Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, sometimes called Lightroom for short, provides photographers with tools to catalog, manage, edit and display images. This combination of capabilities helps streamline the photographer’s workflow yielding more efficient processing and better looking results.

Lightroom is a rather recent project with the earliest beta version released in early 2006. The public release of the product occurred in 1007. As of 2012 there have been four releases of the software.

The various subsystems in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom accomplish different tasks necessary to a well-organized photographer. The photographer can catalog images based on location, subject, camera equipment and quality. Sort and retrieve photographs on any of those categories. Edit images by adjusting exposure, white balance and crop to size to produce the perfect look. Prepare the images for online or print publication. Images can be transferred from Lightroom to Adobe Photoshop for further editing.

Lightroom offers some distinct advantages over many of image editing and cataloging software. Non-destructive editing processes mean the original data always remain within the file. If an editing step produces an undesirable outcome, the image can be returned to its original state. Lightroom also accommodates most raw files created by major camera makers as well as other standard file formats such as JPEG and TIFF.

Recent version of Lightroom provide the photographer the ability to use plug-ins. These additional pieces of software allow preprogramming for complex adjustments or functions. Many providers produce plug-ins to handle some of the routine adjustments photographers encounter.

A number of vendors produce tutorials to help users build expertise in using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The controls are intuitive and easy to access. However, the software offers such a wide variety of capabilities some training is often helpful.