Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for Mac OS X and Windows, recently revved to version 5, is a worthwhile tool for photography enthusiasts and professionals. The new version adds critical photo editing capabilities and creates time-saving workflows.
 
Lightroom 5 adds new editing tools to help photographers create better images faster. With the new Advanced Healing Brush, you can quickly fix image flaws like dust and lint, or seamlessly erase just about any object. Improved control lets you easily remove things with odd shapes such as threads or splotches.

You can straighten tilted images with a single click. The new Upright tool analyzes images and detects skewed horizontal and vertical lines, even straightening shots where the horizon is hidden.

Photoshop Lightroom 5 lets you emphasize important parts of your image with more flexibility and control. The Radial Gradient tool lets you create off-center vignette effects, or multiple vignetted areas within a single image.

Smart Previews let you work with images without bringing your entire library with you. Just generate smaller stand-in files of your full-size images. Any adjustments or metadata additions you make to these files will automatically be applied to the originals.
 
Lightroom 5 also brings extended sharing and publishing capabilities. New video slideshows enable customers to combine still images, video clips and music in a creative HD slideshow that can be viewed on almost any device. Updates to the Book module bring the ability to create, personalize and print photo books from a variety of tailored templates, as well as create customer-specific templates.
  
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 is available for immediate download for Adobe Creative Cloud members. Standalone software is available at Adobe.com and participating retailers for US$149 or $79 for upgrades. For more detailed information about product features, upgrade policies, pricing and language versions, please visit www.adobe.com/go/lightroom.