Professional Software

Lightroom 2 takes the lead

As noted earlier, GIMP -- a free open-source program -- rivals Adobe Photoshop CS4 for complexity and power. Most professional photographers, graphic artists and designers choose Photoshop, however -- partly because it's the industry standard, with the most support, instruction and plug-ins available. If you're considering a career in one of these fields, experts say you might as well resign yourself to learning Photoshop. Since upgrades become available at significant savings, once you've bitten the bullet and bought it once, you can keep current at lower expense.

Each upgrade offer raises the question, though, of whether or not the extra expense is worth it. We found the best comparison of Adobe Photoshop CS4 with the earlier version, CS3, at Outback.com, where Uwe Steinmueller details the main changes. There are too many to cover here but suffice it to say, most reviews say the upgrade is worth the price. The main caveat is that CS4 takes significantly more computing power, so it can bog down a system that doesn't have enough RAM.

Photographers now take Photoshop more or less for granted, but its newer companion software, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (*Est. $300), is creating some excitement. Lightroom is designed to speed up the workflow involved in processing images from camera to final version. It also serves as an image-management tool. The editing tools included in the first version got mixed reviews, but the new version, Lightroom 2, is so full-featured that many pros say they seldom reach for Photoshop any more. You can also install modules for web integration -- to export an edited photo directly to Facebook, for example.

This capacity to stand alone as an image manager, editor and web publisher also makes it viable as an intermediate step between Adobe Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS4. If you're taking more photos than Elements can catalog well, and/or want to go beyond Elements without buying Photoshop, it's worth considering Lightroom 2 as your main photo software. It's not a substitute for Photoshop when it comes to digital graphics in general, but for editing photos, reviews say it's now very deft and capable.

For Mac users only, Apple's Aperture 2.1 (*Est. $200) is similar. Aperture was developed earlier than Lightroom, paving the way with nondestructive editing that automatically preserves the original files from the camera. Reviews praise Aperture, but Lightroom 2 is earning even more top recommendations -- both for speed and editing prowess.

Comparison tests at ArsTechnica.com, for example, find that Lightroom 2 does the best job of dealing with image noise when editing RAW files taken at various ISO levels. It's also fast. The reviewer concludes that "Lightroom 2.0 is the first program that I simply love using from a workflow, tagging, and 'they thought of everything' standpoint; and its speed is unmatched."