If you're a working photographer or a hobbyist who captures hundreds of photos in the course of a week — photos which do not need artistic enhancements but only minor post-production processing, if you can afford the purchase, buy Adobe's Lightroom.

Photography is no longer the purview of a select few; almost anyone with a photo cell phone can now be a photographer. The majority of images captured with photo cell phones, however, tend to have a short life; they're sent to a small number of people, viewed, and probably deleted. But, photographers with digital cameras, now freed from the costs of film and film developing, are capturing thousands of images and sharing them, perhaps for decades if not longer, with the entire Internet-connected world.

Today's photographers often find themselves in "digital darkrooms;" many spending hours at their computers making adjustments to photos that took far less time to capture. Attribute that to inexperience, lack of skill, ignorance, and laziness. If you learn how to take good photos with your camera you can spend more time taking pictures instead of fixing them.

Lightroom is NOT Photoshop; in one sense it is more and in another it is less. Lightroom is an application that can streamline a photographer's post-production workflow by providing quick and easy ways to put the finishing touches on lots of photos. It can even correct some major flaws fairly quickly. Lightroom is not a tool for artistic expression. I'd describe Lightroom as being strictly a photo-editing and cataloging tool and Photoshop as a photo-editing and enhancing tool with Adobe Bridge providing cataloging.

So, forget about channels and masks; don't think about adjustment layers, filters, and text when you look at Lightroom. Think about taking more photos. Lightroom will help you catalog your photo assets and make the majority of photo editing changes you need done and get you back to shooting. Lightroom can stand alone but if you have Photoshop you can expand the capabilities of Lightroom by linking to it as an external editor; you can also link to apps like iPhoto, GraphicConverter, or LightZone.

I shoot mostly sports and news events. The work is both demanding and forgiving at the same time. I'm prohibited from doing much if any photo editing let alone photo enhancing; if there is debris, or wires, or unwanted objects in my photos they, generally, have to stay. But my shooting environment is fast; I have to select a subject, focus, shoot, track, and not get run over in the process. Most photos I take need to be straightened and cropped; that, I'm proud to say, is about it. Then I need to sort, tag, and catalog, export, and archive my photos. Lightroom helps me do all those things, quickly. Quickly is the operative word. If I shoot a single sporting event I come away with nearly a thousand photos; the newspapers and magazines will use only one or two while online photo galleries will use from twenty-five to two hundred. Almost all papers want their images within twenty-four hours. That's one event. In three days I will shoot half a dozen games or more. This Thanksgiving, if last year is any indication, I expect to capture twenty thousand photos in three days and two thousand will need to be turned within seventy-two hours.

Lightroom is as much a frame of mind--a workflow construct, as it is a suite of tools. There are tools I do not use but you might need. I've never used the red-eye removal tool. My photos don't have red-eye. However, I have taken photos where I needed a little added light--not increased overall exposure or brightness, just what's called fill light; light in the shadows. Lightroom's Fill Light tool is outstanding. On occasion I find my highlights are a bit overexposed. Again, I don't want to reduce overall exposure because that darkens the entire photo so I use Lightroom's Recovery tool to quickly recover some of the blown highlights. When shooting sporting events at night I use a fast lens and push my ISO to the extreme, e.g., 1600-3200 with exposure compensation added (or reduced). I get lots of digital noise (the equivalent of film grain). Going to medium resolution newsprint it's not so bad but for magazines it's a killer. Lightroom has a tool for reducing noise but even with the tool's adjustment I find a better photo wins almost every time.

I'll describe my typical workflow so you get a sense of how I work with Lightroom.

First, I download my photos from my media card into appropriately labeled folders to my hard disk before launching Lightroom. I could launch Lightroom and import my photos from my media card into Lightroom's data catalog, instructing Lightroom to copy the photos to my hard drive in the process. I find I can more quickly clear my card by downloading as a separate process then by having Lightroom import the photos into its catalog but leaving the photos where I carefully placed them. If that sounds complicated it's not; it's very straightforward. But it's my workflow that dictates the choice I made. I may shoot several events on one media card. By copying all the images to a temporary folder, then doing an initial sort, I can then import the photos into Lightroom's catalog, by event, and apply keywords and even further sort photos into subfolders (which I don't do). At this point my cards are clear and ready to reformat for use on the next job. All my photos are safely copied to my hard drive. Lightroom has cataloged my photos with keywords. I can view all the photos from individual events after each import or after I have finished all the imports. I prefer the latter but for no good reason.

I am now ready to process (develop) my photos.

I open an event in the Develop mode--I skip Library although I could, in Library, do photo-editing but without the delicacy Develop provides. I reduce the thumbnail size so I can view several photos at a time and begin to look for those photos I think I want to use/submit. When I find one of those photos I could tag it; I don't but you might want to. I straighten the photo, crop it, and make whatever other small adjustments need to be made. There are seldom very many--fill light most often. I then choose to export the photo for e-mail, creating a folder for the low-res photo inside a folder I choose. That folder, for me, is the folder containing the high-res originals. I should point out here that Lightroom does not alter the original photo; it simply saves the adjustment instructions and applies them to photos when you export. I continue this process. Often I come upon a series of photos I've shot in burst mode, i.e., three to eight frames per second. This series of photos will probably need the same adjustments made to all. Here Lightroom excels. I make an adjustment to one photo, then I sync the remaining; in moments half a dozen or more photos are fixed whereupon I can review the edits and tweak, e.g., adjusting crops and straightening. As I go along I can delete photos I no longer want, either from Lightroom's event catalog or from the folder on the hard disk. I can still recover a photo from the trash but I've only had to do that once and I immediately knew I'd trashed the photo by mistake.

Now, finished more or less, I've reviewed all my photos from an event, fixed those that needed fixing, exported low-res images which I will send to the photo editors at the papers for review. I often have a sense for which photo is the best and just send along the high-res photo with the low-res proofs. Then I move on to the next event.

When my photos have been reviewed I might be asked to send the high-res copy of, for example, DSC_0845.jpg. I quickly find it in Lightroom's Library with a search on either one of several keywords or just the 0845. I then export the edited photo into another folder which I label for the paper or magazine. This folder, too, stays in the event folder which now contains the originals and a folder of the low-res proofs sent as e-mail. Lightroom allows me to add folders or subfolders on the fly.

Lastly I return to Lightroom's Library to export photos to the online photo galleries. This is a more time consuming process than sending photos to the papers and magazines, but it runs unattended. In all instances the photos I upload, including the proofs, go to FTP servers.

Occasionally, I offer to send someone a photo I took of them at an event, mostly as a kind gesture. If I've agreed to do this I export those photos to yet another folder inside the event folder. Simplicity is often the best choice so if someone asks six months later if I still have their photo from a certain event, I can usually find it in less than a minute, without even opening Lightroom.

If I miss the ball in a sports action shot I can't, later, add it to the photo. I've been told I can't even remove a blemish from someone's face if it's a news photo. But, what about photos that are not from sporting or news events? Well, I do a bit more, because it's permissible. It's important to me to get the best picture possible without relying on post-production adjustments. But there are some things the camera cannot fix or ignore. Using Lightroom's editing tools I can clone and heal, but not as elegantly as I can in Photoshop using the Healing Brushes. And what I do in Lightroom I do on the equivalent of the "background" layer. There are no adjustment layers. I can sharpen, which I seldom do, and I can invigorate colors, which I occasionally do when working with photos of flora. I can adjust tint and (white balance/Kelvin) temperature, but since I shoot a custom white balance whenever I can, I seldom find the need. One could get some artsy effects by pushing the temperature to an extreme but if I want that look, I capture it with my camera after making the necessary white balance adjustments.

There are a lot of things I like about Lightroom and they far outweigh those few things I dislike. I like Lightroom's colored histogram; it's almost as important as my camera's histogram. I mentioned that I use fill light and highlight recovery fairly often. Lightroom allows me to add back black, which I might need to do when I've shot black uniforms on a bright sunny day but then needed to apply fill light to bring out hidden facial features of darker-skinned players wearing football helmets. I can export photos using sRGB (when they are going to be printed on inkjet printers as is done with the online photo galleries) or Adobe RGB 1989 (when the photos are going to four-color press as is the case with the papers and magazines). I can edit and export using a set aspect ratio (which I must do with two online galleries). Lightroom's interface allows one to use quite a bit of screen by hiding panels and one can elect to have the background be black, neutral gray, or white.

I like Aperture, too, but given this is not a comparison/contrast review I'll just say I can run Lightroom on a Dual 1GHz G4 without groaning. iPhoto was the "quick work" application I was using most often until Lightroom appeared. Finally, I must mention that Lightroom works quite well with RAW photos. When I absolutely MUST have a photo I shoot RAW, otherwise I shoot only JPGs. I shoot great JPG images; if I shot sporting events in RAW I'd still be going through the photos I took last Spring.