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If you’re not using the best photo editing software, you aren’t unlocking the true potential of your images. The modern post-processing workflow is an essential component of digital photography – just as the darkroom was back in the film era. With the right software, you can turn an image from promising into stunning – and there are no shortage of programs to help you do it.
While Adobe Photoshop is considered by many to be the industry standard, and still takes the top spot on our list, it is far from your only option. We make a point of reviewing all the new photo-editing programs that come out, as well as checking on their regular updates, and many of them have their own advantages over the Adobe suite (not least the lack of a monthly subscription payment). So, I’ve drawn on the AP team’s experience to assemble this guide, and you can click through the entries to read our full reviews.
If you’re looking to get serious about editing your images to make your photographs look as good as they possibly can, you’re in the right place. There are some tips on how to choose the best software for you at the end of the article, and there are also more options in our guides dedicated to the best subscription-free photo editing software and the best free photo editing software.
Here’s a quick reference list of the image editing programs we’ve picked for our list, along with links to get the best prices…
Best subscription-based photo editing software:
Best subscription-free photo editing software:
Best free photo editing software:
Best mobile image editing software:
We spend many hours testing every product we recommend, in detail, in a variety of situations and shooting scenarios, and only use experts for our reviews; so you can be sure that you’re getting the best products. Find out more about our expert writers.
Read on to learn more about why we rate each of these image editing programs, with links to full reviews by our team of writers and photographers…
Opinions are divided on the subscription model for software, but as more and more companies move in this direction, it’s something we can’t ignore. Many of the top-tier, professional standard programs are subscription or nothing. There are some pretty good deals for photographers which can soften the blow of monthly payments a little. Here are our picks of the best subscription services for photo editing.
Adobe Photoshop has been practically synonymous with photo editing for decades now, to the point where many people casually use ‘photoshopped’ as a generic term for an edited or retouched image. Amusingly, Adobe has a page on its website that instructs us to say ‘The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software’ instead of ‘The image was photoshopped’. This seems unlikely to catch on. That to be “photoshopped” is a part of the common language is a sign of its pre-eminence and success.
Photoshop is indeed a superb piece of photo editing software. Whether you need to clone out distractions, rescue blown-out highlights, convert an image to monochrome, process RAW files (via the Camera Raw plugin) or perform any of the other myriad tasks that might befall a photo editor, Photoshop will be well equipped. We reviewed the most recent version of Adobe Photoshop, and its ability to clean up and declutter images has been made faster than ever thanks to new AI-powered object selection tools.
These days it is impossible to talk about Adobe software without talking about AI, as the firm is going all-in on it. Newer versions of Photoshop have come loaded with powerful generative AI tools such as Generative Fill and Generative Expand, which allow you to radically transform images with generative content. Those who just want to edit photos without all that may be dismayed that Adobe has, in fact, embraced it fully.
The full version of Photoshop is subscription-only, as it has been for a long time. New subscribers are currently able to get a 50% discount on their monthly subscription of £9.98 instead of £21.98 (at the time of this publication). The popular $9.99 / £9.99 Photography bundle has been discontinued by Adobe and replaced by a Photoshop-Lightroom combo with 1TB storage for $19.99 / £19.97 per month – though be warned that cancellation is a more complex affair than you might think. Adobe is infamous for its sneaky ‘cancellation fees’ that hit users who have the temerity to not want to give them money anymore.
Read our full Adobe Photoshop review
If you’re subscribed to Photoshop, chances are good that you’ve got Lightroom too, as the most cost-efficient subscription gives access to both. While Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom programs share many features, the key appeal of Lightroom lies in its extensive cataloguing and image-management features. These allow you to use keywording and rating to organise your images and single out the keepers. If you’re regularly sifting through large numbers of files, it is an enormous timesaver.
Lightroom is also no slouch when it comes to photo editing. While Photoshop is the more powerful program with a more comprehensive suite of options, Lightroom is still excellent, and many photographers use Lightroom exclusively. Its image-repair and enhancement tools are precise and intuitive, and the highly fine-tunable masking function can be immensely useful. You can also easily copy your changes to multiple images for speedy batch editing.
Read our guide to Lightroom vs Photoshop: which is right for you? And for more advice, check out our guide to the pros and cons of RAW vs JPEG.
Previously known as Zoner Photo Studio X, this Windows-only software is designed to be the complete package when it comes to photo editing – so it’s also a raw processor, an image organiser and even a photobook designer. It offers plenty of Photoshop-like tools, including Layer adjustments, and the interface is well designed. The program includes plenty of camera and lens correction profiles too, with the option to upload more if needed. This latest version also runs much better than previous iterations of the software, with plenty of bug fixes and performance enhancements having been introduced.
Zoner Studio doesn’t have Adobe’s ultra-advanced features like Neural Filters, and its corrections aren’t as good as those you’d find in the likes of Photoshop or DxO PhotoLab. However, as a start-to-finish photo editing program, it does a very good job indeed, and is definitely a credible option for those looking for a solid Photoshop alternative. Note too that Zoner Studio won the ‘best photo software’ award in this year’s prestigious EISA awards.
Read our interview with photographer Kevin Bruseby on getting more from Zoner Photo Studio X.
CaptureOne Pro’s interface combines features similar to Lightroom catalogues for image storage, management and editing, but also offers the best features of Photoshop, like adjustment layers, masks, and advanced colour grading tools. You can also create so-called ‘Sessions’: standalone projects that are streamlined to include only the current photos you are working on, making it free of distractions. However, after finishing with a session, there is an option to import it into your CaptureOne catalogue and apply further editing, too.
Providing an excellent RAW processing performance and comprehensive support for USB and wireless tethering (your shots are transported to your computer in real time, where you can apply edits while you shoot), it became a must-have for many professional studio photographers. Even though it’s compatible with over 450 camera models, it only supports tethered capture for Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm, Leica, Sigma and Phase One/Mamiya.
There is an option to purchase the software with a one-off payment (£299), but with this, you won’t get any regular software updates. Alternatively, you can pay a monthly subscription fee, starting from £14.99 and have the benefit of regular bug fixes and updates.
We get it – not everyone wants to be on the hook to a digital landlord for the rest of their photo-taking life. Less than $10/£10 a month for Photoshop and Lightroom may feel like a really good deal, but if you’re planning on using the software for years on end, those monthly fees mount up. You may be better off paying full-price up front for software that’s yours to own and keep.
For a more detailed round-up, check out our full guide to the best subscription-free photo editing software. Or read on to discover some of the best photo-editing software that’s available as a one-time purchase with no subscription required.
While an upfront payment can seem painful on first sight, if you use software for more than a few months to a year, you’re going to make a saving compared to an ongoing subscription (a saving that will only continue to grow as time goes on). The basic version of ACDSee Photo Studio 2026 can be picked up for as little as $49.95, with the superior Ultimate version going for $119/£87. In either case, you’re ultimately coming out ahead compared to an Adobe subscription if you use the software long enough.
The program is designed to be a kind of one-stop shop for photographers, covering the workflow from organisation and cataloguing right the way through to the final edit. There’s no import process, with images from your folders being simply visible in the interface, and there’s also a new AI keywording tool. The latest 2026 version brings incemental, but useful improvements. There’s a number of new AI editing tools like the new AI denoise tool, Face edit as well as a customisable home screen and enhanced organisational tools.
As far as editing goes, ACDSee Photo Studio offers both destructive and non-destructive editing, giving you plenty of options for fine-tuning your images. In our review, we also found that AI tools like AI Masking and AI Sky Replacement work reasonably well, and in general you can rely on the Develop module to do everything you’d expect a photo editing program to do. It’s not an exceptional program, and doesn’t really have a solid USP compared to rivals. But ACDSee Photo Studio could well be a cost-effective option.
For an idea on using the software, read our ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2025 review
This powerful software from DxO is especially potent for processing raw files. DxO’s de-noising technologies, DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD2s, provide huge benefits in terms of rescuing detail in shots that are suffering from a significant amount of digital noise due to being shot at high ISOs. The process is fast and highly effective, able to turn images you might have written off as irredeemable into something you can make prints from.
If you’re using an older camera that gets noisy very quickly when the ISO is turned up, PhotoLab could help extend its lease of life. When we reviewed PhotoLab 9 we were hugely impressed – DxO’s DeepPRIME results show no horrible smoothing effects, or AI artefacts and even restored colour and contrast. The new AI masking tool quickly recognises subjects and makes precise selections and you can even copy local adjustments over between different images.
LUTs (Colour Lookup tables) are colour filters invaluable for video editors. DxO Photolab includes 32 initial choices, but it also supports third-party LUTs as well. This tool is used increasingly among photographers, as it helps speed up their workflow through automatic colour correction and colour grading.
Read more about the DxO PhotoLab 9
While Skylum Luminar does have a subscription model, it also offers the option of a one-time-only lifetime purchase of the software. This will ultimately save you money in the long-run, and there is a 30-day trial period in which you can get a refund if the software is not to your taste.
Skylum Luminar NEO is the latest iteration of a piece of software that’s been around for some time – originally, the developer was named Macphun, and made products exclusively for Apple operating systems. These days, Skylum Luminar NEO is a program aiming to fulfil the roles of both Photoshop and Lightroom, with a full suite of photo editing and photo organising tools. It’s stuffed with AI-powered tools like background removal and noise reduction and also offers tons of presets for those who don’t mind letting the program make a few editing decisions for them.
Read our full Skylum Luminar NEO review.
If the monthly subscriptions and one-time costs are beyond your budget, fear not – there’s lots of excellent free software out there for editing photos. We have an entire guide dedicated to the best free photo editing software right now – but here are two of the applications we feel are the best.
Affinity (by Canva) is probably the best Photoshop alternative for those who want a free package for photo editing and other image work. Now that it’s owned by Canva, it’s free to download and use, and for that you get a sophisticated editor with non-destructive workflow, layer editing, masking controls, and plenty more of the kinds of features photographers expect.
The program isn’t the most immediately user-friendly for beginners; those new to image editing will undergo a bit of a learning curve at first, with some of the more familiar features seeming a bit hidden, until you’re used to the layout. However, once used to the way the program wants you to think, and swapping between its different ‘Personas’ depending on the task you’re performing, it does get much easier.
Read our full Affinity by Canva review here.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP as it apparently must be known, is a free and open-source image editor that you can download, install and run in barely the time it would take to read this paragraph – no credit card required. GIMP has always been free, and is maintained by a devoted team of enthusiasts. It offers a powerful photo editing suite to rival Photoshop or Affinity Photo, and there are tons of community-developed plugins that allow you to make it your own. It’s infamously tricky to get to grips with – though recent updates have made it a lot more user-friendly than it once was.
GIMP 3.0 was released at the end of March 2025, eagerly awaited by large segments of the photo community. A sensible update, it doesn’t radically overhaul the interface, but provides general workflow improvements and operability tweaks that make the program more user-friendly than it’s ever been. GIMP is definitely worth a try if you’re looking for a free editor – it’ll literally cost you nothing to give it a go!
When you first boot up RawTherapee, you might be a little overwhelmed at the complexity of what you’re looking at. We’ve found that this free raw conversion software is not blessed with the most intuitive of interfaces, with tons of tool panels and a huge array of features. Geeks will be in heaven; normies might feel a little overwhelmed. However, if you do want to wade into the ins and outs of raw processing and don’t have cash to spend, the amount of power you get for free here is absolutely incredible.
Though RawTherapee wasn’t updated for a while, it eventually did see a welcome new version in May 2025. This update added support for various cameras and lenses, as well as a new Dehaze option, additional Distortion Correction tools and other fixes and improvements (see here for the full patch notes).
Despite being pre-installed, the Apple Photos editing software can be a little bit hidden away, and many Mac users might not be aware that they actually have a perfectly capable photo editor already on their machine. While it doesn’t offer advanced features like Layers, the Apple Photos interface offers a number of options for adjusting your images, including standard sliders for Brightness, Contrast, etc, as well as a Curves panel and Sharpening tools.
It also offers a number of automated modes that will enhance your photos for you, showing you what settings have been changed on the sliders so you can further adjust to taste. It’s a nice balance between automation and user-input. The straightening tool is also really good – a fast, intuitive radial wheel that automatically crops your image as you turn it.
While GIMP is inarguably the more powerful editor, Apple Photos is a simple and capable option for Mac users, one that you don’t even need to download – it’s already there! There’s also an app available for iPhone and iPad, allowing you to easily sync your library and editing across multiple devices.
If you’re someone who shoots in great volume, organisation and managing your photo archive is an absolutely vital bit of business – and the longer you put it off, the worse it gets. We’ve been impressed recently by Excire Foto 2025 & Excire Search 2026, photo-management programs that are easy to use, work locally, and take the drudgery out of organising your photo archive.
The two programs are effectively the same proposition – the key difference is that Excire Foto 2025 is a piece of standalone software, while Excire Search 2026 is a Lightroom plugin. Both are available for a one-time price, meaning you won’t be on the hook for yet another subscription, and both are powerful enough to cope with archives of tens of thousands of images without slowing down.
We put our expert Will Cheung on the case of testing both programs, and he found that they were eminently able to deal with his 650,000-image-strong database. He found that the auto-keywording genuinely worked well, and allowed him to make the most of Excire’s excellent search capabilities. AI assisted culling also proved to be a hugely useful tool, as it was able to automatically sort images into relevant groups for easy categorisation.
Realistically, this software is only really going to be worth it if you’re a pro or committed amateur photographer firing off huge numbers of frames – it’s overkill for sorting through holiday snaps. But if you’ve been meaning for a while to get around to sorting your disordered archive, you’ve nothing to lose by taking the 14-day free trial for a spin.
Read our full Excire Foto 2025 & Excire Search 2026 review
Finally, we’re taking a quick look at the best apps for editing photos on the go. Most photographers likely snap plenty of pics on their phone as well as their camera, and there are plenty of apps out there to help you kick your smartphone photography game up a notch. We have a whole dedicated guide to the best photo apps for phones, including editing apps – but read on for our top recommendation.
We regard Snapseed as one of the top choices for photo editors on mobile – while there are plenty of competitors out there, truthfully you’re unlikely to go wrong with Snapseed. It’s great. A completely free, Google-made app, available for both iPhones and Android devices, Snapseed puts a powerful and intuitive editor in the palm of your hand.
As well as standard tools like cropping and rotating images, Snapseed also enables Curves adjustments, with a range of presets available to make things easier. It’s perfect both for those who want a streamlined, automated process, and for those who like to dive in deep and get granular with their adjustments. And – need we remind you – it’s free!
Read our guide to how to edit your photos in Snapseed.
First of all, consider your needs and make a list of what are the most essential features you want to get from your editing software, this will help you narrow down your options. The most suitable photo editing software for you depends on what kind of photography you are doing and whether you are a beginner enthusiast or a pro in editing.
Subscription or one-time purchase
Most of the providers offer either a one-time purchase or a monthly or yearly subscription. With purchasing a one-off license, you own the program forever, and will pay less if you break down your cost per month, as the longer you use it essentially the cheaper it gets. Their downside however, is that they usually don’t provide software updates, and you can miss out on important bug fixes and new plug-ins. The subscription-based options, on the other hand, benefit from regular software updates, but you pay a monthly or yearly fee, and your access to the software stops when you stop paying the subscription.
System requirements
You will need sufficient horsepower to run the latest editing software, so if your computer is somewhat outdated, this can be an issue. Check on the manufacturer’s website for the recommended RAM, graphics card size and type, operating system and monitor resolution recommendations. For example, Photoshop’s system requirements state 16 GB as recommended; however, you can get away with the minimum 8GB, but speed and performance may be curbed.
Consider whether you have enough hard disk space to run it. I am not talking about space to install the software, but having enough free hard disk space to run it.
Another important aspect is how often the provider releases software updates. These often include shiny new features like Photoshops’ Generative AI but can be other useful things like support for newly released cameras and lens profile corrections.
Cross-Platform Licensing
If you use a MacBook or laptop on the go as well as a PC or iMac at home, you want to check if your chosen software offers what’s called cross-platform licensing. This allows you to use the same software on your Mac and PC without purchasing a new license. Some subscriptions also let you download the same software to more than one device, so you can pick up where you left off on another device.
Workflow and organisation
Would you like to edit as well as catalogue your images? Most software offers comprehensive cataloguing and rating features to help manage your image files. It is easy to shoot in burst and fill up your hard drives, so it is more and more important to be able to easily locate your files.
What features to look for in a photo editing software?
All of the editors listed here will include the essential editing tools, but depending on the style and genre you are shooting and editing, your ideal editor will differ greatly. You might want built-in filters or presets that can be easily applied for a quick fix, AI editing features, or generative fill.
Or maybe you want to work on different layers to composite multiple images together. If you edit your images one by one, practically any of the editors will suit you; however, if your work requires editing multiple images with similar changes, like in event or wedding photography, then you want to make sure batch editing is included in the features.
For macro or product photography, software that’s capable of compiling focus-stacked photos will be essential, but for someone who shoots wildlife, effective noise reduction will be a lifesaver. It all depends on your own unique wants and needs.
Final take away
When you have one or more potential software on your list, make sure to download their trial versions. It is a lot easier to make up your mind after you have actually worked with them in real life. Choose three images and edit them in each program; this way you can compare the ease of use and features and get a good idea if you will be comfortable using it on the long run.
It is generally considered best practice to shoot in raw format to retain as much information as possible, so when it comes to editing, you have a wider scope. Raw files allow you to pull more detail from the shadows and highlights of your image, as they preserve all the data from the sensor. But in return for the legroom in post-production, they look more flat. On the other hand, shooting in JPEG saves space on your memory card as it compresses files, and gives you ready-to-share images as it applies some basic adjustments in camera. The trade-off is a smaller scope to correct highlights and shadows, and the potential u0022bandingu0022 when you push sliders a little too far.
Read on for our in-depth explainer on RAW vs JPEG.
It is best to start with rotating, straightening and then cropping your image, so you have your image base ready. Then move onto white balance to fix any unnatural blue or yellow cast. At this point you can move onto adjusting exposure, as well as light and shadows. Then move on to more detailed adjustments like color vibrancy, saturation, and sharpening.
Our team tests every photo editing software by using it in our own professional editing workflow. All of our team are photographers, and regularly use different photo editing programs as part of our day-to-day workflow. This hands-on approach allows us to evaluate each program in real-world use instead of relying solely on technical specifications.
When we test new editing software, we assess how easy and intuitive it is to use compared to rivals on the market. From user interface and how easy it is to find features and catalogue images to make simple as well as complex adjustments. We pay attention to how smoothly the software fits into a photographer’s typical workflow, whether it’s a quick on-location edit or an in-depth retouching session.
We use editing programs to edit both JPEG and RAW files, if such functionality is offered. We look at how effectively a piece of editing software can be used to reduce image noise, remove blemishes, recover detail in highlights/shadows and more. If a piece of software offers image cataloguing features for organising and sorting through image libraries, we’ll test those out too.
Last but not least, we assess any advertised AI features like automatic subject selection, sky replacement, or background removal to see how accurately and consistently they perform. Finally, we consider factors like export options, compatibility with other software, and overall value for money.
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Jon is a freelance journalist who has been writing features and reviews for Amateur Photographer for more than a decade. His writing also appears in Digital Camera World, Black + White Photography magazine, Photomonitor and many more. He's an avid film photographer, despite the expense, and has contributed a few features to AP on how to shoot film on the cheap. See more at jonstapley.com.
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© 2026 Kelsey Media Ltd . kelsey.co.uk
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