It's hard to remember what life was like before Adobe Photoshop revolutionised digital photography editing and the latest addition to the Photoshop family will undoubtedly be greeted with as much celebration as its predecessors.

Targeted at both professional photographers and serious amateurs, Lightroom 2 costs less than half the price of its Photoshop CS4 big brother and contains a raft of improvements on Lightroom 1.

If you're coming to Lightroom as a novice, you'll find the interface extremely easy to navigate around. The two-tone grey/black background is deliberately designed to enhance your photos rather than act as a distraction, with drop-down menus on the left and right of the central workspace.

There are five key modules that control your decisions (Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web) and they're positioned top right of the screen. The Library module's batch processing facility has been beefed up so you can now import large volumes of photos from memory cards, folders or cameras, which can be automatically renamed, sorted and then filtered using keywords and powerful metadata filters. There are five pre-set collection folders and you can set up your own Quick Collection for faster working.

Once you have all your images, you can quickly find and select the image you want to work on and then move to the Develop module to begin editing. Passing your cursor over the range of pre-sets in the left panel will automatically provide an instant preview before applying the change to your original. The right panel contains a histogram at the top and the range of tools beneath.

The new tools include a retouching brush with variable width which can target more flexibly and accurately a specific area of the photo, and the gradated filter which can be dragged, dropped and angled before adjusting exposure, brightness, contrast, clarity, sharpness and saturation. The other excellent news is that you now have dual screen support and you can split the screen to have instant 'before' and 'after' images side by side while you work on them.

Lightroom 2 has been designed to integrate seamlessly with Photoshop software, to handle 64-bit technology and to be fully compatible with Windows and Mac systems. There's support for 190 camera RAW formats and images can be worked on in the library even when the originals are offline; the enhancements are instantly captured and waiting for you when you return.

There are further improvements to sharing, printing (including different sizes on the same page and output sharpening) and exporting to websites, which make it worth the £100 to upgrade if you already own Lightroom 1.

This is undoubtedly a must-have for the dedicated snapper and it's worth noting that there are a number of online and print support materials available for anyone wanting a complete tutorial before you get started.

Verdict
If perhaps you can't afford Photoshop CS4 or just prefer something slightly less complex, this extensively upgraded Lightroom 2 will be the perfect tool for any serious photographer who wants to enhance large quantities of digital images.

Company: Adobe

Contact: 020 7365 0733

Tags: adobe photoshop lightroom adobe photoshop macintosh raw image format lightroom microsoft windows graphics windows