It's a good thing that Corel includes a few plug-ins to get you started. Corel is banking on an all-new plug-in architecture, and at the moment you have only about two dozen choices online. It'll take some time for this ecosystem to grow. Of the existing plug-ins, some--like the architecture perspective correction plug-in--are useful but not especially easy to operate.

As you'd expect, AfterShot lets you send your photos to an external editor, but there's no way to export a set of photos for stitching into a panorama or an HDR composite and then automatically reimport the final image.

AfterShot Pro is a robust photo editor and library for serious photographers, and it's priced low enough to appeal to enthusiasts. Only a few shortcomings give us pause. There's no in-program mechanism for backing up the previous catalog file, for example; so if it gets lost or corrupted, you may lose all of your edits. And there's nothing here for handling videos that your digital camera shoots.

Those are small quibbles, though. AfterShot Pro has enough attributes we like that we're nearly ready to leave Lightroom and move in with AfterShot.