How We Chose the Best Photo Editing Software Programs Highly rated programs If you’re hunting for the best photo editing software, you’re likely familiar with Adobe Photoshop, and its outsized reputation is deserved: Parent company Adobe Systems has been a software pioneer since the early '80s, and it’s been continuously improving Photoshop since its first release in 1989. The company now offers multiple options, from a single-purchase Adobe Elements 2018 to a Lightroom subscription to a monthly Photography Plan, which combines Lightroom and Photoshop. If you’ve never used Photoshop before, it’s tricky to figure out which version is best: What’s the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop?

Between Photoshop and Adobe Elements? We set out to compare each option. We also brought in three non-Adobe photo editing programs: Corel AfterShot Pro3, DxO Photo Lab Elite, and Serif Affinity Photo. These three programs were the closest competitors we could find, and all claim to offer similarly powerful tools. After downloading each program and setting up our test photos (featuring Test Corgi: Wally), we booted up each program to see how quickly we could start editing and organizing our photos.

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• Adobe Photography Plan (includes Photoshop and Lightroom) • Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018 • Corel AfterShot Pro3 • DxO PhotoLab • Serif Affinity Photo Easy navigation All our programs let you make hundreds of photo adjustments, but this abundance of options can make even the best photo editing software difficult to navigate. With this in mind, we looked for programs that made it easy to find the right tools on the first try. Each contender met the same baseline standards, allowing us to collapse editing modules we didn’t need so that histograms and color charts didn’t take up unnecessary screen (and brain) space.

We also appreciated that all have guided search features. If you search an action keyword, like “layer,” each program directs you to where you can find the function on your own: Over time, you’ll learn where the layer button is, no search function needed. Ableton live light.

Guided search directs you to the correct tool — no hunting through dozens of “Layer” or “Filter” options to find the right one. Customizable interface From here, we dug into how much we could customize each interface. We wanted to be able to rearrange lists of tools to our liking, as well as move individual modules around the screen, letting us keep track of whichever toolset was necessary for any given project: If we were background painting, we would want brush, color wheel, and texture modules open and close-at-hand. If we wanted to work on minute lighting changes, we could close up our coloring modules and arrange the Brightness and Contrast, Shadows and Highlights, and Exposure modules to our liking.

Most of our programs allowed us to customize our workspace. Here, we're using Serif’s “Color” and “Brushes” modules, while other tools stay nested in the menu.

Learning tools The best photo editing software should also have resources that guide users through unfamiliar functions. Even if you’re a Photoshop whiz, Adobe constantly adds new tools and expands old ones, and beginners are often interested in branching out and expanding their mastery.

We looked for tools like videos, tutorials, and online forums that would help make that transition easier for beginners and experts alike. Photoshop Elements offers 47 guided walkthroughs to adjust and edit your photos, many of which can be single clicks to auto-adjust your photos without any technical knowledge or skill. Technical performance We couldn’t test and compare the performance of every single tool offered by every single program (we’d be looking at hundreds of different functions). In order to compare technical performance, we focused on a tool that all beginners are likely to use at some point: the healing brush, which allows you to. In this tool, you select a “good” portion of the photo to copy, and then select the “flawed” section that you want to cover over. In our case, we gauged the efficacy of the healing brush by removing snowy footprints from a backyard photo of our favorite corgi, Wally.