Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.5

Adobe Lightroom 3.5 is the gold standard among workflow apps for professional photographers. Anyone who shoots lots of digital photos with a high-megapixel DSLR should consider an app like this, which lets them manage, adjust, and output all those large image files. Lightroom 3.0 was a major upgrade, bringing lots of new goodies to the table, including much faster operation, better noise reduction, a new import dialog, new RAW processing engine, and more online publishing options.

Version increments up to and including Lightroom 3.5 have added support for more cameras and lenses, integrated Flickr (Free, 4 stars) and Facebook publishers, and the ability to correct based on specific lens characteristics, including geometry distortion. Lightroom is the only pro photo software that can make this last claim, and it's a significant one. Mac users have an excellent and low-cost option with Aperture 3 ($79, 4.5 stars), but for Windows users or those who want to switch back and forth between the two platforms, the newly polished Lightroom 3.5 is our app of choice, fending off the challenge of also-impressive ACDSee Pro ($239.99 direct, 4 stars).

Interface
Lightroom 3.5 maintains the program's modal operation, via an interface with five modes accessible by tabs: Library (for viewing and organizing collections), Develop (for image adjustment), Slideshow, Print, and Web. This seems a bit much; the last three should be collapsed into an Output tab. ACDSee narrows the modes to four, but I prefer Aperture's approach, which lets you do anything from a single Inspector pane, via Library, Metadata, and Adjustments tabs.

I prefer Aperture's Library Inspector (which clearly displays projects, albums, slideshows, and websites) to Lightroom 3.5's Catalog, Folders Collections, and Publish Services groups. Accessing Lightroom 3.5's slideshows and Web projects requires you to switch modes. If you like to compartmentalize, however, you might prefer Lightroom's approach. ACDSee's is the only one of the three that lets you detach any control panels, as you can with the image-editor extraordinaire Adobe Photoshop ($699, 5 stars).

Importing and Organizing Photos
Lightroom 3.5 has an improved import function; It lets you choose all your import options in one step?whether you want to add or move the files to the LR library, apply adjustment presets during import, and so on. On subsequent imports, all setting, tag, and file-name choices are automatically remembered. This tripped me up at first, as each import has different needs, but I soon got used to the idea. If you're a serious high-volume user, you'll definitely appreciate the automation.

Lightroom lets you see thumbnails and full size images on memory cards before importing. That's a big improvement from Lightroom 2, but Aperture can do all this, too. Lightroom 3.5's import is much faster than Aperture's, but Aperture handles imports differently, letting you start work on any photo in the set before all the import processing is done. ACDSee let me start processing while an import was still in progress, too, but it couldn't automatically apply adjustments aside from rotation on import, and it was much slower than Lightroom.

Like Aperture, Lightroom imports pictures into its own database, aka "catalog," where other programs and the files system can't access to them (unless you change that option or export the pictures later). The database approach makes sense for photographers with huge collections of large images. In Aperture, you can start an import no matter what you're doing in the program; in Lightroom you can import only in Library mode.

Another way to get photos onto your computer is to tether. Mostly of use to studio or sports photographers, tethering lets you connect your camera with a USB or FireWire cable and actually control the shutter release from the computer. When I tried this with my Canon T1i ($899.99 List, ), which was listed as a supported camera for tethering in Aperture, I got messages stating that there was an error, or that the camera wasn't recognized in the software. Lightroom 3.5, on the other hand, let me shoot from my laptop with more elegant UI than Aperture's bare-bones tethering box. That's one area, at least, where Adobe beats Apple on interface. ACDSee, by comparison, offers no tethering capability.

In Library mode, double-clicking takes you between thumbnail and screen fit view, and another click zooms in to 100 percent, but Aperture's browser, viewer, and filmstrip buttons at top are clearer. Lightroom not only gives you thumbnail and full views of your images and the ability to star rate, pick, or color-code images, but it also lets you group pictures into Quick Collections of thumbnails you select and Smart Collections of photos that meet rating or other criteria.

Star rating, flagging, and rotating can be done from within the thumbnails. And from Library Mode you can also use Quick Develop, which may be all you need if your pictures just need a lighting fix. You can also apply saved or included creative presets (such as "Antique") in Quick Develop.

Another neat tool in Library mode is the spray-paint-can button, which lets you click on thumbs to apply either metadata or adjustment presets. The program also does a good job of making it easy to compare images side by side. Finally, a Survey mode lets you select several images for larger comparison views.

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