It’s not all about Photoshop! These days we want more than layers and masks…

Many things have changed since Photoshop first came to dominate the photo editing market. We’ve all got much larger more complicated photo libraries now, and we need software that can organise, search and share these growing collections. There’s also a growing interest in more evocative ‘looks’ that can be applied quickly and simply across a whole batch of photos.

And, most of all, we want to be able to change our minds – hence the rise of non-destructive, or ‘parametric’ photo editing, as used by Lightroom, Capture One and a whole host of other photo editors. Very often you’ll come back to an image and see a better way of adjusting it, or see how to tweak the settings to get a better result. Non-destructive tools enable you to make those changes months after the initial edit.

Amongst many members of the photographic community, there’s a general mistrust of subscription software. Adobe’s Photography Plan is terrific value, but many people still prefer to pay a one-off licence fee and not have to keep paying monthly fees on a permanent basis. Often, the long-term cost of ownership is not so very different when you do the calculations, but there’s a significant difference in how much you pay and how long you pay it for!

So here’s our pick of 10 top photoediting applications for beginners and experts, cataloguers and preset fans alike. Rod Lawton

The contenders

Adobe Photoshop

£9.98/$9.99 per month

Still the best at what it does

www.adobe.com

P hotoshop is, of course, the world’s most famous photo P 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.