Serif Affinity Photo offers one of the best photo editor and compositor experiences, and it works great on a Mac or PC.

It’s expensive but very, very good.Ī monthly subscription works out under $30 / £25 / AU$45. It doesn’t have Adobe’s mobile apps and online synchronization options either, but it does offer professional-grade ‘tethering’ tools for studio photographers capturing images via a computer. It’s compatible with over 450 camera models, but tethered capture only supports Canon, Sony, Nikon, and Phase One cameras.Ĭapture One Pro also has a better system for applying local adjustments, using adjustment layers and masks. Its raw conversions are sharper and less noisy than Adobe’s, but it doesn’t support such a wide range of camera raw formats or as large a number of lens correction profiles. Provided you’re happy to subscribe, Photoshop remains the best in the business for digital image editing.Ī Photoshop subscription costs around $30 / £25 / AU$45 per month.Ĭapture One Pro covers almost exactly the same territory as Adobe Lightroom Classic, offering cataloging tools, seamless raw processing, manual image enhancement tools alongside preset effects, and a non-destructive workflow that means you can revisit your adjustments at any time. Other more minor updates, such as new downloadable tutorial assets, show that Adobe is trying hard to justify the continued subscription cost. It’s so effective that it really needs to be seen to be believed. Sky Replacement is a more resounding success, detecting the horizon with impressive accuracy and masking out overcast skies.

Impressive but faintly terrifying, features such as Skin Smoothing can be effective if deployed delicately. Its layering, masking, and retouching tools still set the standard by which others are judged, while the power of its layer-based editing system can handle the most complex of creative projects.įreshly updated, the latest Photoshop variant adds AI into the mix, with automated ‘neural filters’ which make otherwise laborious edits into one-click adjustments.

Even after switching to a subscription model, the renowned software remains the go-to solution for artists, illustrators, designers, and photographers.

Adobe Photoshop has long been a byword for image editing.

Luminar 4 portrait retouching