into an application that is used not only by photographers, but many different types of scientists, designers, and other professionals as well. Although the ACR plug-in and Bridge application have been added to Photoshop to meet our modern needs, Lightroom was written from the ground up as one all-inclusive application designed exclusively for the modern digital photographer. Lightroom is a database-driven RAW processing application that creates a catalog of photographs, and it can include archives on separate volumes. Lightroom's catalog can be thought of as the card catalog at your local library, and your photographs are the library's holdings. Your keywords are how the catalog organizes and finds your photographs on the shelves. The application is divided into modules that each serve a different purpose. There are Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, and Web modules. There are still occasions when Photoshop provides a better solution than Lightroom, as in the cases of image stacking or creating HDR files or panoramas. It is easy to open files in Photoshop directly from Lightroom and then save the rendered files back to your Lightroom catalog. There is a learning curve when getting started with Lightroom. I recommend Seth Resnick and Jamie Spritzer's The Photoshop Lightroom Workbook, published by Focal Press, or Martin Evening's Adobe Photoshop Lightroom as comprehensive guides to this application. The following section is intended to be a brief overview of the Lightroom Develop module specifically as it applies to night photography. raw proceSSing procedure