The world's best image-editing program
Photoshop isn’t just a PC program, it’s a verb. Nobody ever looks at a celebrity on a magazine cover and thinks, ‘Hmm, I bet she’s been Corel PaintShop Pro’d’. In short, there’s no disputing that Adobe’s photo editor (currently celebrating its 25th year) is the first choice. The question is whether it’s the right one for you.
Until recently, that dilemma was probably decided by its price - over £500. But these days Adobe would rather rent out software than sell it, so to get and use Photoshop you need a subscription to Creative Cloud. The ‘cloud’ part is a bit of a misnomer: Adobe does offer various handy online services, like storing colour palettes and exchanging documents with the company’s various apps for Apple iOS, Android and Windows Phone. But Photoshop itself is still a normal Windows program that lives on your hard drive. It just checks in with Adobe each time you launch it to make sure you’re still paying your monthly fee. If 30 days go by without confirmation, it’ll stop working.
A full Creative Cloud subscription - all the software you’d need to run a graphics studio, publish a magazine, design a website or edit a movie - costs £47 per month. This represents excellent value but overkill for most of us. The Photography option just gives you Photoshop and Lightroom (see our review. Issue 453) for a reasonable £8.57 per month, although you have to sign up for a year.
This price includes all upgrades, and Adobe adds features continuously. This 2015 version of Photoshop CC has some good new bits, even if nothing stands out.
Dehaze is a useful filter for photos taken facing towards the sun or that, for whatever reason, come out with low contrast. We found it mostly worked well: just watch out for false colours appearing on some pictures.
Dehaze lives in the Camera RAW module, which appears when you open raw images taken with more advanced digital cameras. Unlike JPEGs, these images have not been pre-processed, so you have more scope to adjust colour and tone without pushing things too far. You can also open Camera RAW as a filter and use it on any photo. Earlier this year, it gained options to combine photos into HDR (high dynamic range) images and panoramas, making even more eye-popping pictures possible.
If you use Photoshop for work projects, you might sometimes need pictures that you haven’t taken yourself. The Fotolio image library is now integrated into Photoshop, so for £7 you can license a picture of almost anything and use it immediately.
One significant new feature is Artboards, which lets you create multiple ‘pages’ within each document. You wouldn’t normally use this to create actual pages, rather for different versions of a website designed for varying screen dimensions, or perhaps a project incorporating different items that you want to see all at once. And we’re interested to see what happens with Design Space, an experimental feature that lets Adobe create new interfaces for different ways of using Photoshop.
As you can see, actually editing photos is quite a small part of what Photoshop is about these days. But overall it’s still the best at that. If you prefer to buy rather than rent, Corel PaintShop Pro X7 and Serif PhotoPlus X7, at £60 and £80 respectively, are the closest rivals. If you just want to tweak photos, there are much simpler programs again, but Photoshop offers so much more depth - if you don’t mind spending more time figuring out where everything is.
VERDICT
You shouldn't be put off by the subscription model - Photoshop is more affordable and more capable than ever.