Adobe Photoshop Review, Pricing & Features

What is Adobe Photoshop?

Adobe Photoshop is a design software used by a wide range of businesses to create and edit photos. Its standout feature is its highly advanced tool kit.

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Table of Contents

• What is Adobe Photoshop?
• Adobe Photoshop Review Summary
• Adobe Photoshop Pricing & Cost
• Adobe Photoshop Features
  • Designs
  • Tool Kit
  • Collaboration
  • Cloud Storage
  • Exporting
• Adobe Photoshop Integrations
• Adobe Photoshop Customer Service
• Adobe Photoshop Alternatives & Competitors
• Is Adobe Photoshop Right For You?

Adobe Photoshop Review Summary

Adobe Photoshop was founded in 1987 by Adobe Inc. It is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of software, which has served over 12,000,000 users Adobe’s San Jose headquarters.

Adobe Photoshop’s features are tailored more for experienced designers. Its strongest points are its photo creation and editing capabilities and tool kit.

Adobe Photoshop’s pricing starts at $20.99 per month per user. Its pricing falls in the middle of its closest alternatives, Visme and Canva. Adobe Photoshop also offers a free plan.

Overall, Adobe Photoshop is the best option for experienced designers in need of highly advanced photo creation and editing features. Photoshop’s tool kit is built for a variety of use cases and is highly adaptable. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of an easy learning curve.

Adobe Photoshop Pricing & Cost

Adobe Photoshop pricing starts at $20.99 per user per month. The business plan costs $33.99 per user per month and offers additional features such as an admin console and advanced technical support.

Note that Adobe Photoshop is included with Adobe Creative Cloud. This plan is $52.99 per user per month and features other Adobe products such as Adobe XD and Illustrator.

Adobe Photoshop Features

Let’s discuss the major features that Adobe Photoshop offers and how they can help your design needs. Product screenshots are included to add context and demonstrate the user interface.

Designs

Adobe Photoshop specializes in photo creation and editing. Photoshop is designed to be as flexible for designers as possible. This means that your options for photo creation and editing are virtually limitless, but come with a very steep learning curve.

Design Types and Templates

Adobe Photoshop, unlike Canva and Visme, is built primarily for flexible photo creation and editing. This can include something as simple as coloring changes, or as complex as entirely unique photo compositions. Contrast this with software such as Canva and Visme, which are best suited for marketers in need of readymade and highly shareable content.

Photoshop offers thousands of templates that can help you grasp the basics of the software. Note that many of these templates, however, require a paid subscription of Adobe Stock.

Here is a list of the template types Adobe Photoshop offers for your designs:

Tool Kit

Adobe Photoshop’s tool kit is very advanced compared to alternative tools. However, newer designers will find its learning curve much steeper than beginner-friendly tools like Canva and Visme. This means that Photoshop is best for intermediate and advanced designers.

User Interface

Photoshop’s user interface is advanced yet highly customizable. An example of an uncustomized user interface is seen below.

Photoshop comes with far more additional tweaks to modify your interface than Visme and Canva combined. In fact, there is such a variety of customization that Adobe offers premade user interface templates depending on your use case. This makes Photoshop’s variety of options more accessible for beginners.

Here are the premade workspaces you can select in Adobe Photoshop:

Tool Types

Adobe Photoshop offers a comprehensive number of tool types to choose from. Although this variety of tools offers a plethora of design options, their learning curve is substantially steeper than tools in Canva and Visme. Note also, that Photoshop’s tools are more so centered around photo creation and editing rather than Illustrator’s focus on scalable graphic design.

You can access the following tools when editing content in Adobe Photoshop:

Photoshop’s set of tools are designed to be used for far more use cases than Canva and Visme’s. A direct trade off of this flexibility is Photoshop’s far steeper learning curve. We highly recommend leveraging Photoshop’s templates to familiarize yourself with the various tools the software has to offer.

Photo Editing

Adobe Photoshop is the best software for photo editing. Each photo editing feature it offers is designed to be as flexible as possible.

Each adjustment you want to make to a photo is done through an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers can essentially be turned on and off to activate your various changes. This means that your coloring adjustments and effects are not directly applied to your photo and can be easily reverted if necessary.

You can make advanced adjustments to your images. This includes:

Element Removal

Adobe Photoshop comes with a number of tools that help remove unwanted elements from your photos. The primary ways to do this are through the Spot Healing Brush tool and Patch tool.

Both tools allow you to draw over or trace any element you want removed from your image. As you can see above, we used the Spot Healing Brush tool to remove fingers from our image.

This seemingly intimidating process is simplified to the point that beginners new to Photoshop could immediately grasp how to use it. The fact that Photoshop’s element removal is both very easy to execute and high quality is one of its strongest points.

Collaboration

Adobe Photoshop’s collaboration is its weakest feature. Photoshop does not feature real time editing like Canva and Visme.

Projects cannot be edited by team members at any time. Furthermore, commenting must be done on Adobe Creative Cloud’s website. This breaks your workflow apart and might cause potential miscommunication.

Cloud Storage

Adobe Photoshop can be fully cloud-based like Canva. You have the option to keep files fully in the cloud or save local files for personal use. This means that you do not need to save your own projects before uploading them to the cloud which takes up space on your hard drive.

Version control is strong in Photoshop. You can access and restore versions up to 30 days old. Photoshop also allows you to name various versions. This makes restoring larger files easier.

Exporting

Adobe Photoshop’s exporting options are not built for marketers and content creators. You can, however, export images at much higher resolutions than alternatives.

You can export your file as the following in Adobe Photoshop:

Photoshop cannot directly post to social media platforms like Canva and Visme. If you primarily leverage design software for social media content, this will be an extra step in your workflow to consider.

Adobe Photoshop Integrations

Adobe Photoshop offers far fewer integrations when compared to Canva and Visme. Here are some popular integrations Adobe Photoshop supports:

Adobe Photoshop Customer Service

Adobe Photoshop’s customer support team is highly reachable. They are available through live chat and phone. We’ve found that responses take, at most, only up to ten minutes.

Adobe Photoshop’s primary resource is its blog. This site includes product updates, as well as career advice, case studies, and general design principles.

Adobe Photoshop Alternatives & Competitors

Adobe Photoshop has a number of competitors. Here’s a full list of Adobe Photoshop competitors:

Is Adobe Photoshop Right For You?

Overall, Adobe Photoshop is the best option for experienced designers in need of highly advanced photo creation and editing features. Photoshop’s tool kit is built for a variety of use cases and is highly adaptable. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of an easy learning curve.

If you're interested, you can try Adobe Photoshop today.