Adobe Lightroom 3 review

A similar thing goes for the new Sharpening tools, which preserve detail, don't introduce noise but can bring new life to a slightly soft photo.

Impressively, all of the effects and adjustments are made in real-time. Testing on our Core 2 Quad computer, we found Lightroom to be incredibly responsive, letting us work through a directory of photos at high speed.

Beyond adjustments, Lightroom remains the excellent management software that it's always been. Once you've imported your photos (hard disk, memory cards and tethered cameras are all supported), you can bundle them into collections, add keywords and even search using metadata recorded by the camera.

While previous versions of the software have only let you manage photos, Lightroom 3 also supports video files. You can preview your video and add keywords to it, letting you manage video as part of your media collection, although you'll need video editing software to process it.

Lightroom 3 improves its ability to display the photos that you've edited. First up, there's Flickr integration. New to this version is the ability to pull in comments from the photo-sharing website, as well as uploading them.

If you prefer to show your photos locally you can create video slideshows. A range of preset outputs lets you create everything from iPod and DVD videos all the way up to 1080p Full HD movies. You can adjust the slide duration manually, or select an MP3 music file and tell Lightroom to match the slideshow duration to the length of the track. Files are written to your hard disk, so you can transfer them to a mobile device, watch them locally or burn them to disc.

Finally, if you want to make prints, Adobe has boosted the Print templates. Using these you can quickly drag and drop photos into montage templates, then print the results locally or save an image file that you can upload to a printing service.

The new lens correction and noise reduction tools make Lightroom 3 a must-have upgrade from previous versions (just £63 for the upgrade edition), while its powerful management tools remain as good as ever. For many people Lightroom 3 will be the only bit of photo-editing software they need, but even those that have to turn to Photoshop for more-advanced image effects will find Lightroom 3 an invaluable management and pre-processing tool.