Photoshop started the digital image manipulation revolution more than 30 years ago, and Adobe's groundbreaking application continues to be the best photo editing software money can buy (or rent, to be more precise).
If you need layered image editing, typography, 3D modeling, drawing, and a multitude of effects, you need Photoshop.
Designers and photographers alike find the most—and the most-advanced—tools available for their crafts in this application.
Mind-blowing AI-powered neural filters, sky replacement, live shapes, more control over cloud-stored files, and pattern preview all appear in the latest update—version 22—released at the company’s October 2020 Max conference.
Photoshop remains Daxdi's undisputed top choice for professional photo editing software.
How Much Does Photoshop Cost?
To get the latest version of Photoshop, you need a Creative Cloud subscription.
This means you need to sign in with an existing Adobe ID or create a new one.
The Photography plan is $9.99 per month, and that also gets you Photoshop Lightroom, our Editors' Choice winner for photo workflow software, and 10 Adobe Stock images.
You can no longer simply buy a one-payment license for Photoshop, which annoys some users who don't like the software-as-a-service model.
Those who feel this way may want to consider options such as Corel's surprisingly capable PaintShop Pro, CyberLink PhotoDirector, or even Adobe's own Photoshop Elements, all of which can be purchased outright.
And if you don't want to pay a cent, you can use the free, open-source GIMP software, though doing so can be a painful, counterintuitive experience if you're used to the convenience and polish of Photoshop.
To install the application, you first install the resident Creative Cloud helper program, which handles updates and syncing your files online.
This is also where you can find Adobe news, stock images, and the Behance creative social community (more about this later).
In the newest update of Photoshop, you also can browse and easily install plug-ins from the Creative Cloud utility.
You should only consider installing Photoshop on a fairly powerful PC or Mac.
I tested on an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 (the software is compatible with Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 or later).
Installation took about 10 minutes.
Mac users must be running macOS 10.13 or later.
If you haven't boarded the Creative Cloud train yet and are still clinging to your ancient licensed version of Photoshop, you miss out on other recent features like Content-Aware Crop, Face-Aware Liquify, Artboards, Cloud Documents, touch and stylus input support, the Design Space view, synced libraries, a glyph panel, and lots more.
Photographers and photo editors also benefit from tools for haze removal, more navigation options, and new raw camera file support.
The Photoshop Interface
Adobe keeps making Photoshop's interface more customizable and helpful.
You can choose from among several targeted workspace layouts, including 3D, Graphic and Web, Motion, Painting, and Photography, or you can create your own custom layout of panels and windows.
You can even rearrange the program's toolbar button rail to taste.
Choosing New Document presents a dialog offering templates such as Textured Geometric Masks, Instant Film Mockups, and Photo Collage Layouts.
Category filters across the top let you restrict the proposed templates to Photo, Print, Art & Illustration, Web, Mobile, and Film & Video.
If you've copied an image onto the clipboard, the software gives you an option to open a new image with its exact dimensions.
You can pick from thumbnails of your recent files, and access presets and libraries from the start page.
The page shows personalized tutorial content at the bottom.
Those who'd rather stick with the legacy starting experience can switch back to it, but I find that the start page makes it much easier to get to things I'm interested in, such as recent projects.
The ever-present search magnifying glass icon at the top right lets you find program functions, your own images, tutorials, or Adobe Stock images.
For version 22, the resulting dialog becomes a detached Discover window, but it still presents command shortcuts and help.
You can also click its Home icon to get to an index of tutorials, What’s New items, and the Help user guide.
I think a search function in a complex desktop application is a great idea, and some big-league software developers agree.
Microsoft helpfully introduced it to Office 2016, for example.
For context-sensitive help, the lightbulb icon is always at the ready for quick demos of how to perform edits.
The interface also adapts to the purpose at hand.
A case in point is the Select and Mask workspace, which is an available option whenever you have a selection tool active.
This shows only the tools useful during selection, such as Refine Edge, Lasso, Brush, Hand, and Zoom, along with the relevant Properties panel.
The interface's color themes offer a pleasing, context-sensitive consistency, too.
If you set the window borders to be light gray, all dialogs will likewise be gray.
When it comes to touch input, Photoshop is keeping up with the times with excellent touch support for devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro.
The company also now has a nearly fully functional iPad version of Photoshop.
Not only can does it let you use touch to pan and zoom images, but it also recognizes gestures, such as a two-finger swipe to undo and a three-finger swipe to scroll through images.
Larger tabs help touch-screen users, as do soft Shift, Ctrl, and Alt buttons.
You can't yet use touch for finger painting, however.
For that, you might try Adobe's Fresco app, available for iOS and Windows tablets.
Another input option is enabled by Photoshop's support for the Surface Dial, which offers a nifty way to adjust brush size, opacity, and more.
Selecting objects and people in photos is one of the top activities in the application—and one of the top pain points.
In the last few versions, Adobe has added Object Select, Subject Select, and the Select and Mask workspace just mentioned, along with its Refine Edge option.
Select Subject uses AI (called Sensei by Adobe) to automatically determine and select the main object in an image.
Object Select lives in the same toolbar button as the Quick Selection and Magic Wand tools.
When either of these is active, a Select Subject button appears in the options bar across the top of the program windows.
In testing, pressing this did a remarkable job of selecting people when the background was relatively uniform.
More complex backgrounds left some mis-selected areas.
The June 2020 update of Photoshop improved the Select Subject tool, addressing one of the most common selection tasks and pain points.
Selecting people’s hair has long plagued photo editors—even with tools like Refine Edge.
Adobe claims to have finally solved this problem for once and all with the update.
In my testing, the tool worked impressively, but we haven’t yet reached the holy grail of hair selection, one-and-done hair selection.
There was still plenty that remained unselected in my test shot, and it was hair fibers on a plain background that’s clearly hair to the human eye.
I took screenshots of the tool’s handiwork, showing the original, the dotted-line selection, and the black-and-while mask view, which shows just the selected matter as white.
I had similar not-quite-perfect result with both a low-res shot:
and a higher-resolution shot:
Here’s a detail from that last one, showing the unselected fine hairs at top and top right:
And here’s a use of the selection with a gradient background layer:
You can see white background areas that were missed in the selection, and some hair strands look smudged.
Still, while it’s not yet perfect, it is getting better with every iteration, and the current one makes for a good first pass.
It's the most automatic portrait selection tool, but Capture One's Refine Mask tool does an excellent job as well (below), even getting some hair strands missed by Photoshop.
It originally selected some of the background, which I fixed with the eraser.
Neural Filters
The most exciting Photoshop features to come out of the company’s MAX 2020 conference are neural filters, which magically let you change a portrait subject’s mood, age, and gaze.
Neural here is short for neural network—a subset of AI machine learning.
The tools actually take advantage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which in essence, use a technique of trying to trick the AI algorithm with incorrect (or adversarial) data.
Most of the new Adobe effects do their processing in the cloud, so you may need to wait a bit for them to appear.
The most interesting such filters are labeled as beta and included under an Erlenmeyer flask icon group; only Skin Smoothing and Style Transfer are not considered betas.
Several of the tools with entries in the panel are not even available (those marked with an i), but you can register your desire for Adobe to produce them.
Some of the filters require an extra download.
Other worthy options are Colorize, Super Zoom, and JPEG artifacts removal.
Not yet available are the intriguing Photo Restoration, Dust and Scratches, and Face-to-Caricature options.
The Super Zoom effect didn’t do much aside from applying a blurry noise reduction.
The face tools are possibly more fun than practical.
When I ramped up Happiness slider on most pictures, the result was more like a forced smile than a natural one, though it can be effective if you don’t turn it all the way up.
There are also sliders for Anger, and Surprise, which were surprisingly effective.
The algorithm also failed to de-age the neck on some subjects.
An interesting option is Retain Unique Details; if you uncheck this, your subject approaches a Barbie-doll appearance.
One slider, Placement, can nudge the face selection box right or left, though it didn't do much in my test shots.
The Colorize tool, though impressive, failed to bring alive the hands as well as the head in an old photograph.
Still, it’s clearly labeled as beta, so you can’t take points off for that; I actually had better luck with Photoshop Elements’ Colorize tool.
On a couple street- and beach-scene test photos it did nothing, but it convincingly colorized a snowy reindeer scene.
The neural tools do have a Before-and-After button, but I wish it had a side-by-side view.
The Light Direction tool, when used judiciously, can work to good effect.
The Gaze slider moves the eyes subtly, but the head direction tool wasn’t convincing in my test photos.
The final neural filter I’ll discuss is something that’s been in other photo software for a few years, notably in Cyberlink PhotoDirector.
It’s the Style Transfer effect, which makes your photo look like the work of an artist such as Picasso or van Gogh.
It’s a 176MB download at the time of testing.
There’s a good selection of looks, with over 30 to choose from already.
You can not only choose the strength of the effect, but also preserve color, focus on the subject, change brush size, and blur the background.
It’s a good implementation of the effect type.
Though it's now packed with drawing and font tools, Photoshop got its start as a photo editing and printing application, and it remains the most powerful photo editing software.
Along with its completely photography-focused sibling, Lightroom, Photoshop offers the most support for raw camera files, and the most in correction and effects.
From removing or adding objects with content-aware tools to lens-profile-based geometry correction to histogram adjustments to stained-glass effect filters, Photoshop has it all.
It's impossible to cover every feature here, but I'll take a closer look at a couple of the standout tools.
Sky Replacement.
This is a new tool for the October 2020 version.
Photoshop had been trailing software such as Skylum Luminar, and replacing a drab sky with a beautiful one used to be a many-step process involving manual masking and layers.
The new tool is instant—and awesome.
You get many choices, ranging from pleasant to dazzling, and you can adjust the position, edge, brightness, and temperature of your chosen sky replacement.
Unlike some tools, which simply try to detect a horizon, Photoshop’s can handle images with foreground objects that block the sky, like the obelisk in the image above.
You can move the sky around to get the best placement and even adjust the lighting and color of the foreground to better match the new sky.
In the example, you can see how the pavement reflection changes to match the sky color.
Lens Blur. The AI-enhanced Lens Blur tool creates a more color-aware effect than its non-AI predecessor.
The old lens blur is in the left above, and the newer is at the right.
The newer tool also give you control over bokeh shapes, which would be created by the blades of a camera iris in real lens blur.
Photoshop's simulated effects include a choice of polygons from triangles to octagons, and you can also adjust the blade curvature and rotation.
Content-Aware Crop. A few years ago, an app called Anticrop (since renamed to Recrop) gained momentary celebrity in the tech world.
Why? As its name suggests, it lets change you change the aspect ratio of an image by adding to the sides instead of simply cutting them off.
The Photoshop tool works similarly.
Just check the Content-Aware box while using the crop tool, and the app fills in anything in the crop selection that falls outside your image's boundaries.
Content-Aware Crop resembles the Content-Aware Fill tool.
Like that tool, Content-Aware crop only works well with patterned image content, such as a forest, pavement, sea, or sky.
It's particularly convincing with skies.
Note in the image below all the extra clouds generated in the sky on the right to create a more spacious square composition.
Content-Aware Fill has also been updated, with an interface that shows you what source content it's using to replace the object you want to remove.
You can edit the source area, but the program does a remarkable job with no help—it's even improved over last year's version, now identifying objects that shouldn't be part of the fill pattern.
Face-Aware Liquefy. Face detection has reached an increasingly high level of accuracy in recent years, to the point of recognizing individual facial features, as well as whole faces.
Face-Aware Liquify...
