Les Jones

Sell a kidney and get both.

Actually, I loved Lightroom when I shot weddings. I could blow through 1000 pictures in one evening and get them all balanced, color corrected, etc.

The ability to recover blown highlights in RAW mode is just the balls.

I use Photoshop more than Lightroom though, so I'm partial to it myself. In fact, I'm just waiting until CS4 to upgrade (I always wait two versions these days. I started with Photoshop II and it got old upgrading all the time).

as a professional, I'd say skip it. Frankly, Picassa is better and a lot cheaper, IMHO.

Robb: Yeh, I agree about waiting. I was waiting for Lightroom 2 and/or CS4 (due RSN) to take the plunge.

dave: And I'm also waiting for the long-overdue Picasa 3.0 to see what develpps on the free front. :-) But as much I like Picasa 2.7 and free stuff in general I really don't mind paying for good software. Two hundred smackers ain't that much relative to what I've spent this year on photographic hardware and classes. 'Bout 10% of the total so far.

If you're shooting on a Nikon, Capture NX2 is another option. I've been using on my laptop and it's faster, accurate and an improvement over the earlier version. You can download a 60 trial of the full release and judge for yourself.

I use Lightroom. Here's a review of version 1.1.

http://www.knoxviews.com/node/5189

I'm on version 1.4 now.

I love it. I use it for 99% of all my photo processing. Only very occasionally do I need to use Photoshop CS3 to rescue a photo. Its cloning and healing tools are more flexible than Lightroom, and in fact that's just about my only complaint re. Lightroom, except you need lots of horsepower to run it with acceptable performance.

I guess my only other complaint is color matching on prints that I print myself. Seems like I have to experiment a lot. Photoshop CS3 is almost as tricky, but the "soft proofing" feature helps. Prints that you output to JPEG sRGB for online print services, Target, etc. work fine.

Nikon Capture NX renders better colors sometimes depending on the composition, but it is so horrible to use that I can't tolerate it.

Another option to consider is Photoshop Elements. It has a nice organizer, uses the same Adobe Camera Raw processor as CS3 and Lightroom (maybe with some advanced features disabled, not sure) and a slightly stripped down version of Photoshop that has 99% of anything a photographer needs.

Lightroom for $200 is a great value with a superior interface and workflow for processing a whole bunch of photos fast.

I played around with the latest version of Picassa the other day, and it's some great free software. I was surprised that it supports raw files, but obviously it's no comparison to Adobe ACR or Capture NX for Nikon files.

Awesome review, R. Thanks! Lightroom fans seem to really like it.

I'm with you when you say Adobe should make Lightroom part of CS. I was sorta hoping that would happen with CS4, but from the online tea leaves I'm reading that doesn't seem to be the plan.

I haven't gotten into RAW yet because my laptop with Photoshop died around the same time I got my D40. Now that I've got a new home PC all I need is the software to start experimenting.

Yep, I'm using it and I'm quite happy with it. I could be using other products, but I like the natural integration with Photoshop.