3. Lets You Make Exposure Changes Easily

Lightroom 2's best new feature is the ability to "paint" corrections selectively in specific parts of the photo. Consider a photo in which the sky is overexposed but the foreground is dark and muddy, for instance. You can drag a "graduated filter" onto your image and underexpose the sky, while painting a mask over the parts of the foreground you want to brighten. Lightroom helps you by smartly tracking the edges in the image, so you can paint a selection on a flower without accidentally selecting any of the surrounding sky. Once your selection is complete, you can edit the exposure, brightness and contrast, saturation, sharpness, and even add a color tone.

The red sky in this image shows one of my selections, so I can ensure I've painted all the bits of sky that I want to include in my exposure adjustment. I've selected some of the mountains separately for a different exposure adjustment.

This Exposure Bush so easy and powerful that it will completely change the way you think about photo editing. Indeed, this single Lightroom feature demonstrates how awkward and difficult photo editing has been in programs like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro since the dawn of digital editing. The Exposure Brush works with JPEGs, but it performs best with your camera's RAW format, since RAW photos capture a lot more data to begin with, and thus can be pushed and pulled more effectively in Lightroom. Start using Lightroom, and you might decide to do all your photography in RAW.

4. Lightroom Is a Fully Integrated Organizer