Adobe Photoshop is a software that everyone is familiar with, or at least knows what this particular does. The word ‘Photoshop’ is so popular that the English Dictionary even considers it as a verb.
Photoshop has been around for quite some time now, and it is Adobe’s flagship software that it sells to the audience, along with a bunch of different softwares related to many different aspects.
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Nowadays, there is quite a lot of competition around Photoshop, as it is not the only photo editing software present. Hell, it is not even the only photo editing software from Adobe itself.
So in this review, I will clarify whether Photoshop is still the industry-leading software or if there are some other softwares present in the market that perform even better tasks than Photoshop.
Contents
Photoshop Specs
Let’s start off by discussing the various specs that are available to use in Photoshop.
Layer Editing – Layer Editing is the number one tool that makes Photoshop such a great photo editing software in the first place. In Photoshop, you can create multiple layers on your photo, and you can customise each of the layers.
This allows users access to a lot of creativity which they certainly can’t get if they are just working on a single layer.
Lens Profile Correction – Lens Profile Correction is also a great tool to look forward to. It is a complicated thing, but to explain layman’s terms, each lens has its different sets of properties assigned to them.
Because of these properties, sometimes the image loses on certain elements. But with many photo editing softwares, you can bring back the image loss through Lens Profile Correction.
Availability of Photoshop
Photoshop is available to use on many devices. You can use it on your Windows and macOS devices. Along with this, you can also use this software on mobile devices such as Android and IOS devices.
This is an overall great addition by Adobe because a lot of people like to edit their images on the go, and with the availability option for Android and IOS devices, you can simply work on Photoshop over on your phone or iPad.
And same goes for Windows and macOS devices as well. You can very easily choose on which device you want to use this particular software or even transfer the PSD files from one device to another and continue your work.
It is simple, and everyone gets to enjoy the great set of features that are available in Photoshop.
Photoshop Price & Free Trial
You can get Photoshop available in Adobe’s Creative Cloud package for $39.99/month, where you have access to many softwares offered by Adobe such as After Effects, Premier Pro, Auditions, etc.
Or you can individually buy Photoshop for $20.99/month. Adobe also offers a free trial of seven days for Photoshop, so you can also try it out for yourself and see if you want to purchase the overall product or not.
The price varies from time to time since the Holiday season is almost upon us; that is why you are seeing certain discounts on the pricing plans; otherwise, you get Adobe’s Creative Cloud Plan for $54.99/month.
The prices could be a little expensive for certain people, and I would only advise purchasing the products if you are going to use the software regularly.
New Update of Photoshop
Photoshop constantly gets updates each year, and each year there are many different features and effects that are available in its library. These are some of the new changes that you can see in the newly updated Photoshop.
Integration with Adobe Express – One of the great things about using Adobe products is that you are able to use other Adobe products to create an overall better outcome for your product.
With the new update, you can easily integrate Adobe Express into Photoshop. Adobe Express is a free tool that allows users to quickly edit their pics.
New AI imaging technologies – There have already been great AI tools in Photoshop, and with this new addition, you have access to even more tools such as Sky replacement, Neural filters, Landscape mixer and Colour transfer.
Additional/ Refinements of tools – There have been additional new methods and tools that allow you to remove objects from the backgrounds and select certain objects even easier than before.
Pros and Cons of Photoshop
Let’s now discuss some of the Pros and cons of Photoshop.
| Pros | Cons |
| ✅Available on all devices ✅Lots of editing tools ✅Powerful software ✅Adobe integration with other softwares | ❌Expensive software ❌The UI and list of features can be overwhelming for beginners ❌Subscription type model |
So, as you can see, there are a somewhat equal number of pros and cons for this software, the pros slightly over numbering the cons. But that being said, the cons of Photoshop are nothing to dismiss over.
The software is very expensive compared to some of the other photo editing softwares that are available in the market right now. And the overall UI can be a lot overwhelming for beginners.
Just to put it in context, I have been using Photoshop since 2018 and granted, I don’t use it all the time, but every time that I use it, I have to refer to YouTube to know how to use the different sets of features and effects on it.
So for a beginner, the list of features can be quite overwhelming. But, if you are a professional photo editor, then you will feel right at home, given how many features and effects you have for yourself.
But Adobe should look into some of the cons of its software, as they are widely repeated about its software.
Specific functionalities of Photoshop
User Interface
The user interface of Photoshop has been kept sleek, just like its previous versions, and Adobe continuously adds more options to customize the entire user interface as per your liking.
For example, you have the option of choosing the type of workspace layouts of the entire UI. You can choose from Graphic and Web, Printing, Photography and Motion. If you are not a fan of the layouts, then you can even customize it as per your liking.
You also have the option of adjusting the toolbar of the software so as to choose the tools that you use the most often for your work and more.
So, in terms of customization, the user interface of Photoshop is pretty reliable, and you are able to do a lot on it. But, it can still be very overwhelming for a lot of beginners.
Filters
Photoshop is known for its sheer amount of filters, and with the new update, you get one more filter added to that list of filters. This new filter is called ‘Neural Filter’.
If you have a portrait shot of a subject, this Neural Filter allows you to automatically change the age, mood and even the gaze of the subject, thanks to its AI mechanism tool.
It is quite an advanced tool to have, and Adobe has been bringing in more and more of these AI tools that you can use on your images to make them automatically better without a lot of manual work.
Obviously, some people love to choose the more manual approach when it comes to editing images, as they are able to do a lot more but having such AI skills is a treat.
Numerous tools
There are, of course, numerous tools that are available to use in Photoshop, from drawing tools to font tools, etc. But Photoshop has been working on adding more and more tools that can be beneficial to a lot of photographers as well.
Some such tools are the sky replacement tools, which allow the user to instantly change the sky of their image to a much more vibrant and better-looking sky that are already in the library of the software.
It is a quick method compared to manually changing the sky of your image (and believe me when I say that it takes quite a long time to change the sky in your image if you want it to look good.
Then you have other tools available as well such as the ‘Content-Aware Crop’ tool that automatically fills in the parts of the image that is not available when you are cropping the image.
And these are just two of the many tools that you can expect to use in Photoshop.
Effects
There are tons of different effects to choose from in Photoshop as well. These effects allow users to create and make better imaging products than they already have on their hands.
One such great effect is called ‘Super Resolution’. The Super Resolution effect allows the AI imagery of the software to automatically increase the overall resolution of any pic that you are working on in Photoshop.
This is a great feature to have, especially for the pics that you would like to print out on bigger scales, as this would allow the addition of more pixels onto your pics so that there is less distortion of pixels when you print it.
The AI imagery is also pretty good, and the details are much more shaper than the original image in comparison.
Integration with Adobe Products
As mentioned above, the great advantage of Adobe products is that they are all integrated and can be used on other Adobe products as well, and the same is the case with Photoshop as well.
With the new update of Photoshop, you have integration with Adobe Effects. Adobe Effects, as I explained before, is Adobe’s free image editing software that you can use to quickly edit your images as per your liking.
But with this new integration, you can simply jump between Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Express in an instant and share your work between the two platforms very easily.
All of your file’s layers, tools, settings, and effects, are all seamlessly integrated between the two softwares, and you can easily use the best of both of them to create the type of image that you want for yourself.
Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock, as you can guess from its name, is Adobe’s stock library of many different types of images, clips, vectors, etc. To put it in numbers, around 40 million of different types of stock files are available on Adobe stock.
You can simply access Adobe Stock from the library of Photoshop and use it to download certain images and video clips that you want to put for your work on Photoshop. Creators also get the option of selling their art on Adobe Stock.
There is a proper procedure for uploading your work and licensing it over at Adobe Stock. And once you have done all that, you can get 33% of the entire sale of your artwork as well.
It is a very handy tool and can be utilised a lot by different fields of people.
Performance of the software
Adobe Photoshop is quite a powerful image editing software that you can try to download right now. With the recent update, the performance of the software has also drastically improved while exporting images.
You can do a whole lot on this software and create many types of different layers for your work, and the software would still perform smoothly. But, it does require some sort of hardware requirements to run smoothly on a computing device.
If you are running on older operating systems such as Windows 7 or prior to that, with a computing device that has fewer numbers of RAMs available, then the software will tend to lag a little bit when you use it.
But other than that, the software is quite snappy and powerful to use and operate.
Exports
There are plenty of different options in which you can export your files on Photoshop. You have different types of file sizes available such as JPEG, PDF, TIFF, etc., so in terms of exporting files, you will not find a lot to complain about.
With the latest updates, the overall option for sharing the files has also been quite simplified. Photoshop now supports native sharing options for both macOS and Windows devices, and that is a lot quicker option than what was available before.
You can also now share your document and files that are uploaded on Adobe Cloud to other specific members, something like what you are able to do while sharing google docs files with specific individuals.
It is a really handy feature to have and makes sharing and exporting of the files that much more easier.
Titles and Fonts
You have tons of different options available when it comes to titles and fonts in Photoshop. And Photoshop tends to add new features and functionalities to the fonts that make it much more simpler and easier to use them.
For example, Photoshop immediately detects the type of fonts that are written on your work and saves it in its library.
You can also choose the option of searching through different fonts and filter them out based on different styles. One feature that I really like is that you have the option of asking the software to look for similar fonts that are already in your image.
You just have to place the fonts in a box, and Photoshop will do the rest of the job of searching for similar fonts to the box. You can also hover over the fonts to see how your text would look rather than writing it all down.
FAQs
Is Adobe Photoshop any good?
Adobe Photoshop is plenty good, actually. If you would have noticed, I started almost all the special functionalities articles with the sentence ‘there is plenty of option..’ because there is actually plenty of options to choose from.
You have an endless list of features and effects available on Photoshop, and the ones that I have mentioned are only maybe one-third of what all there actually is that you can achieve on Photoshop.
It is a powerhouse of a photo editing software, given how many different types of tools there already are available on it and how many more tools Adobe adds each year with the newer updates.
So, in layman’s terms, yes, Photoshop is very good just because of the sheer amount of creativity that you can explore with this one software.
Is Photoshop worth it for beginners?
This is an interesting question because it is a good software to learn for beginners as you are able to do a lot on this particular software. And as the beginner starts to learn more about how to use this software, the better he/she will get with it.
But that being said, the overall functionalities and effects that are available on Photoshop can be very overwhelming for anybody, even for some professionals as well.
That is because Adobe has perfected this software for years now by adding in different types of effects with each update, and because of this, the software is overloaded with features and functionalities.
My advice would be to start first from either Adobe Express or Adobe Lightroom and then move up the ladder by using Photoshop because then you would be familiar with the overall interface of Adobe.
Is Photoshop completely free?
No, Photoshop is not completely free. You can get Photoshop available in Adobe’s Creative Cloud package for $39.99/month, where you have access to many softwares offered by Adobe such as After Effects, Premier Pro, Auditions, etc.
Or you can individually buy Photoshop for $20.99/month. Adobe also offers a free trial of seven days for Photoshop, so you can also try it out for yourself and see if you want to purchase the overall product or not.
The price varies from time to time since the Holiday season is almost upon us; that is why you are seeing certain discounts on the pricing plans; otherwise, you get Adobe’s Creative Cloud Plan for $54.99/month.
The prices could be a little expensive for certain people, and I would only advise purchasing the products if you are going to use the software regularly.
Is Photoshop the industry standard?
There are definitely some other image editing softwares present right now in the market as well. In fact, I have written an article where I have listed twelve of the best photo editing softwares that you can use right now.
That being said, there is no doubt in considering that Photoshop is the industry standard when it comes to editing photos and creating graphics from scratch. Adobe has set the benchmark of what all can be achieved with a image editing software.
And its competitors are all following its path by adding in some of their own angle on the take.
But that is the very definition of what an industry standard of what it means to be an industry standard. It’s that the people of the industry know what the customers want, and see what the competition is providing, and be able to one-up the competition.
What are the Disadvantages of Photoshop?
Photoshop is definitely not without its flaws. I find the software to be a bit too expensive. Granted, it offers tons of different features and effects, but when you compare it with the competitor’s price, you can clearly see the price difference between the two.
It also doesn’t help with the fact that it is a subscription-type model, where consumers have to pay for it each month rather than being able to pay only once and use the software for the rest of their lifetime, and that is also quite annoying.
The other major disadvantage/advantage of Photoshop is the abundance of different tools available that can be overwhelming for any person, regardless of what stage they are on, in terms of difficulty.
So, it is not a perfect software. But I have always said there is no software present that’s perfect.
Final verdict and Review
So, what’s my final verdict on Photoshop? Well, there is no denying the fact that it is one of the best image editing softwares present right now. There is just too much that you are able to do on it, and I mean it both as a compliment and a complaint.
I have been using Photoshop for quite some time now, and every time I learn something new about it. I believe that the people at Adobe also don’t fully use the different sets of features that are offered by Photoshop.
That being said, it is not a software for everyone, and Adobe also knows that.
This is why they have made much more simpler version of Photoshop to edit their images, and if you are someone who is just starting out, I would advise you to try those alternates before hopping onto this train.
Conclusion
Well, there you have it. An in-depth review of Adobe Photoshop. It is an industry-standard software, and there is no denying that. It is a very powerful image editing software that is capable of more than image editing.
But, it also has its fair share of flaws that you cannot overlook, and you have to see both sides before you decide to start using it as your main image editing software.
There are plenty of different options to choose from, and you don’t always have to go for the best.
But, as always, these have been my thoughts on Adobe Photoshop. What about you? Do you agree with what I have to say about it?
Or do you prefer to use it as your main image editing software, even if you are just starting out in the world of image editing?
Whatever your thoughts and queries are, do let us know in the comments down below!
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