If you're not familiar with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, it's a photo processing app that's designed to be used by professional photographers for the post-production of batches of photos, and it's often used in conjunction with Adobe's seminal app, Photoshop.

Download Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 5.0 (32 bits) in Softonic

If you're not familiar with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, it's a photo processing app that's designed to be used by professional photographers for the post-production of batches of photos, and it's often used in conjunction with Adobe's seminal app, Photoshop. It's an incredibly accomplished image processing suite that's aimed mainly at professionals.

Download Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 5.0 (64 bits) in Softonic

What is Lightroom?

If you're not familiar with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, it's a photo processing app that's designed to be used by professional photographers for the post-production of batches of photos, and it's often used in conjunction with Adobe's seminal app, Photoshop.

The new interface

This latest version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom looks great. It's divided into seven sections - Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, Print and Web- which let you easily flit between different stages of management, processing and presentation. There's also some awesomely configurable options, running from how the app looks to how it acts, before and after processing. There's only one thing - the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom interface is vast, and to get the most from it, you'll need a large screen.

Photo management

The upside to using a dedicated photo processing app is the ease with which Adobe Photoshop Lightroom allows you to see, categorize and manage your photos. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is no exception, with a great import features and options, and, new to this version, location-based organization. You'll find the tools to manage this function under Map.

Photo processing

In version 4 of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe's self-stated aim has been to "extract more detail from highlights and shadows, make a wider range of targeted adjustments, and easily share your images and video clips on social media and photo sharing sites". It certainly provides some interesting options to do this, including highlight and shadow recovery, white balance features and local noise/moire tools. This is in addition to all the usual editing tools, which are present and easy to apply.

Presentation options

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom really excels when it comes to presenting your photos and passing them on. You can email directly from this new version, as well as sharing with a variety of social networks and photo sharing sites. The Book feature is also new, allowing you to create a variety of beautiful photo books from templates. This complements Adobe Photoshop Lightroom's Slideshow option, giving you even more scope for creating en eye-catching and imaginative end product.

Video management

In this version, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom really ramps up video support, further increasing its versatility. This means that you can make even more complex edits to video clips, as well as easier video publishing.

Conclusion

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 is an exceedingly promising piece of software. It can look complicated - and even overcrowded - on first glance, but once you become more familiar with app, you'll see everything adds up to offering you one of the most comprehensive photo processing apps around.

Download Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.4 in Softonic

Touching up photographs in a powerful program like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom may be overkill for most people who aren't professional or amateur photographers. Programs like Toolwiz Pretty Photo simplify the process by giving easy to use presets for filters and effects.

While filters are all the rage these days, they aren't the only features that Toolwiz Pretty Photo has to offer. There are color, hue, and focus adjustments to name a few. Many effects give manual controls for more advanced users, though the novice can figure them out fairly quickly.

One thing that Toolwiz Pretty Photo is sorely lacking is a live preview of the changes to an effect. This makes adjusting something like blur very annoying. You have to re-drag the area you want blurred each time you make an adjustment in order to see how the blur changes. This makes editing photos take much longer.

While Toolwiz Pretty Photo brings nothing new to the table, it does offer users some great editing features that aren't included in other photo editors.

Download Toolwiz Pretty Photo 1.0 in Softonic

If you think that the stock Windows Photo Viewer is too slow, then you may want to give ACDSee Free a try. ACDSee Free is a simple photo viewer that doesn't feature a bunch of bells and whistles that slow it down.

Apps like Adobe Lightroom are great for managing and touching up huge image libraries but they are often slow and resource heavy. ACDSee Free gives you a great image viewer that responds quickly. Zoom in and out of photos with the '+' and '-' keys or quickly set it as your desktop background from the 'Tools' menu.

Another cool feature of ACDSee Free is its print controls. Once you're done viewing your photographs, you can quickly access print settings to make sure it fits on the specific type of paper you're using. There are tons of print options for users to tinker with to get the best possible results.

ACDSee Free's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Yes, ACDSee Free is lightweight and quick but Windows Photo Viewer isn't a slouch either. Since Windows Photo View is included with Windows, there really isn't a good reason to seek out an alternative photo viewer.

Overall, ACDSee Free is a good, speedy photo viewer but it could have included a few more features to differentiate itself from the stock Windows Photo Viewer.

Download ACDSee Free 1.0.18 in Softonic

If you take a lot of photos, it can be a pain to manage them all. Kestrel GX is a well designed app that will help you manage all of your pictures and edit them as well. The interface of Kestrel GX is very intuitive. Browse to the location of your photos and it will load them all up for quick and easy editing.

Kestrel GX is simple enough to use for novices and powerful enough for the professional photographer. Its interface is reminiscent of Adobe Lightroom and Apple's Aperture programs. If you find Kestrel GX fits your needs, it's a lot cheaper as it's completely free. Commercial users will have to purchase a license though.

There are tons of tweaks you can perform on your photos with Kestrel GX. You can change temperature, crop, tint, saturate, and even put a watermark. These are all great features that will help your photos to look their best.

Overall, Kestrel GX is a great, free photo editing and management application for Windows that is easy enough to use for the novice and powerful enough for the professional.

Download Kestrel GX 1.3.1 in Softonic

If you're looking for a way to spruce up your photos, Perfect Effects Free is a great program to do just that. Think of it as Instagram for your computer, but with a lot more features and control. Import your own photos into Perfect Effects Free and you can crop, trim, and put filters on them - all with layer support. In fact, it looks and feels like a simplified version of Adobe Photoshop.

The included filters are very good and Perfect Effects Free gives you the ability to adjust the intensity of each one. Filters are also stackable, which means you can select multiple filters and create your own custom versions. Perfect Effects Free then gives you the option to save your custom filter as a preset to apply to other photos.

Perfect Effects Free performs very well, with filters showing up instantaneously. Tools like cropping and trim work just as you would expect them to. The interesting thing about Perfect Effects Free is that it can run as a standalone application or as a plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom, or Aperture.

Overall, Perfect Effects Free is a great program with great default filters and controls to make your photos more interesting.

Download Perfect Effects Free 3.0.2 in Softonic

If you're tired of the Windows native image viewer and want to use another tool to browse through your photos, look no further. We found it for you: FastPictureViewer.

FastPictureViewer is a fast, straightforward photo viewer that lets you scan the contents of a whole photo folder in a very easy way. You can move along pictures with many different key combinations (arrow keys, + and – keys, page up and page down keys) and also the mouse wheel. Plus the mouse buttons can be customized to quickly zoom in a photo.

FastPictureViewer works only with JPG and HD photo formats, and also supports XMP ratings which are compatible with popular photo tools like Adobe Lightroom.

That said, don't expect to find many other features in this program. FastPictureViewer doesn't include all the bells and whistles you could expect from an image viewer. I would say FastPictureViewer is especially addressed to users who just need a tool to quickly review photos and pick those which need further editing.

The program features a sleek, dark interface with a minimalistic design that contributes to put all the attention on the photo itself.

FastPictureViewer is an attractive, easy photo viewer that's mainly focused on browsing large picture collections and doesn't include any extra tools like the ones you find in similar apps.

Download FastPictureViewer Professional 1.8.252 in Softonic

Compatible with Photoshop CS5, Adobe Photoshop Elements and Lightroom, Blow Up makes edges sharp when you enlarge your digital images.

If you're familiar with Photoshop's resize tool, Blow Up will be simple to use for you as it's almost identical. Blow Up essentially assures you're able to resize images on a much larger scale without blurring details or losing any real quality.

Blow Up operates like any Photoshop plug-in, using a panel that's accessible from the Filter tool. This panel shows you the image in its original size. There are three ways to resize an image using Blow Up:

-Crop & Resize: crop the image but still maintain the original image proportions
-Resize: enlarge the entire image
-Stretch: You can choose any size for your image, although you'll lose the original proportions

In all three modes of BlowUp there are filters that sharpen your image's edges, which is the trick so that the final result does not lose quality. You can also define the type of paper you're printing the photo on, so the image will fit it perfectly

Blow Up's retention of image clarity when during enlargement editing is highly impressive.

Download Blow Up 3.0.0.628 in Softonic

Right after launching the program, you have to select the photo you want to fix. PhotoTune will then ask if the image contains people or not, and start a step-by-step wizard to fine-tune the picture. The program doesn’t work with folders, however, and nor does it include a built-in file explorer to browse your photo collection.

PhotoTune works little by little; the program fixes an image parameter at a time (tone, color, skin tuning, brightness, contrast and so on), displaying two versions of the photo and asking you to choose the one you like best.

There’s also a Pro mode in PhotoTune that gives you more control over the image. This mode includes a bunch of handy, easy-to-use editing tools with which you can optimize all the image’s parameters. Plus, any changes you apply are displayed in real time. Also, PhotoTune can be used as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom.

PhhotoTune allows you to edit your photos gradually and easily - and in real time!

Download PhotoTune 3.0.7 in Softonic