PHOTO-EDITING SOFTWARE

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

- Rod Lawton

Many things have changed since Photoshop first came to dominate the photo-editing market. We’ve all got much larger and more complicated photo libraries now, and we need software that we can use to 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, and 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 for how long.

Read on for our pick of 10 top photoediting applications for every budget, with options for beginners and experts, cataloguers and preset fans alike.

Adobe Photoshop

£9.98/$9.99 per month