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Lightroom is a ground breaking professional workflow environment, designed to cover the whole process from capturing and cataloguing your files, to editing then converting from RAW, right up to inkjet printing or making slide shows or even designing and publishing web pages. It will even upload the web pages. The software also places a great deal of importance on preserving your original RAW image, saving variations as sets of instructions rather than TIFs or JPEGS. Apart from saving disk space this also means that all steps, even cropping, can be undone - next week, next year, anytime - Incidentally Lightroom doesn’t just deal with RAW files - you can import and work on any type of image file you like. The nearest real competitors to Adobe Lightroom are Apple Aperture which has the same aims and many of the same features, and ACDSee which has some of the features but not the well thought out workflow of the other two. Although Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture will appeal to a large audience, they are both aimed at the professional market, where dealing with large numbers of images quickly and efficiently is vital. Many professionals, including me, now spend far more time in front of a computer, than behind a camera, so anything that speeds up the processing of our images is very welcome.
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