DxO PhotoLab Elite: DxO’s lens corrections are excellent and even counter edge softness, its raw processing is first rate, and its DeepPRIME process is in a class of its own for noise reduction and detail.Adobe Lightroom: The web-based version of Lightroom brings the ultimate convenience of having all your images everywhere, but the organizing tools are weaker and cloud storage costs extraīest photo editing software for RAW processing.Capture One: Capture One offers not just regular catalogs, but managed catalogs (like Aperture used to) and sessions with ‘live’ folder views – it might just work better for you than Lightroom.Adobe Li ghtroom Classic: for all-round organizing, searching, keywording and filtering, I’d say Lightroom Classic has it, but Capture One is very close with its own strengths.Affinity Photo: it’s really the only contender, and short of putting in Photoshop itself, there’s nothing else that matches Affinity Photo’s power, depth and professional capabilitiesīest photo editing software for image management.Best photo editing software for layers, composites and Photoshop style editing

So it seems to me the simplest and most ‘neutral’ way to list these programs is in alphabetical order.

This is even more true for people like me who use two or more applications to get the full spread of features they want. The fact is, everyone will be looking for something different in their software, so trying to put this list in order of merit really doesn’t make much sense. Photographers want software that will organize and catalog their images, offer creative and inspiring preset effects, let them try out different image ‘looks’ on single images, add an effect to whole folders full of images at a time… and so on. Image editing software now has to do more than retouching, compositing and detailed Photoshop style manipulation. This is how Life after Photoshop came about. The fact is, though, that the whole field of image editing has opened up to a far wider audience who want to do a lot more with their images – and more quickly and simply – than Photoshop was ever designed for. You would just say Photoshop, and that would be it. Choosing the best image editing software used to be easy.

Nik collection in affinity photo