Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

Colours can be adjusted using hue/saturation/luminance controls, and split toning effects (adjusting the saturation of highlight and shadow areas separately) is a matter of clicks.

More usefully, the Detail control gives full control over noise reduction: when working with RAW files, or even very high-quality JPEGs, this allows you to produce great images when working with high-ISO images while avoiding the horrors of the smeary, painted look of over-processed JPEG snapshots. A close-up view allows you to examine the result of each setting and adjust it until bright noise is removed.

If you're looking for the opposite effect, film-like grain can be added, and the vignetting control can be used to either fix genuinely afflicted images or convert beautifully shot images into the kind of thing that might have come from a plastic-lensed Soviet snapper. And speaking of lenses, this new version of Lightroom supports lens profile-based image correction. The idea is brilliant: you pick your lens from a list and Lightroom will, knowing the exact settings, immediately rub out any distortion or chromatic aberration.

In practice, though, this is currently of limited use: just eight Nikon lenses, 14 from Canon, five Sigmas and a handful of others are supported out of the box. You can create your own profiles, but it's a complicated process. It's fine if you have a home studio, but tricky otherwise.

It's important to note that one of the key changes in Lightroom 3 is to the image adjustments, but you might not spot it – behind the scenes they use the latest version of Adobe's RAW image processing software.

Another hidden enhancement is that if you have a 64-bit computer Lightroom will make use of that. Even without, it's no slouch. on a dual-core PC with 2GB of memory it was quite happy to wrangle with 22,000-pixel-wide panoramas, displayed twice to show a before-and-after view.

Besides these adjustments there are a handful of tools that you can apply to images: there's a crop tool, of course, with a level for setting the horizon, while the spot removal tool allows you to clone any specks, blotches or annoying objects in, usually, one click, and it can heal as well as clone. The red-eye removal tool does what it promises, while graduated filters are great for quickly enhancing blue skies.