What you’ll need
Lightroom is designed specifically for photographers working with digital capture images. Lightroom can process JPEG, TIFF, or raw images, but if your camera is capable of capturing raw images, I advise you to shoot in raw mode whenever possible. Lightroom currently supports more than 250 different raw camera formats.
You will need a computer that meets the minimal specifications listed below. Although it is possible to run Lightroom with a minimum of RAM, Lightroom will certainly benefit from having as much RAM as possible, so install at least 2 GB of RAM. Choosing a computer with a fast chip speed will help, of course, and you will also see a further speed improvement if you are able to run Lightroom via a 64-bit operating system. You don’t need much hard disk space to install and run Lightroom, but you will need to give serious consideration as to how you will store all the images in the catalog. Some people can easily shoot 10 GB of images or more in a single day. If you export some of those files as rendered TIFFs or PSDs, your storage requirements can grow considerably in a short amount of time. For more information on computer systems and backup strategies, see Appendix B. Here, though, are the minimum requirements for Mac and PC systems: