When Adobe announced the public beta of Photoshop Lightroom just over a year ago, there was speculation that the company was anxious to make up ground lost to Apple’s Aperture as quickly as possible.

Whatever the reason, there’s no denying the two products have a lot of common, so comparisons are inevitable.

Like Aperture, Lightroom is aimed at professional photographers who are looking for basic image-editing tools combined with a robust digital image database.

Lightroom’s workspace adopts a tabbed layout, which is vaguely reminiscent of the Kai Krause Soap and Goo applications of almost a decade ago.

Each tab is geared to providing the tools necessary for a particular stage of digital post-processing – images are imported, organised and tagged in the Library; Develop provides tonal and colour adjustments and some other editing tools; the Slideshow, Print and Web tabs provide everything you need to generate outputs for those formats.

Aimed at professionals, Lightroom is designed to work with Raw format images (a list of supported cameras can be found on the Adobe website ), but works equally well with Jpegs, Tiffs, Psd and Dng formats.

Although not configurable for a dual-monitor setup, the workspace is designed to help with task sorting, sifting large numbers of images and selecting the best ones, so multiple view modes are the order of the day.

In addition to an image strip running along the bottom of the screen, a central display panel can be configured for a thumbnail grid view, single-image zoomable loupe view, two-up comparisons, or multi-frame surveys.

Panels on either side of the main display provide the necessary tools for the task in hand.

In Library mode you can organise images into collections, add and search keyword and other metadata, and filter folders by star rating, flags or labels. A Quick Develop pane provides a subset of the Develop tab’s Basic colour and tonal adjustment tools that will be adequate for most images.

The Develop tab itself will be familiar to users of Camera Raw, Adobe’s Raw file processing and converter utility. All of the ACR tools are here, some having developed more sophisticated controls, and there’s new stuff too. These tools are designed to squeeze the last ounce of quality from 16-bit Camera Raw files, but they can also be used to good effect on Jpegs.

The primary Develop tools are organised into seven panes, providing just about everything you could want in terms of colour and tonal adjustments. In addition to the usual histogram and curve controls, a recovery slider helps claw back blown highlights and Fill Light works in a similar fashion to the first half of Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight adjustment.

A Vibrance slider boosts colour in a similar way to the Saturation one below it, but manages to avoid the clipped, super-saturated look that results from overextending the latter.

The HSL pane provides graphic equaliser-style control of individual hue ranges, so you can, for example boost blue saturation without affecting other colours. Used on greyscale conversions the same controls provide a multi-band channel mixer with eight sliders.

In addition to split toning controls, the remaining panes are given over to sharpening, lens correction, camera calibration, Effect presets and History.

The Slideshow, Print and Web tabs don’t provide anything groundbreaking, but they do make light work of outputting image collections and that sums up what Lightroom is all about.

For most photographers, especially those who trained in chemical processes, if the job is done properly, post-processing should involve little more that grading, cataloguing and whatever minimal skilled tweaking is necessary to make an image pop. And that’s exactly what Lightroom provides.