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.

Let's start off by looking at the import procedure. You import images via a menu or simply by dragging and dropping a folder of shots onto its interface. You can choose whether to make fresh copies of your photos in a new location or leave them where they are. Lightroom will keep tabs on everything and can even convert all your images to the Adobe DNG format for future-proofed archives.

As pictures are imported, you can opt to rename them in almost any format you like and you can even apply preset editing styles and keywords to the shots so they are all processed as a batch. It certainly saves time. You can set up a watched folder for dumping images in, too, which are then automatically added to your library.

Once your images are imported into a grid in Lightroom's Library view, all your shots appear on the screen as thumbnails ready for selection and editing. To the left is a panel of functions for finding and selecting shots, while on the right is a Quick Develop panel for carrying out rough-and-ready edits of your shots. At the bottom of the interface is a filmstrip of thumbnails for quick and easy selection of photos. You can group selected shots into a Quick Selection, and picking or rejecting individual shots in the selection is as easy as pressing [P] for Pick or [X] for Reject. It certainly speeds up the sifting process. You can also choose to put selections in piles or Stacks, so they take up less space in the grid.