The digital SLR has brought high-quality photography to the masses; we're all out there, clicking away, producing shot after shot of high-quality RAW files, and yet when it comes to sorting and editing this veritable torrent of images, what do we do?

Well, many of us use iPhoto to catalogue and edit our images. However, if you have a lot of photos and want to adjust shots without degrading the RAW image file, you're going to need something a little stronger.

The first answer to this problem was Apple's Aperture. It enables photographers to order and refine their RAW files without degrading the image, by recording the editing actions in a separate file, known as a Sidecar or XML file. This is an improvement on iPhoto, but Aperture requires a powerful Mac and it's prone to crashes and endless beachballs of death. What's more, many photographers claim that the quality of Aperture's RAW conversions are not as good as those produced by Adobe Photoshop's Camera Raw.

Waiting in the wings

During the development of Aperture, Adobe quietly coded its own cataloguing and RAW editing software. The company released a public beta just over a year ago (reviewed in MacFormat issue 176) and sought user feedback. That program has now come of age in the form of Lightroom 1.0.

And what a transformation the program is from its early beta incarnation! Lightroom is snappy and will run on a fairly modest Mac. It sports a smart black interface that can rival Aperture's good looks, without feeling the need to crash on a regular basis.

Using Lightroom requires a bit of a mental shift, as it's different to most of Adobe's other apps in terms of looks and how it's controlled. There are new keyboard shortcuts to memorise and a workflow to get to grips with. In fact, this app is all about workflow. To process images you follow a path that involves importing, selecting, developing and outputting the results. If it sounds like a straitjacket process, don't worry, it isn't.