The Best Photo Editing Software

An excellent photo editing tool must feature repeatable adjustments capabilities while supporting the widely used image file formats. Adobe Lightroom operates on a subscription basis yet GIMP and Photopea serve as excellent free alternatives for photo editing.

Luminar Neo serves as a complete and easy-to-use program for beginners in photography who wish to start photo organization and editing with features that enable seamless RAW file processing and simple one-click preset effects. Users will find the yearly subscription fee highly affordable.

Adobe Lightroom
Professional photographers depend on Adobe Lightroom as their primary photo editing software. Lightroom offers community tools alongside editing capabilities, mobile synchronization, local printing, tethered shooting compatibility and maintains nondestructive edits thus ensuring original files remain untouched which makes it the preferred choice for photo editors.

As a top photo management application Lightroom organizes images into collections with ease and allows users to create slideshows as well as e-portfolio files with slideshows and add text labels or watermarks to images.

The software combines simplicity with user-friendliness in its interface which makes it perfect for beginners. The basic editing functions provided by the software include cropping images, adjusting histograms and colors, creating tonal curves as well as black and white images, removing spots from photos, correcting lenses and correcting chromatic aberrations in lenses. The software includes Photoshop-like tools yet falls short in tasks that need multiple image compositing or text integration. This software costs more than other photo editing programs with comparable features.

Snapseed
Snapseed stands as one of the top photo editing applications available on smartphones. Users receive a free application that enhances photos with artistic effects through its Expand, Perspective and Selective tools which allow specific area manipulation and its distinctive Stacks feature enables re-adjustments or selective application of Structure Details Tone Image tools.

Adobe Lightroom enables users to perform non-destructive edits that keep the original image intact while allowing modifications. The Tools tab offers various options for precise adjustments to brightness, contrast, saturation, highlights and shadows.

The application provides distinctive filters which create exclusive photo effects through Retrolux, Grunge, and Noir filters that incorporate textures such as dust or smears. Healing tools provide the best solution for removing small objects and correcting blemishes along with other imperfections in pictures.

Hugin
Hugin provides a free open source solution for users to merge multiple photographs into panoramic images through an assisted guidance mode and includes extensive image manipulation options.

This software generates various projection types such as rectilinear, cylindrical and equirectangular projections which are common in 360 degree camera technology. The software facilitates HDR merging to boost output quality and adjusts for perspective distortion in final files.

The program provides advanced users with many options to manage image transformations. The software provides automatic lens correction features together with exposure fusion and view-point correction capabilities and enables users to save images in TIFF, JPG or PNG formats or to create panoramic spherical, gigapixel and HDR panoramas.

Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo combines an intuitive interface with comprehensive editing tools including customizable keyboard shortcuts that speed up editing and full compatibility with various camera file formats and workflows on different hardware configurations.

The program organizes its features through several personas including Photo, Liquify and Tone Mapping personas for specific image editing tasks while the Export persona manages export settings.

While Affinity Photo doesn’t include every advanced feature present in competing software it delivers necessary tools suited for digital photography work and image editing tasks. Users can both import and manipulate PSD files because of layer-based adjustments which Affinity Photo supports and since its adjustments are nondestructive users can edit them at any time without losing image quality or integrity.

The software features a wide selection of brushes and gradients that enable powerful visual effects creation alongside crop and straighten tools which support basic image corrections.