Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop started the digital image manipulation revolution more than 30 years ago, and Adobe's groundbreaking application continues to be the best photo editing software money can buy (or rent, to be more precise). If you need layered image editing, typography, drawing, and a multitude of effects, you need Photoshop. Designers and photographers alike find the most—and the most advanced—tools for their craft in this application. Adobe updates Photoshop frequently, adding innovative capabilities like generative AI, support for new formats, and features that make once-difficult tasks easy. Because of its state-of-the-art leadership position and the polish and usability of the software, Photoshop gets a rare five-star rating and earns our Editors' Choice award.

What's New in Photoshop?

Updates to Photoshop continue to include features that use Adobe's Firefly generative artificial intelligence and its Sensei image-analyzing AI technology. The former powers the Neural Filters, Sky Replacement, Landscape Mixer, and Color Transfer. The latter comes in the form of the Generative Fill and Generative Expand tools. It lets you generate images from scratch or based on a reference image rather than simply adding AI content to existing images.

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The July 2024 update adds a Selection Brush, an Adjustment Brush, bullets and numbering options for the Type tool, and an Enhance Detail option for the AI-powered Generative Fill tool. After I updated Photoshop on my PC, the app gave me a choice to add the new tools to my toolbar. Adobe also moved its new Firefly image model (version 3) out of beta.

Some updates impact Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw helper app, now giving you the same Lens Blur tool and HDR editing and output capabilities that recently appeared in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. Note that you can use the Camera Raw filter on any image from the Filter menu—it doesn't require raw camera files.

Other impressive features recently added include the Contextual Task Bar (improved in the latest update), Lightroom-like Adjustment Presets, an AI-powered Remove Tool, and a smarter Gradient tool.

Good software updates don't just add new features; they also remove outdated or unnecessary ones. 3D modeling has mostly moved out of Photoshop into the company's Substance 3D suite of products. That said, you can get some 3D capabilities with the Substance plug-in for Photoshop. Another tool that was once greatly anticipated but never delivered fully on its promise, Camera Shake Reduction, is also gone.

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A notable development is the web-based version of Photoshop, which is getting close to having the same functionality as the desktop application. It even supports raw camera files. And some new features even come to the web version before they arrive in the desktop version, for example, the web version already has the updated Generative AI features. The web version of Photoshop runs well on the new Chromebook Plus computers. But it still lacks a few features, like Clone & Stamp, Pen and Shape tools for vector paths, and many filters. Also on Adobe's Photoshop roadmap is a new collaborative space for team ideation called Canvas and an online repository for sharing assets and projects called Spaces.

How Much Does Photoshop Cost?

To get the latest version of Photoshop, you need a Creative Cloud subscription. Pricing can be confusing, and it's hard to find the best deal on Adobe's site. You can sign up for a Photoshop single-app plan for $22.99 per month (that's with an annual commitment, though you make payments monthly), which gets you 100GB of online storage. But that's not the best you can do. There is a plan called Photography (20GB) for $9.99 per month with an annual commitment, which also gets you Lightroom, our Editors' Choice winner for photo workflow software, and 10 Adobe Stock images. You need to hunt around the site to find that deal. When you get to the pricing page, make sure you click on Photo on the left side.

If you want Photoshop, Lightroom, and more online storage (1TB), you pay $19.99 per month, again with an annual commitment but paid in monthly installments. That's less than the 100GB Photoshop-only plan, but that also gets you the premium varieties of Adobe Express and Fresco. A full Creative Cloud subscription, which gets you all the suite's design and video applications as well, costs $59.99 per month with an annual commitment. If you choose month-by-month payments, the Photoshop plan is $31.49. If you prepay for a full year, it's $239.88, which works out to $19.99 per month.

You no longer have the option to buy a one-time payment perpetual license for Photoshop, which annoys some users who don't like the software-as-a-service model. Those who feel this way may want to consider Photoshop alternatives such as Corel's surprisingly capable PaintShop Pro ($79.99), CyberLink PhotoDirector ($99.99), or even Adobe's own Photoshop Elements ($99.99). And if you don't want to pay a cent, you can use the free, open-source GIMP software, though doing so can be a painful, counterintuitive experience if you're used to the convenience and polish of Photoshop.

How Do You Get Started With Photoshop?

To get Photoshop, you first install the Creative Cloud desktop program, which handles installations and updates, as well as syncing your files online. It's also where you find news about Adobe, stock images, and the Behance creative social community. The Creative Cloud utility also lets you browse and easily install Photoshop plug-ins. Note that it installs a slew of background processes on your system, many of which run even when you're not using a Creative Cloud application. I counted no fewer than 11 processes in the Windows Task Manager running even when no Adobe software was ostensibly running and after I'd exited the Creative Cloud Manager app. Another annoyance is that the Creative Cloud app seems to require updating every time I open it.

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Only install Photoshop on a fairly powerful PC or Mac. I tested on a Windows 11 PC sporting a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. It requires 64-bit Windows 10 version 21H2 or later, 8MB RAM, and 4GB available disk space. It runs in Windows on Arm with the same requirements. Mac users must be running macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later with 8GB RAM and a GPU with Metal support. Apple Silicon Macs can also run Photoshop as long as they're running macOS 11.2.2 or later.

The Photoshop Interface

Despite the enormous number of tools inside this program, the interface is impressively user-friendly. Adobe continues to make Photoshop's interface more customizable and helpful. You can choose from among several targeted workspace layouts, including Graphic and Web, Motion, Painting, and Photography, or you can create a custom layout of panels and windows. You can also rearrange the program's toolbar button rail to taste. A Neutral Color Mode option (thankfully) changes the bright blue Share button to a less distracting gray.

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The Contextual Task Bar is a small toolbar that floats along the bottom portion of the image you're working on and lets you do actions that make sense with the current image. The feature took me by surprise because it looks like a plug-in has been added. But it is helpful, opening relevant side panel entries. If you don't like it cluttering your workspace, removing it from view is an option in the three-dot overflow menu on the right. New capabilities arriving in the latest update include Fill, Stroke, Rotate, and Flip.

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On the start screen, you see New File, Open, Home, and Learn, as well as your file locations, including photos you've uploaded through Lightroom and cloud documents shared with you. The Home icon takes you to suggested tutorials and thumbnails of your recent document. When you choose New File, you get a tabbed dialog with templates such as Textured Geometric Masks, Instant Film Mockups, and Photo Collage Layouts. Category filters across the top let you restrict the proposed templates to Photo, Print, Art & Illustration, Web, Mobile, and Film & Video. If you copy an image onto the clipboard, the software gives you the option to open a new image with its exact dimensions.

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You can pick from thumbnails of your recent files and access presets and libraries from the start page. The page shows personalized tutorial content at the bottom. Those who'd rather stick with the legacy starting experience can switch back to it, but I find that the start page makes it much easier to get to things I'm interested in, such as recent projects.

The ever-present search magnifying glass icon at the top right lets you search for program functions, your own images, tutorials, or Adobe Stock images. If you already have a file open, the resulting dialog becomes a detached Discover window that presents command shortcuts and help. The panel's Home icon shows tutorial suggestions, What’s New items, the user guide, and more resources. An always-available search function in a complex desktop application is a great idea, and some big-league software developers agree. It's in Ableton Live and Microsoft Office, for example.

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The interface also adapts to the purpose at hand. A case in point is the Select and Mask workspace, which is an available option whenever you have a selection tool active. It shows only the tools useful during selection, such as Refine Edge, Lasso, Brush, Hand, and Zoom, along with the relevant Properties panel. The interface's color themes have a pleasing, context-sensitive consistency, too. If you set the window borders to be light gray, all dialogs will likewise be gray.

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Photoshop has excellent touch input support for devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro. The company also now has a nearly fully functional iPad version of Photoshop. Not only does the program let you use touch to pan and zoom images, but it also recognizes gestures, such as a two-finger swipe to undo and a three-finger swipe to scroll through images. For painting with your finger, though, you might try Adobe's Fresco app, available for iPhone, iPad, Microsoft Surface Pro devices, and Creative Cloud Desktop for Windows.

Selection Tools

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One of the main uses of Photoshop is to select objects and people in photos. It's also one of the top pain points. Photoshop still includes the venerable Lasso, Magic Wand, and Marquee, as well as the Object and Quick selection tools (with their cool Subject Select checkbox). Of note is the Select on Hover feature as well as the Select and Mask workspace, along with its Refine Edge option. In truth, though, I'd probably choose Quick Selection, Object Select, or Subject Select before going to this new tool.

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The newest selection tool is the Selection Brush. It works similarly to a regular brush for painting, complete with opacity and hardness settings. Once you've made a selection with it, the Contextual Toolbar gives more choices, including Transform Selection, Select Border, Smooth Selection, and Feather Selection. You can also open the Select and Mask interface for more refinements. A handy use for this new tool is to use Generative Fill based on your selection. I was able to remove the furniture on the left side of the photo.

Select on Hover gives you a nifty way to create masks. It uses Adobe’s Sensei AI technology to detect all objects in the image, and as you hover over each, it's highlighted for selection. Select on Hover works with the Object Selection tool, which is in the same tool button as Magic Wand and Quick Selection. Press and hold it to use it. Check the Object Finder checkbox in the options bar and Auto Show Overlay selected in the gear icon's settings. Move the cursor around the image, and you'll see objects shaded as you go. You can tap the Show All Objects button (the square containing different-size rectangles) to show all the automatically selected objects, and a related menu option, Layer > Mask All Objects, creates separate masks for all the objects detected in a layer.

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Select Subject uses AI to automatically determine and select the main object in an image. When active, a Select Subject button appears in the options bar across the top of the program windows. In testing, it did a remarkable job of selecting people when the background was relatively uniform. More complex backgrounds left some incorrectly selected areas.

Adobe continues to work on improving the selection of complex hair with Subject Select. And once again, the tool worked mostly well but hadn’t yet reached the holy grail of one-and-done hair selection. Hairs in my test shot remained unselected, and some lines in the background behind the hair were incorrectly selected. Even pressing the Refine Hair button and cloud processing options didn't improve the situation much, as you can see below, leaving some of my test subject's hair clearly visible. Thankfully, you can use the Select and Mask workspace tools to fix these issues.

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Remove Tool

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While not merely a selection tool, the Remove Tool, which came in the June 2023 update, does indeed work by using selection capabilities. Photoshop has for very long let you select and remove an object from your photos, but perhaps with Apple and Google touting this as a new capability of their smartphones, Adobe felt the need to include a similar one-step tool. My first attempts resulted in a smeared portion of the person I was trying to remove; it turns out you have to paint over the entire object, not inside it the way some selection tools work. Overshooting the edges is fine. The tool did an impressive job of filling in the background, as you can see above.

If your objective is to change or remove the background in your photo, you can use Photoshop's Remove Background quick action from the Contextual Task Bar or by typing "remove background" in the persistent search box. Since the automatic selection may be less than perfect, you may want to use the Select and Mask tool to get it just right.

Firefly Generative AI Features in Photoshop

Photoshop has three Firefly generative AI tools: Generative Fill, Generative Expand, and Generate Image. Helpful built-in tutorials teach you how to use each one. Before you do anything, you must agree to Adobe's user guidelines. Basically, it says you can't use the tools to train other AIs, to create porn or other offensive material or deepfakes, or to violate trademarks. You can use the AI creations for commercial purposes safely. By default, they include Content Credentials (see the Deepfakes section below).

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To get started with either generative tool (as with so many Photoshop functions), you select an area in the image using your choice of selection tool. One of the cool things about Adobe's generative AI is that the text prompt is right there in the image you're working with, thanks to the recent and very helpful context-sensitive Contextual Task Bar.

Generative Fill

Generative Fill is the more fun of the two tools because it creates completely new objects in your image. You can also use it to transform something you select. I started by selecting a chunk of the road, shown below. Notice the helpful Generative Fill button that automatically appears in the Contextual Task Bar.

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When I typed 'herd of purple elk with wings" in the text box and pressed the Generate button, the tool somehow considered this offensive and wouldn't generate an image.

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After several similar results (apparently, the word elk is somehow offensive), I tried "herd of purple lifelike deer galloping," and after a progress timer of a few seconds, I got the image below, in which the deer don't seem lifelike at all. Note the alternate choices in the Properties panel at the right. Clicking on any of those replaces the creation in the main image.

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At one point, I got an error message saying Compositing preferences were set to CPU because of an error. After several unconvincing results with deer and moose, I got an OK result with "herd of orange rhinos running," shown below.

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You can now use Enhance Detail in your Generative Fill results for sharper details.

Generative Expand

Imaging software that lets you expand photo scenes has been around for several years, starting with AntiCrop in 2012. They required that your image had consistent textures in the background, and Photoshop itself produced a similar capability in its Crop tool, discussed below. The AI-powered Generative Expand doesn't require any consistency in the image to extend it.

The Generative Expand button appears on the Contextual Task Bar if you use the Crop tool and pull its edges out beyond the image's original borders.

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With this tool, you also get a text box asking what you'd like to fill with. I said "white mountains" and got the below result:

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Yes, the mountains aren't really white, but they do blend nicely with the existing image. If you just want the borders filled in similarly to the existing image, you don't have to enter anything in the text prompt box at all. It works convincingly, as you can see below:

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I should note that, for the first time in perhaps over a year, these tools caused Photoshop to crash a couple of times for me. I suspect there may be an issue with my particular graphics card.

Generate Image

With the July 2024 update, Photoshop now lets you generate a completely new image using Firefly rather than requiring you to modify an existing one as you do with the tools discussed above. You get to it from Edit > Generate Image. You can upload your own image for reference, and the tool gives you suggestions if you're completely blocked.

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You can choose between Art and Photo, and the generated image appears right in your canvas, with alternative options on the side. Here's what it came up with for the prompt, "birds in Mexico city." The first result included fictitious, nonexistent AI birds, which I didn't like.

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I also wanted to test how well these tools imitate the style of a famous artist. I uploaded a Rembrandt painting and asked for a group of friends drinking Coke in the same style.

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The result is better than what I got when testing the beta a few months ago, but I still find OpenArt.ai's creations more convincing. Oddly, the two friends in Photoshop's generated image are in different styles and textures in all three choices.

Neural Filters

Among Photoshop's most exciting recent features are neural filters, which let you automatically change a portrait subject’s mood, age, and gaze. Neural here is short for neural network, a subset of AI machine learning. The tools take advantage of Generative adversarial networks, which, in essence, try to trick the AI algorithm with incorrect (i.e., adversarial) data. Most of the effects require a download, and they're not small. The Landscape Mixer was more than 380MB. Others, like Smart Portrait, do their processing in Adobe's cloud, and the program is good about telling you where processing happens while using the filters. Be aware that even with graphics hardware acceleration, some of these effects took up to a half minute to complete on my test PC.

Some of the most interesting filters are designated as betas: Harmonization, Landscape Mixer, Depth Blur, Color Transfer, Makeup Transfer, and Photo Restoration. Of the 12 tools at the time of writing, Skin Smoothing, Smart Portrait, Makeup Transfer, Style Transfer, Colorize, Super Zoom, and JPEG Artifacts Removal are no longer considered in beta.

A Wait List tab shows tools not yet available: Portrait Generator, Water Long Exposure, Shadow Regenerator, and Noise Reduction. That last one is still in the waitlist section despite Adobe including automatic noise reduction in its companion Adobe Camera Raw utility (more on that below).

(Credit: Adobe/Flickr/William Creswell/PCMag)

Photo Restoration is a 769MB download. I tried this tool on an old public-domain photo found on Flickr, perhaps an unfair test, given how damaged it is. Though the filter didn't perfectly restore the image (above), it impressively improved it. In another old photo with a couple of deep scratches (below), the filter worked better, if not perfectly.

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Here is how it looks after I applied Photo Restoration, increasing the Scratch Reduction slider.

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You can still see remnants of the scratch on the girl's face and the woman's ear, but it's a definite improvement.

The Color Transfer filter (not to be confused with Style Transfer) lets you apply the colors and tones of one image to another.

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The beta Landscape Mixer filters let you change a scene’s season from, say, summer to fall or make a midday scene look like it was shot at sunset. In testing, the Landscape Mixer did indeed give the foliage fall colors, but it removed an egret that was in the original photo, so you're best using it on pure landscapes.

The face tools in Smart Portrait are more fun than practical, though they may be useful to portrait photographers if used judiciously. When I ramped up the Happiness slider on most pictures, the result was more like a forced smile than a natural one, though it can be effective if you don’t turn it up. There are also sliders for Anger and Surprise, which were surprisingly effective. The algorithm also failed to de-age the neck on some subjects.

An interesting option is Retain Unique Details. If you uncheck this option, your subject approaches a Barbie doll appearance. One slider, Placement, can nudge the face selection box right or left, though it didn't do much in my test shots. The Light Direction slider, when used judiciously, can work to good effect. The Gaze slider moves the eyes subtly, but the head direction tool wasn’t convincing in my test photos.

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The Colorize tool is impressive, as you can see from the above example, even though the original is slightly underexposed. On some very old high-contrast photos, the tool wasn't able to colorize, however. (Photoshop Elements got a Colorize tool earlier than Photoshop, and it works well.) The neural tools do have a before-and-after button, but I wish they had side-by-side views.

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The final neural filter worth mentioning was part of other photo software for a few years, notably in Cyberlink PhotoDirector. It’s the Style Transfer effect, which makes your photo look like the work of an artist such as Picasso or van Gogh. It’s a 176MB download at the time of testing. You get a good selection of looks, with more than 30 to choose from already. You not only choose the strength of the effect but can also preserve color, focus on the subject, change brush size, and blur the background. It’s a good implementation of the effect type.

Tools for Photographers

Though it's now packed with drawing and font tools, Photoshop got its start as a photo editing and printing application, and it remains the most powerful photo editing software. Along with its completely photography-focused sibling, Lightroom, Photoshop has the most support for raw camera files and the most in correction and effects. From removing or adding objects with content-aware tools to lens-profile-based geometry correction to histogram adjustments to stained-glass effect filters, Photoshop has it all. It's impossible to cover every feature here, but I'll take a closer look at a couple of the standout tools.

Sky Replacement

For a while, Photoshop had been trailing software such as Skylum Luminar in handling skies in photos. Replacing a drab sky with a beautiful one used to be a many-step process involving manual masking and layers. Photoshop solved that problem with a Sky Replacement tool that is instant and awesome. You get many choices, ranging from pleasant to dazzling, and you can adjust the position, edge, brightness, and temperature of your chosen sky replacement.

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Unlike some tools, which simply try to detect a horizon, Photoshop can handle images with foreground objects that block the sky, like the obelisk in the image above. You can move the sky around to get the best placement and even adjust the lighting and color of the foreground to better match the new sky. In the example, you can see how the pavement reflection changes to match the sky color.

Photoshop handles complex edges, such as tree lines, better than it did before. It does so by adding two adjustment layers and a "less-smooth mask than the compositing mask." Additionally, an Edge Lighting slider reduces the halo effects you get from using a bright sky on a dark existing area and vice versa.

Content-Aware Crop

Content-Aware Crop is a less creative and more natural version of the Generative Expand feature discussed above. You just check the Content-Aware box while using the crop tool, and the app fills in anything in the crop selection that falls outside your image's boundaries. Content-Aware Crop resembles the Content-Aware Fill tool in that it only works well with patterned image content, such as a forest, pavement, sea, or sky. It's particularly convincing with skies. Note in the image below all the extra clouds generated in the sky on the right to create a more spacious composition.

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The Content-Aware Fill interface shows you what source content it's using to replace the object you want to remove. You can edit the source area, but the program does a remarkable job with no help. It also identifies objects that shouldn't be part of the fill pattern.

A related tool is One Click Delete and Fill, which you use after selecting an object by pressing Shift-Backspace. Here's a shot where I used this AI tool to remove the duck at the upper left.

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It's a good job, but it's not perfect. You can still see a dark area where the duck was.

Face-Aware Liquify

Face detection has reached an increasingly high level of accuracy in recent years, to the point of being able to identify individual facial features as well as whole faces. Don't confuse it with face recognition, however, which identifies multiple images of the same person the way Lightroom and other apps do for organizing your photo collection. Photoshop's Face-Aware Liquify tool uses face detection to let you convincingly transform facial expressions, turning, for example, a frown into a smile.

This brilliant tool finds facial features like eyes and mouths and gives you the ability to manipulate them with sliders for resizing the eyes, nose, face width, and jawline. You can even edit the eyes independently with Face-Aware Liquify. A chain icon lets you either lock together editing of both a subject’s eyes or edit them separately.

You can apply some very flattering changes or some ridiculously unflattering ones. For me, the coolest part of this feature is that the resulting image still looks human. It's not like simply smearing a portrait with the old-fashioned, face-unaware Liquify tool.

Camera Raw Features

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The Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) module appears when you open raw camera files like those from Canon's CR2 and Nikon's NEF. It seems to become more of a full photo editing tool on its own with every Photoshop update, and there's a good deal of overlap between what you can do in ACR and in Photoshop itself. Even AI selection, masking, and healing tools are now in ACR. It's become sort of a Lightroom without the slick workflow features. When Lightroom gets new features, they sometimes come to ACR rather than the main Photoshop interface. Examples are support for HDR editing and output, the Lens Blur tool, and the Point Color tool. For in-depth testing of the first two, check out my review of Lightroom. Below is the HDR button in ACR. You may be able to see the greater detail in the clouds on the right side. The histogram has a line in the middle, with everything on the right being in the HDR region. Note also the Visualize HDR and Preview for SDR display check boxes further down.

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To save to an HDR-compatible format, you don't open the image in the main Photoshop application. Instead, you have to click the down-arrow button to Save and Convert the image, where you can now choose JPEG XL and AVIF formats among myriad other settings. Although Photoshop is fairly capable of this kind of work, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are probably better for it.

Below, you can see ACR's Point Color tool, which shifts a color range you select with a dropper. ACR now has no fewer than three tool groups that include the word Color; Color, Color Mixer, and Color Grading. The Point Color tool lives in the middle one, Color Mixer. Here, it was useful in toning down the overly rosy skin tones of the original colorization of this old photo.

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ACR lets you make local hue adjustments rather than changing the hue values for the whole image. It even includes the main program's Subject Select and masking tools. The tool lets you have more than one adjustment panel open, and you can switch between vertical and horizontal filmstrip thumbnail views. You can also create presets based on images' ISO settings and do panorama merges from a right-click.

As in Lightroom, you get the geometry correction tool called Upright in ACR. This lets you fix parallel vertical and horizontal lines. Its Auto setting attempts to fix perspective errors, but you can choose to align only verticals or only horizontals or mess with the perspective to taste with transforming sliders for pincushion and barrel distortion, vertical, horizontal, and aspect ratio.

Back in the main Photoshop interface, you can call up Camera Raw as a filter, applying all its manifold photo adjustments—color temperature, exposure, geometry, etc.—to any image layer, not just to raw camera files. You can apply Camera Raw adjustments to videos, too, and use a non-circular healing brush. As in Lightroom, you get a radial filter that lets you apply the adjustments to an oval shape, such as a person's head.

The Camera Raw Profiles setting governs how Photoshop converts raw files into viewable images. The default is Adobe Color, which produces a more vivid image than the old Adobe Standard profile. You also get Landscape, Portrait, Monochrome, and Vivid Profiles, along with a selection of retro and artistic Profiles that are essentially Instagram-style effect filters. The same Profiles feature appears in Lightroom.

The module also now includes more than 100 presets developed by pro photographers in categories including portrait, travel, cinematic, future, and vintage. An Amount slider in these presets lets you adjust their strength, and you now even get the adaptive subject presets that are only applied to an automatic subject mask. Unfortunately, most of the presets use nondescript names like FT1, FT2, FT3, and so on. They're also a bit drab overall, with few—even in the Creative category—resulting in particularly striking effects. Even the Edgy presets are fairly tame, but there are enough choices that you're likely to find a look you like.

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You can save custom presets, which live in a group just below the built-in presets. You can then export these in .psap format.

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Noise Reduction

Photoshop finally has automatic noise reduction, but it's not as effective as third-party software from DxO and Topaz. You find the feature in the Detail section of the Edit tool group on the right-side panel. I give a rundown here, but see my detailed tutorial on how to reduce noise in photos.

As in Lightroom, clicking Denoise opens a window showing an area of your photo in close detail with the correction applied. You can choose the strength with a slider; it defaults to 50. A progress circle fills up as the tool completes its work; on my test system, a 24MP raw file took about 10 seconds to denoise.

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Here's an example of the Denoise tool's work, with the original noisy shot on the left.

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Below is how the same originally noisy picture looks when denoised with Photoshop (left), DxO PureRAW (middle), and Topaz DeNoise AI (right) using each program's default settings.

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The colors are more juiced up in the Adobe result, but we're not concerned with that; we're looking for detail recovery in addition to noise removal. The eyebrow shows those factors most clearly, and to me, Topaz gets the most detail, Adobe second, and DxO third. But if you look at the cheek below the eye, DxO retains more texture than the others. Any of the three results in a much better image than a non-denoised one.

Mobile Design and Libraries

Photoshop has made great strides in mobile design. Not only can you use views and tools intended to facilitate mobile and web design, but you can also install the Adobe Preview mobile app and see how your project looks on it. When I installed the app on my iPhone, I initially got a connection error. I was trying to connect by USB rather than Wi-Fi, though the Adobe documentation says both methods should work.

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Artboards let you create Photoshop documents with multiple views for different device screens. An Artboard can also be thought of as a level above layers, and they're accessible from the Layers panel. It sounds a little dry, but after playing with Artboards for a while, I find it to be a useful capability.

Shared Libraries sync not only documents but also brushes, font styles, and color themes. They can be created in and accessed from not only Photoshop but also Adobe Express and the Capture and Fresco mobile apps. The Adobe mobile apps support Libraries for acquiring, creating, or editing content. They're all free downloads, but most require a Creative Cloud account for full functionality.

Related to Libraries are Cloud Documents. Saving your project as a Cloud Document enables you to work on it in the iPad version of Photoshop as well as on other desktops. Cloud Documents are saved instantly and allow collaboration among multiple creators with the Invite to Edit option. You can also create a link (using the Share for Review feature button) to a web-hosted version of the photo where collaborators can comment. Previous versions of cloud documents show up in a Version History panel. Cloud documents support offline editing.

Font Tricks

Photoshop keeps getting better at fonts. Your document's fonts are automatically downloaded, activated, and synced to your Library. You can also filter searches for fonts with attributes like serif, script, and blackletter, and you can even tell the program to show you fonts similar to the one you've selected.

An update to the Contextual Task Bar now suggests text formatting edits, including alignment, font, size, and even kerning, as shown below.

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And the Font browser lets you hover over a font in its panel and see the on-canvas font updated live.

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The Type > Match Font tool can identify fonts in images and find the closest match on your system or in Adobe's massive font collection. Its intelligent imaging analysis is improved with more fonts, vertical text, and multiple-line detection. I had better results in my testing this time around.

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You can also designate fonts as favorites, which is handy, and you can hover over a font choice to see a preview of how it will look in your document. The font size dropdown menu gives you a 16-point option, a size commonly used for web content. Web designers will also rejoice now that Photoshop supports SVG OpenType fonts for those wildly popular responsive designs, as well as emoji fonts. You can search fonts.adobe.com for typefaces, and everything is licensed, thanks to your Creative Cloud subscription.

Font fanciers who want to go beyond standard typeface sets will love the Glyphs panel. It lets you substitute alternate characters and even shows you those alternates when you select a character in a Type layer. The tool didn't always work reliably for me, though, sometimes proposing a previous letter when I selected a new one.

A welcome option for the Type tool is list creation of both the bullet and numbered varieties. You get several styles to choose from for each, including dashes instead of bullets and letters instead of numbers.

Photoshop also supports Variable Fonts, an OpenType font format that lets you play with custom attributes like weight, width, slant, and optical size using slider controls. It now also uses the Unified Text Engine to legacy text engines and allows more flexibility with non-Latin characters.

Tools for Artists and Designers

With higher-resolution displays becoming more common, your old images sometimes may not be good enough anymore. Photoshop's upsampling algorithm could be a lifesaver. The upscaler shows up when you resize an image in the form of the Preserve Details resample setting. It also has a Reduce Noise option since the process may introduce noise. It's much clearer than the old bicubic algorithm.

Smart Objects make for nondestructive, reusable raster and vector images that update throughout your project. You can save formatting of type as styles that can be easily applied to other text later. You can also view type in a way that previews the antialiasing used in web browsers. For web designers, Photoshop can generate CSS code that produces the exact look designed in the software. The software can also do the reverse, importing color from a website's HTML or CSS code.

Converting Smart Objects back to their components for editing is now a simple matter of using the Convert to Layers menu option. The default swatches, gradients, patterns, shapes, and styles have all been updated with more appealing options. Below, you can see the gradient panel on the right, for example.

Turbocharged Gradients

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Adobe has made some updates to gradients in the past few years, notably adding options like Perceptual and Linear interpolation modes. You now get a center point to adjust as well as the endpoints. You can also right-click on either endpoint to choose a new color or double-click to open the full color picker. Changes show up live as you work, and this makes the gradient tool super powerful and customizable—and a lot of fun to play with.

Brushes and Pencils

Photoshop has a vast array of brushes and pencils, more than 1,200 of them. They give you stroke smoothing options, and you can organize brush presets in folders. A recent capability is the Symmetry option. It works with Paint Brush, Mixer Brush, Pencil, or Eraser tools. To use it, you click the butterfly icon in the Options bar and choose the kind of symmetry you want: Vertical, Horizontal, Dual Axis, Diagonal, Wavy, Circle, Spiral, Parallel Lines, Radial, or Mandala.

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A Pattern Preview feature simply repeats whatever’s in your image as a grid—outside the actual image boundary. You can then save the result as a reusable pattern. (As you can see, I’m no artist.) It seems like a great tool for designing gift wrap and greeting cards.

Alternatively, you could use the Shape and Line tools from the left-hand toolbar. Adobe lets you draw raster lines as pixels, and designers can now import Illustrator files complete with vector shapes, paths, and masks. Before, you could only draw vector lines, which makes more sense unless you're going for a pixel art effect. Now, you can import text layers from Illustrator that maintain vector art and the ability to edit the font. Previously, they would have been converted to raster.

Adjustment Brushes

Adobe has added a new type of brush in the July 2024 update: the Adjustment brush. Though this is photography-oriented, it appears in the regular Photoshop interface rather than in Camera Raw. It adds a layer (making your edits with it non-destructive), and you choose Brightness, Levels, Curve, Exposure, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Photo Filters, and more. Here, I've used it to create a blotchy pattern on the sweater with the Brightness function.

(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)

Export and Share

Photoshop's Export options are richer than ever, and the performance is improved. It supports the operating system's share feature, which opens macOS and Windows' built-in share targets. On the Mac, you can use AirDrop. In Windows, you can use Nearby sharing, as well as any other installed Store apps that accept photos.

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A big Share button lets you invite co-editors on documents saved to Adobe Cloud. You can either specify the user's Adobe ID email address, or you can copy a sharing link. You can include a comment for your collaborators, too.

The Export option replaces the tried-and-true Save for Web option, though you can still use that if you prefer. It's faster, and it delivers smaller files, especially when it comes to JPGs. You can also export and import SVG (scalable vector graphics) files, which are commonly used on websites. As mentioned, you can now export images in Google's web-friendly WebP format.

You can also export at multiple sizes simultaneously, convert to the sRGB color space, and export a single layer or Artboard. You can use the format of your choice by setting up a Quick Export option from the File menu. Finally, you can add metadata, such as copyright information, at export.

Rooting Out Deepfakes

(Credit: Adobe)

One feature worth mentioning is Content Credentials. This tool ties in with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) proposal. It records tamper-evident proof of any edits made to an image and verifies the identity of its creator. It also makes the information available on the public Verify website, where you can check an image's provenance. Adobe's Behance social sharing site also supports Content Credentials for validation of images' authenticity.

Verdict: Beyond Mere Photo Editing

Photoshop makes it easier to do amazing things with digital images, especially with Firefly generative AI tools. The company continues to improve in-program help features, a boon for such a feature-rich program. You won't find photo editing software with better, more complete, or more precise tools for pure photo manipulation, drawing, and typography. Photoshop's position as the preeminent image-editing tool remains secure. It earns a rare five-star rating and is PCMag's Editors' Choice winner for photo editing software. If you want the best photo workflow software for importing and organizing your photo collection, look to our photo workflow Editors' Choice winner, Adobe Lightroom Classic.