Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 is the official public release of the next generation of Adobe's famous Lightroom photo processing suite.

What is Lightroom?

If you're not familiar with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, it's a photo processing app that's designed to be used by professional photographers for the post-production of batches of photos, and it's often used in conjunction with Adobe's seminal app, Photoshop.

The new interface

This latest version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom looks great. It's divided into seven sections - Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, Print and Web- which let you easily flit between different stages of management, processing and presentation. There's also some awesomely configurable options, running from how the app looks to how it acts, before and after processing. There's only one thing - the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom interface is vast, and to get the most from it, you'll need a large screen.

Photo management

The upside to using a dedicated photo processing app is the ease with which Adobe Photoshop Lightroom allows you to see, categorize and manage your photos. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is no exception, with a great import features and options, and, new to this version, location-based organization. You'll find the tools to manage this function under Map.

Photo processing

In version 4 of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe's self-stated aim has been to "extract more detail from highlights and shadows, make a wider range of targeted adjustments, and easily share your images and video clips on social media and photo sharing sites". It certainly provides some interesting options to do this, including highlight and shadow recovery, white balance features and local noise/moire tools. This is in addition to all the usual editing tools, which are present and easy to apply.

Presentation options

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom really excels when it comes to presenting your photos and passing them on. You can email directly from this new version, as well as sharing with a variety of social networks and photo sharing sites. The Book feature is also new, allowing you to create a variety of beautiful photo books from templates. This complements Adobe Photoshop Lightroom's Slideshow option, giving you even more scope for creating en eye-catching and imaginative end product.

Video management

In this version, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom really ramps up video support, further increasing its versatility. This means that you can make even more complex edits to video clips, as well as easier video publishing.

Conclusion

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 is an exceedingly promising piece of software. It can look complicated - and even overcrowded - on first glance, but once you become more familiar with app, you'll see everything adds up to offering you one of the most comprehensive photo processing apps around.