Adobe Photoshop
£9.98/$9.99 per month Still the best at what it does
Photoshop is, of course, the world’s most famous photo editor. While it was once an expensive professional purchase, it’s now part of the Adobe Photography Plan, offering Photoshop, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic (and extras) for £120/$120 per year.
Photoshop is solely an in-depth professional image-editing tool. It has no image cataloguing features and no library of preset effects. It does not support non-destructive editing in the modern sense, though you can build Adjustment Layers and Smart Objects into your images to provide extensive reworking opportunities.
You would probably not use Photoshop on its own. It relies on the help of programs like Bridge (included) and Lightroom for image browsing and organisation. The fact is that as Lightroom grows in power and sophistication, photographers may find they need Photoshop, and programs like it, less and less.
Adobe has made things complicated by splitting Lightroom into two versions! You get both versions with the Adobe Photography Plan, but they work in very different ways, so we’ll look at them individually.
‘Lightroom’ is the name Adobe uses for its web-first version. Lightroom is a stripped-down version of Lightroom Classic that’s actually more pleasant to use, but comes with important requirements and restrictions.
First, all images must be stored in the cloud – so for an image collection of any size, that means paying £9.98/$9.99 extra per month for 1TB storage. Second, it doesn’t support external editors or plug-ins (except for Photoshop), it doesn’t offer smart albums, and you can’t create virtual copies of your photos for editing.
Lightroom is very effective, however, if you want to use your mobile devices to capture, browse and edit images seamlessly across devices.
Affinity Photo is the closest thing to a Photoshop alternative in this group. Like Photoshop, it’s a powerful, in-depth, technical image enhancement tool. It’s also available subscription-free – and, amazingly, is the cheapest program in this roundup.
Where Photoshop is designed to dovetail with Illustrator and InDesign, Affinity Photo works alongside Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. The combined price for all three is little more than the cost of one year’s Photography Plan.
Affinity Photo does not offer any image cataloguing tools or creative one-click presets. But it does have focus stacking, HDR merge, panorama stitching, frequency separation retouching tools, live image filters and more. Its interface is busy and technical, but its tools are a match for Photoshop’s – and often better. It can take a little work in the Develop mode to get the best out of raw files.
DxO PhotoLab is a combined image browser and raw processing/editing tool, designed to deliver the best possible lens corrections and raw processing, together with sophisticated local adjustments.
It does integrate with ViewPoint 3 (perspective corrections) and FilmPack 6 (analogue film and processing simulations), but these programs cost extra.
PhotoLab is a non-destructive editor, so if you want layered image composites and more complex effects which can only be achieved by direct pixel adjustments, you will still need to send images to a program like Photoshop.
PhotoLab comes in two editions: Essential and Elite. The Elite edition is the more expensive, but definitely the one to get, as it includes DxO’s remarkable DeepPrime noise reduction technology, and a rather good ClearView local contrast tool.
Photo Raw 2022 is a ‘do it all’ photo editor that covers everything from photo editing, through non-destructive raw processing and preset effects and right through to multi-layer composites, all within a non-destructive workflow. It covers a lot of ground.
It’s hard to find any gaps in Photo Raw’s features. This is probably the most complete single program here; it even has a library of effects presets to rival those in Exposure X7. If it has a weakness, it’s the interface, which can be fussy to navigate, and does have some crossover between its Browse and Catalog tools and Develop and Effects modes.
The results from Photo Raw 2022 are very good. Its presets are varied and exciting; its raw processing is at least as good as Adobe’s; and its effects filters offer huge control. It just lacks a little fluidity compared with the best packages on test here.