I tried out Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 for the first time today and I have to say that I'm very impressed.
If you don't know what it is, the closest program to compare it to is the Apple program Aperture. So if you know that you will know what Lightroom does.
For those that don't, it is a photographic workflow tool, which supports a very wide range of camera import profiles (many more than Aperture does). You basically use it as an image library, importing your images, adjusting them (colour, contrast, brightness etc), printing them, creating slideshows etc...
Adobe have done a great job with the interface, making it easy to navigate and work with, and it is fast. Importing images into Lightroom is very quick and you can instantly start working with imported images, even while it is still importing more (if you are importing a lot of images at once). The import window allows you to create profiles, where you can add copyright and other general information about the pictures you are importing, which is very useful, and you can assign keywords to your imported images allowing you to quickly search through your image library for specific images.
When importing you also have different options on how the images get imported. They can be copied to a lightroom area on your HD which could be useful for those importing directly from their camera or memory card, or you can import the images but leave them where they are on your HD, so lightroom is just referencing them and not moving them, which is good for those who like to arrange their files how they wish, as I do.
Once you have your images in Lightroom they are very easy to navigate and work with. Everything is fast and easy to use, with nothing leaving you puzzled about how it should work. You can arrange images in folders or categories which aids navigation and you can view them in groups, or individually.
There are a lot of settings to adjust an image to make it look its best, and this is great for images imported from a camera as normally you do just want to alter the contrast, brightness, colour balance, curves etc... and so don't actually need to load the images into a full editing package like Photoshop as Lightroom can do all of these adjustments for you. It has a very handy histogram too. And because it is all so easy to use it allows you to experiment.
I was also very impressed with the other areas of the application. The slideshow feature allows you to quickly build up a slideshow of selected images, with transitions, which is ideal for presentations, or to just display the best of your holiday snaps. But more impressive is the printing section. This is the easiest printing setup I've seen in a program to date. It automatically gets the printer page dimensions from your printer driver, and then has sliders to change how the image will be printed on the page. You can move them around to make the image larger or smaller, and it won't let you go beyond the limits of the printer. Also if you have selected more than one image it automatically sets the number of pages needed to print them all, and you can adjust the row and column sliders to create pages with multiple images on, which is great for contact pages, or if you just need small prints of each image.
If you have a digital camera and take lots of pictures then Lightroom is definitely worth looking at. It isn't cheap at £125, but it is worth the price. You could also try it for free if you get my drift