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Agreed. If you're working with Photoshop and Lightroom, you'll definitely be frustrated. CPU and mem usage may not suffer (although you better have a lot of RAM, I pushed my machine to 4.5GB actual mem usage recently doing an HDR w/PS and LR), but graphics will. Having an actual dedicated card that meets aero glass requirements is a must, and as far as I know, no VM host can do that. You'd get better performance via Wine.

Or you could always switch to the Gimp and Rawstudio and/or RawTherapee under Linux...

Also in the repos is RawStudio. It uses dcraw to do conversions, but inside a lightroom-lite (as in it only has the basic abilities you actually use) interface. Unfortunately the "export to gimp" menu option is broken, but it still opens images faster, makes adjustments faster and exports to jpeg faster than lightroom under windows on the same hardware.

What about rawstudio and ufraw? I have used all three and I can say that while I like the features that rawtherapee has I like it the least overall. Everything is so slow that working on a RAW image takes forever. Rawstudio has the least amount of features but is very fast and the SVN version has added a few very important features. It is currently my favorite. UFRaw is nice but the interface isn't as clean as rawstudio and there is no batch processing. Every image has to be opened separately.

If you like KDE apps, which I don't. There's just something about the interface and menus and what not that I just can't stand. Oh well.

Back on topic, I personally use rawstudio to import from my camera do some basic adjustments and then export to gimp. And mono be damned, F-Spot is a perfect iPhoto replacement. I've played with lightroom and aperture on vista and leopard respectively and find both work well, but just don't justify their pricetag for me.

There are plenty of options, and they should all be available in most distro's repos, so just try them all (even the KDE stuff). I used synaptic and searched "camera" and installed anything that looked decent. I found dcraw liked my camera better than ufraw even though ufraw lists my model as supported and dcraw does not... So as always, YMMV.

I don't know why the author thinks that Raw Therapee can't process JPEGs or TIFFs. Just go into the preferences screen, uncheck "Show only RAW files", and you're set.

Also missing from the comparison: Rawstudio and UFRaw.

If you're interested in RAW processing on Linux, there's an excellent blog called Linux Photography about this very subject.

Rawstudio

There's rawstudio or cinepaint. Ufraw I guess too which can act as a stand-alone editor and also has a gimp plugin. If you don't mind closed-source then there is Bibble too.

Rawstudio is looking quite promising for such an early bit of software.