Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta review

Lightroom, like Aperture, is a workflow tool - not a traditional composition, creation and montage application like Photoshop.

It imports your images, manages them in a library with attached XML metatags, and lets you apply non-destructive edits so that your originals are never at risk from over-enthusiastic processing. Think of it in terms of adjustment layers in Photoshop and you'll understand the concept.

The interface is little changed from previous editions and, like Aperture, it's dark, allowing you to focus on your images. It scales down well to work on a MacBook display, but really flies in a dual-screen setup, allowing you to keep your library open on one screen while you edit on the other.

Performance is first class. The zoom is speedy and adjustments are applied instantaneously. There's no pause for breath as you switch between tools - as we experience in Photoshop on our test machine - and the results appear straightaway. We found ourselves conducting edits in Lightroom far more quickly than we do in Aperture, allowing us to speed through a folder of shots, quickly reducing them to the few we wanted to work on, and then complete our edits to the point where we were happy to publish or email them. Part of this is down to the interface, which we found far easier to navigate than Aperture's, and part to the logical shortcuts - for example, tap = and - to dial up and down the exposure. Editing is conducted on a picture-wide basis by using slider and input boxes, rather than traditional tools, and adjustment settings are organised in bricks within a channel. Each of these has an on-off switch, which allows you to switch them off if you've gone too far with your edits.

However, there's also an excellent Adjustment Brush, which would greatly benefit Aperture, as it enables you to literally paint changes to exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness and colour onto the image. It's extensively configurable, allowing you to set the flow, feather and so on before you start painting.

The Import tool, which has been enhanced in version 3, is far simpler to use than its equivalent in Aperture, which is a triumph of style over function. Lightroom treats it as a separate interface within the application and it pays dividends, enabling you to concentrate on one single task and save your common import options as presets. You can also now switch more quickly between the collection on which you want to work from within the Develop module than you could in version 2.5, and set favourite locations to give you fast access to commonly used images while you're working on a project.

The new custom print packager greatly simplifies the task of making best use of expensive photo paper by either setting up frames for your images, which will re-size or constrain images according to your preference, or by adding your images directly. Likewise, the web publishing tool simplifies adding a watermark, while integration with Flickr lets you create photo sets from within Lightroom, and even retrieve comments left on your photos on the site from within the application itself if you're signed up to a Flickr Pro account.

Aperture may have got there first, but Lightroom dominates the market for tweaking Raw photos. Adobe's own figures give it a 37% share of the market, compared to Aperture's 6.3%. That's across all platforms, but even confining it to the Mac shows up the stark contrast between the two, with Lightroom on 44.4% and Aperture on an anaemic 12.5%.