Adobe Lightroom
is the main application to edit my pictures in. It’s a real workhorse, easy to use but with tons of tools and a very good RAW-engine to get the best possible quality out of my images. Lightroom has two main functions: editing of the RAW data and archiving the images. Making use of the terrific key-wording, colormarking, starring and metatagging possibilities a library of many thousands of images is quite easy to manage.
To unleash the multitude of tools without experimenting until you discover the best workflow yourself I can recommend the e-book Lightroom, a professional photographers workflow from Michael Clark.
If you are more the type of ‘watching instead of reading’ kind of guy (girl…) one of the best video-tutorials are those of George Jardine. Lots of information and it gives you a lot of extra insight of the interaction of lightroom and your machinery. So, check out these tutorials and watch the free sample movies.
Adobe Photoshop CS
Is still on my computer since I am a designer. For my photographs I start it up to do some fancy layering and masking, stitching panorama’s but for the most of the time it sits unused on my HD
Digital Photo Professional is Canon’s proprietary RAW-engine. It’s good if not very good since Canon understands as no other how its files are built. Alas the have given it an interface ‘only a mother could love’ and is, I’m sorry to say. quite useless.