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Ultimately, while there is still a lot of resistance to Adobe's subscription model, it's being adopted by more and more rivals, and it is an extremely cost-effective route into software that was once prohibitively expensive. The latest updates in Lightroom use AI to 'intelligently' select subjects and skies in your images, and it's incredibly effective.
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Lightroom Classic is the best option for regular 'desktop' editing, and while Lightroom offers cloud-based storage to make all your images available everywhere, on any device, it needs 1TB cloud storage, which doubles the cost of the Photography Plan.
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Lightroom, meanwhile, takes care of all your image organizing, non-destructive editing, raw processing and preset effects. Despite its reputation for complexity, Photoshop actually offers a very clean, slick interface.
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Its support for selections, masks and layers is unmatched, making it the tool of choice for complex composite images. Adobe's Photography Plan, of course, includes Photoshop and Lightroom, which cover a lot more ground between them – but there are still plenty of non-Adobe rivals that can match their scope.ĭespite its immense power and constant steady improvements, Photoshop is slick and straightforward to use. In many programs now you can edit raw files alongside JPEGs without any intermediate processing, wind back your edits if you change your mind and create multiple 'virtual' versions of the same image.Īnd the best photo editing software today doesn't just fix and correct your images, it gives you whole new ideas about what your photos could look like with presets and profiles.īut with this huge expansion in photo editing possibilities, it doesn't take long to figure out that one application alone is unlikely to meet all those needs, and that Photoshop – the one-time 'king' of photo editors – barely manages one or two. Photo-editing software has undergone a transformation every bit as dramatic as digital cameras.
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