Adobe Photoshop Review: Still the King of Creative Software?

For over three decades, Adobe Photoshop has been synonymous with digital image editing. It’s not just a piece of software; it’s a verb. But in an era of AI generators and mobile apps, does it still hold the crown? The short answer is yes. Photoshop remains the undisputed industry standard for photographers, designers, and digital artists who demand precision and power.

In this comprehensive review, we'll break down why Photoshop continues to dominate the market, explore its cutting-edge AI features, and help you decide if the subscription is worth the investment for your creative workflow.

Why Photoshop is the Industry Standard

Photoshop's dominance isn't accidental. It offers a depth of control that few competitors can match.

Unmatched Layer System

The core of Photoshop's power lies in its layer-based editing. This non-destructive workflow allows you to stack adjustments, masks, and blending modes to create complex composites without permanently altering your original pixels. Whether you're fine-tuning color grades or building fantasy worlds from scratch, the layer system gives you infinite editability.

Professional Photo Retouching

For photographers, Photoshop is essential. Beyond basic exposure adjustments, it offers:

• Content-Aware Fill: Magically remove unwanted objects from your photos.
• Neural Filters: AI-powered tools to change facial expressions, smooth skin, or even colorize black and white photos in seconds.
• Camera Raw: A powerful integrated lab for processing raw image files with granular control over light and color.

Digital Painting & Illustration

While dedicated painting apps exist, many concept artists and illustrators stick with Photoshop for its robust brush engine. With thousands of custom brushes available online and deep customization options, it handles everything from speed painting to highly detailed technical illustration.

New AI Features: Generative Fill

The integration of Adobe Firefly has brought Generative Fill to Photoshop, changing the game completely. You can now:

• Expand images beyond their borders seamlessly.
• Add or remove objects using simple text prompts.
• Generate entirely new backgrounds instantly.

These features aren't just novelties; they significantly speed up workflows, allowing creatives to iterate on ideas faster than ever before.

Pricing: Is the Subscription Worth It?

Photoshop moved to a subscription-only model years ago, which remains a point of contention for some. However, the value proposition is strong for professionals.

• Photography Plan ($9.99/mo): Includes Photoshop and Lightroom. This is widely considered the best deal in the creative software world.
• Single App ($20.99/mo): Photoshop alone.
• Creative Cloud All Apps ($54.99/mo): Access to the entire Adobe suite (Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, etc.).

Student Discount: Students and teachers can get the entire Creative Cloud suite for around $19.99/mo, making it highly accessible for education.

Who Should Use Photoshop?

• Professional Photographers: For high-end retouching and compositing that Lightroom can't handle.
• Graphic Designers: For web graphics, posters, and marketing materials.
• Digital Artists: For industry-standard concept art and illustration pipelines.
• Creative Agencies: Collaboration features and cloud libraries make it essential for teams.

The Brush Engine for Digital Artists

Photoshop's brush engine deserves special attention for digital painters and illustrators. The application supports thousands of custom brush presets—available both from Adobe and from the vast community of brush creators—with deep customization over shape dynamics, scattering, texture, transfer, and dual brush settings. Pressure and tilt sensitivity from drawing tablets translates into expressive, natural-feeling strokes that professional concept artists and illustrators rely on daily.

The mixer brush simulates wet paint mixing on the canvas, allowing artists to blend colors directly with their brush strokes. Combined with the standard round brushes, textured brushes, and specialty brushes, Photoshop provides a painting environment that—while not as specialized as Corel Painter or Procreate—is versatile enough that many professional artists use it as their primary painting tool.

The Creative Cloud Ecosystem

Photoshop doesn't exist in isolation. It's part of the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem that includes Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Lightroom, and dozens of other applications. For creative professionals who work across multiple disciplines—designing illustrations in Photoshop, creating vector assets in Illustrator, and compositing them in After Effects—the seamless integration between Creative Cloud applications creates a workflow efficiency that no collection of competing applications can match.

Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stock, and Creative Cloud Libraries provide shared assets that are accessible across all Adobe applications, and cloud document storage ensures that files are available on any device. For professional studios and agencies, this ecosystem integration justifies the subscription cost through workflow efficiency alone.

Photoshop on iPad

Photoshop for iPad brings the desktop application's core functionality to Apple's tablet platform, with Apple Pencil support that makes it a viable painting and retouching tool for mobile workflows. While the iPad version doesn't include every desktop feature, it handles layers, brushes, selections, masks, and retouching tools with enough fidelity that artists can do meaningful work away from their desktops.

The ability to start a project on iPad and continue it on desktop—with full layer and edit preservation through cloud sync—creates a flexible workflow that accommodates both studio-based and mobile creative work.

Learning Resources

Photoshop's three-decade dominance means it has the most extensive ecosystem of learning resources of any creative software. Thousands of courses on platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, Domestika, and YouTube cover every aspect of Photoshop use—from beginner basics through advanced compositing, digital painting, and photo manipulation techniques. This abundance of educational content means that any question about how to accomplish something in Photoshop has already been answered, often in multiple formats and skill levels.

The Verdict

Adobe Photoshop is a professional tool with a steep learning curve, but the payoff is limitless creative potential. If you are serious about a career in design, photography, or digital art, learning Photoshop isn't just a recommendation—it's practically a requirement. Its combination of unmatched layer-based editing, professional retouching tools, a powerful brush engine for digital painting, revolutionary AI-powered Generative Fill, seamless Creative Cloud ecosystem integration, iPad support for mobile workflows, and the most extensive learning resource library of any creative software makes it the industry standard for compelling reasons.

While free alternatives like GIMP and Photopea or one-time purchase options like Affinity Photo exist, none quite match the ecosystem, feature set, and industry ubiquity of Adobe Photoshop.

• Pros: Incredible depth, industry-standard, AI innovation, seamless Cloud integration, unmatched learning resources.
• Cons: Subscription cost, resource-heavy, complex for beginners.

Final Score: 4.7/5 - The essential tool for the modern digital creative.