Adobe released its Lightroom software just over a year ago. The name is a play on the word "darkroom", the idea being that Lightroom is the equivalent of a darkroom for digital images, allowing photographers to filter images and add effects, balance colours and publish them.

We'd previously given it little thought given that it costs so much - the cheapest we've found it is at Amazon, where's its around £175. But you do get a lot for your money. In the past we've sung the praises of programs such as Exifpro, which perform a similar service.

For £11, Exifpro does an excellent job when it comes to sorting through a stack of new photos, categorising and rating them and tweaking them. But Lightroom offers whole new levels of functionality.

Not only is it very swish, with smooth-running screens that look great and work fast, but it also offers a few clever touches such as the ability to quickly tag photos with a keypress - that means that if you're reviewing a large batch of pictures from the weekend's picture-taking, you can easily weed out the bad ones.

But Lightroom is also easily expandable - instead of using the standard Flickr upload tool, you can download Jeffrey Friedl's plugin that hooks into Lightroom's export tool, and sends your images straight to the photo-sharing site.

The only problem is that it makes it so easy to prune a collection of pictures that it encourages much more picture-taking, and now a hard disk upgrade is in order to store them all. Well, that and the amount of screen size it requires - we had to up our resolution to 1600 x 1200 pixels just to fit everything on in a useable size (fortunately our labs have a stock of CRT monitors that can do just that) - although Lightroom 2, which should be out later this year, can apparently make use of two screens, which will improve things.

We were surprised to find that Lightroom is so suitable for not just professionals but for amateurs who want to make the most of their images. And while £175 can't in any way be considered cheap if you're not a professional photographer, for dedicated amateurs it's a good investment and certainly good value.