The Develop Module

Right and Left Panels

Left Panel

Switching to the Develop module, you will be able to see the Preset / History tool in the left panel. Every change made to a photo will be recorded in the History and is reversible.

The unique thing about the History tool is that moving the mouse over each recorded change will display the selected change in the Navigator in real time.

Users can actually see how each change affects the photo by hovering the mouse up and down over the list of changes.

Right Panel

The key component of Lightroom is actually the Develop module.

Once the Develop module is activated, an extensive list of adjustments from colour to lens correction and camera calibration will appear on the right panel.

From the screenshot, you can see the many tools that you can use to enhance a photo. It's a photographer's dream come true.

This is the darkroom of the digital era. There are just too many tools to cover, so and we won't be covering each and every one in this review.

One feature that really made me vouch for this software is the ability to straighten a photo without having to crop the photo after rotating it. It's all done automatically and that is exactly how it should be.

There's also a tool that allows you to "De-noise" the photo but I can't really tell if it is working. I tried this feature on several photos with moderate to high noise, but the results came out as though none or very little noise was removed.

There's no documentation on these features and therefore, I wouldn't dare to say if this feature is intended to remove heavy noise or merely to remove noise for certain ISO ranges.

The other cool aspect about this software is the White Balance custom tool feature. You can manually select the White Balance from any RGB pixel within the photo itself and the changes will be reflected in the Navigator preview screen.

One critical tool left out from Lightroom is the ability for a photographer to correct lens distortion. I think this is very important especially for wide-angle and fisheye lenses. Perhaps Adobe intentionally left this and some other features out, so that users will still have to fall back on Adobe Photoshop.

The ability to stitch photos has also been omitted. There are a handful of third-party solutions that will stitch photos but photographers would generally prefer a one-stop solution. From a business point of view though, it's understandable why Adobe would want to split features between their digital darkroom and photo editing software.