitable Photoshop Lightroom.

Lightroom includes only a few editing tools compared to Photoshop, but helps you keep track of the entire process of digital photography. It has five main screens that carry you through the entire process from memory card to output – and you will normally need just three of those.

Connect a camera or plug in a memory card and it will offer to import the photos – or videos, now – and you can tag them with keywords for later reference. The Library shows each photo as a 35mm slide-sized preview, but can immediately be split to show two alternatives side by side if you want to pick the best shot. If you have a second display then clicking a slide can pop up a full-sized preview on the second screen.

Normally you will want to pick a few images to take forward and polish up, and there are many ways to do this. You could give them a tag, a star rating from one to five or – more simply – add them to the "quick collection" with just one click. In either case you can then filter to show only these images for now.

Once you have found the photo you want, one click moves you to Develop view. Here you can adjust all the key attributes of the image in a few clicks: whether working with JPEG or RAW files you will find options to fix the white balance, adjust the exposure, add fill light or increase the blacks, add or remove colour vibrance or saturation, or tweak the tone curve either using four slider controls or by clicking and dragging the curve itself.