Photo answers review
Photo answers rating 
Features and workflow:
As part of the Adobe Photoshop family, Lightroom RAW converter integrates seamlessly with Photoshop. You can export a file with the adjustments, do some edits and bring it back into Lightroom as a .psd (photoshop document) file. Like Aperture, it’s designed to be a total solution for photographers and provides features that take you from capture through to publishing and printing. It’s easy to create slideshows too.
The package offers a great selection of gallery websites and there are plenty of third-party plug-ins offering more options. As with many digital photo applications, you can rate your images with stars, but Lightroom goes one further – you can categorise with colours as well. This makes it easy to browse only those pictures you want to edit.
There’s also a Healing and Clone Stamp that can be used to remove smaller artefacts and dust spots from images – but it’s not a full brush, so you’ll still need to import the image into Photoshop to make more precise alterations.
Workflow is organised into Library, Edit, Slideshow and Print & Web. It’s a pretty simple system – if you want to manage your files and see thumbnails, you need to be in the Library. The other modules are self-explanatory.
Performance:
One of the best features comes to light when you want to apply the same settings to multiple photos. First you select the edited image, followed by the other images, then click on Synchronise. This brings up a window that allows you to select which edit options you want to apply.
Another neat trick is the Previous button. This allows you to paste all of the selected settings from a previous file to the current image, saving a lot of time when you’re cycling through your images.
The system for archiving images, folders and projects is less than ideal, however. When you import files they go into the folders window, and you can easily end up with folders with ridiculous names that you need to change if you want any sort of coherent archive. The trick is to get everything right at the import stage, as it can be tricky to try to change things and move files afterwards.
Verdict:
Lightroom has remained fairly fixed in price, around £200. Compared to Phase One’s Capture One 4 RAW converter, it offers far more in the way of features and workflow yet it really doesn’t offer anything significant that Apple Aperture doesn’t have; in fact, Aperture probably has more features but costs less.
Lightroom needs a slight drop in price to match Aperture, although it has the distinct advantage of being both Mac and PC-compatible.
Product information:
Operating system Windows XP SP2 or Vista/Mac OS X 10.4
Processor Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent/Mac G4, G5 of Intel-based Macs
Recommended RAM 1GB
Hard disk space 1GB