After looking at Apple’s Aperture it is time to take a closer look at the Adobe alternative Lightroom.

Out of the gate Lightroom offers a potentially significant advantage over other photography applications, both Mac and Windows versions are supported. Though for many people in the professional world, this may not be an advantage I suspect there are plenty of amateurs out there who have not plunked down the money for a Mac.

Overall the interface is good and very usable. Across the top of the screen clearly lists the modules / sections of the application (Libarary, Develop, Sideshow, Print & Web). The photo organization and file management appears functional, but not ideal. The organization is flexible; however, lacks the ability to enforce a structure. One particularly nice feature is that when updating or reviewing meta data from within the library you can with one click find all other photos with the same value.

Within the Develop section of the application you will find one of the best photo editing tool sets. You will find all of the tools well organized, very capable and easy to use. The left panel records all of the history of edits making it easy to undo a modification. At any time, snapshots can be taken and named creating a new “save point.”

Perhaps one of the coolest aspects of the develop module is the cropping and straightening tools. They do a very nice job of making them easy to use and have a nice feature of always centering your photo. It does take a little getting use to since the interaction with the photo is a little different than other cropping tools.

The slide show section appears rather weak. The other output options Print and Web are okay. I would expect they will meet many peoples needs and desires; however, I was hoping for more. Flash integration for web output could have been better. I am hoping the flash templates can be created and made available to Lightroom, but I have not found that yet. The controls available for modifying the provided templates are good and provide some good options for varying your output.

One last thing worth mentioning about Lightroom is I was able to find a lot of good information about using the product both from Adobe and photographers sharing through blogs, podcasts, etc.