There is such a thing as WOW for lightroom. This (free) plugin has about
60 or so photo "profiles" in anything from old looking B&W to scarey
saturation and the like.

As I said before, it's real value is only for the sheer number of photos
it can process, burn to CD, backup and export or swap into Photoshop
with the presets you created in Lightroom. If you use Photoshop the
experience is seamless between applications.

Version 2.0 (only in Beta right now) promises local, non-destructive
editing. It has a tool inventively called a "brush" that allows you to
locally alter exposure in only parts of an image. Pretty neat stuff. The
rest of 2.0 looks like refinements but I've only had it for a few days.

I was serious too, when I said if you edit individual photos from a
Canon DSLR using Digital Photo Professional, the resulting files are of
a higher quality than lightroom files. The good part about that, is DPP
is free with your camera.

I wouldn't personally go down the MS route but many people do. The
problem with anything Microsoft is they always try to re-invent the
wheel and end up with junk like "Publisher" that no print shop can read
the files from!

MS are well into doing it to images with their idea of a file format...
Nothing recognizes it except what MS provide. Same with their "RAW image
viewer" you are at the mercy of a pedantic company with no regard for
industry standards.

But that's only my opinion!

- --

from Douglas,
If my PGP key is missing, the
post is a forgery. Ignore it.