One advantage of digital workflow software is that the apps address the specific needs of modern digital photographers, offering fast, easy, efficient tools for adjusting exposure, color, and other image parameters. Think of it as providing the essential Photoshop tools without the clutter of extras that are better suited to a graphic designer than to a photographer who wants to clean up a photo. These essential photo-editing controls get the job done most of the time, but when you need to remove a person or an object with a clone brush, "punch out" a background, or assemble multiple photos into a composite image, you should turn to a full-featured photo editor. Workflow programs simply can't match them in handling those sorts of advanced tricks, which is why Lightroom lets you export photos to another program for high-level work, and then automatically return the edited photo into its organizer when you're done.

Because workflow programs focus on the needs of serious photographers, they are lossless editors: No matter what changes you make to your photo, the edits are encoded in metadata, and the original pixels remain unharmed. (The exception here is PhotoDirector, which does have a few tools that are lossy and require you to save your content as you go along.) Workflow programs are essentially big databases. At their best, they free you from having to worry about folders and filenames, allowing you instead to tag your photos with meaningful keywords or to search for images by their exposure settings. And the days of juggling a slew of duplicate, or near duplicate photos, are gone. You can perform editing experiments on an unlimited number of virtual copies of a photo--each one cropped differently and given unique exposure and color adjustments--while only the original takes up space on your hard drive.