Whether or not you’re okay with paying for a subscription is up to you, and fortunately, there are still quite a few editors out there that are a one-time purchase or even free.īoth Lightroom and Photoshop are available in Adobe’s photography bundle which is $9.99 a month and gives you 20 GB of cloud storage (which can then be bumped up to 1 TB for $19.99 a month). Pricing Model: We’ve seen many programs turn to a subscription-based pricing model instead of a one-time purchase.

But, that doesn’t mean they can’t be improved and programs that are well optimized definitely get bonus points. Since photo editing is a relatively complex thing for computers to process, it’s understandable that these programs are fairly intensive on your system.

Performance: There’s a lot going on behind the scenes of a photo editor.

But, even if a program has a nearly endless number of options available, that doesn’t excuse it from doing a good job at presenting those options.

Design: The software should be fairly easy to navigate, which does get harder to pull off in more complicated programs.

However, there are few general things to look out for. Photo editors are complicated pieces of software that can vary in features a lot. With so many options and things to consider, it can be hard to figure out what’s best for you.īecause of this, we searched through the various options available today to find the best photo editors whether you’re a complete newcomer looking to learn, a hobbyist wanting to branch out, or a professional looking to switch programs or add another tool to your toolkit.

Because of this range of complexity, there are many programs out there that focus in on one aspect of photo editing, and others that try to do it all. Photo editing can mean a lot of different things, from simple color grading and cropping to making images nearly unrecognizable from the original version.

Ashampoo photo optimizer 6