A new addition to Adobe’s software line-up, Photoshop Lightroom is confusingly named, being a separate application from Photoshop CS3.

Where Photoshop CS3 is a general-purpose editing and art package, seldom used in isolation, Adobe’s vision for Lightroom is as a complete photography tool. Its sole aim is to take over the digital photography workflow, from files as they leave the camera, through image development and processing and on to print or web publication.

The monochrome colour scheme has a practical purpose, to avoid affecting colour perception of the shot you’re working on, but the side effect is a beautiful-looking interface. The basic layout sees vertical information and tool panels either side of the central image area – there are no floating palettes – and it benefits immensely from a widescreen monitor.

The interface is split into five modules that correspond to the logical workflow – Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web – and one module is viewable at a time as you step through the workflow process. The Library module is where you start with image import, and immediately reveals the effort Adobe has put into getting maximum flexibility out of Lightroom. You can add batch metadata and apply preset development settings, as well as ignoring files that appear to be duplicates of those already in the Library, and choose from one of four import schemes depending on whether you want to import to the Library as is, move, copy, or convert to DNG and then import. Essentially, it’s all the options a photographer could need.

A major selling point of Lightroom is its persistent but non-destructive editing: changes you make to an image have no effect on the original file, but the interface acts as if you’ve made changes and saved them to disk. In fact, edits are stored in Lightroom’s own database and re-applied on-the-fly to a shot when you re-open it.

Once imported into the Library, you can view and add metadata, plus filter the view by metadata or capture date. The Survey view lets you make quick A-B comparisons between shots, before heading into the Develop module. This presents the range of adjustments you might expect, corresponding roughly to Photoshop’s RAW file import tool and including adjustments for noise reduction, chromatic aberrations and detail recovery.

Lightroom deals with the mainstay of photo processing, the Curves control, in a fascinating way. Unlike a traditional Curves tool, you don’t click to produce control points; instead, you simply drag the curve up and down at any point along the luminance scale. Or, you can adjust the four main luminance areas – Shadows, Darks, Lights and Highlights – via sliders. For most adjustments, the slider controls are brilliant: open a shot and you can come within a hair’s breadth of what you’d achieve via an old-style Curves control, but much faster.

The Slideshow, Print and Web modules do their job efficiently enough, the Web option generating a choice of either pure HTML or Flash gallery, with options for overlaying title text and selecting colours. As well as in-situ slideshows, the Slideshow module can generate a PDF file too.

Our only major issue with Lightroom comes with its RAW file handling. Nearly a whole day of concerted effort to replicate the detail from Canon RAW files extracted by Canon’s own Digital Photo Professional application failed to produce equivalent results. Attempting to push up the detail to the same level as DPP resulted in over-sharpened images with pixellated artefacts; in the end, we just had to settle for a slightly softer look – something that professional photographers may baulk at.

And, despite Adobe’s public-beta development efforts, Lightroom is in some ways restrictive: what the end-to-end approach gives you in terms of speed and efficiency it can deny in terms of ultimate editing flexibility, with the current lack of third-party plug-ins.

Lightroom is a superb application, however, particularly for a first effort. It will need plug-in support to tear fiercely loyal and often idiosyncratic photographers away from their favourite tools, but it’s already well on the road to becoming a standard for PC-based digital photography workflow. The price is lower than we’d have expected too.