The Best Photo Editing Software of 2017

Whether you merely shoot the occasional selfie on your smartphone or you're a professional photographer with a studio, you need software to organize and edit your photos so that you can find the best ones and make them look even better. We all know that camera technology is improving at a tremendous rate. Today's smartphones are more powerful than the point-and-shoots of just a few years ago. The same can be said for photo-editing software. Photoshopping pictures is no longer the province of art directors and professional photographers. No matter if you're shooting from an iPhone 7 Plus or a DSLR, if you really care how your photos look, you'll want to import them into your PC to organize them, pick the best ones, and then perfect them. Here we've compiled the best choices for photo editing software to suit every level of photographer.

Of course, casual shooters will want different software from those shooting with a $50,000 Phase One XF 100MP in a studio. We've included all levels of PC software here, however, and reading the linked reviews will make it clear which is for you. Below is a cheat sheet of which category each product fits into. Note that some products are suitable for both enthusiast and pros, and most products included fit into the sweet spot of enthusiast/prosumer level.

Entry Level: Apple Photos, Microsoft Photos
Enthusiast/Prosumer Level: Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Corel PaintShop Pro X9, CyberLink PhotoDirector, DxO Optics Pro 11, ACDSee Ultimate
Professional Level: ACDSee Ultimate,AdobePhotoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, DxO Optics Pro 11, Phase One Capture One Pro

Nothing is to say that pros can't occasionally use an entry-level application or that a prosumer won't be running Photoshop, the most powerful image-editing app around. The issue is that, in general, users at each of these levels will be most comfortable with the products that are intended for them. Note that in the table above, it's not a case of "more checks mean the program is better." Rather, it's designed to give you the focus of the products. A product with everything checked doesn't necessarily have the best implementation of those features, and one with fewer checks still may be very capable.

Free Photo Editing Options

So you've graduated from smartphone photography tools like those offered by Instagram and Facebook. Does that mean you have to pay a ton for high-end software? Absolutely not. Up-to-date desktop operating systems include photo software at no extra cost. Windows 10's Photos app may surprise some users with its capability. In a touch-friendly interface, it offers a good level of image correction, and it can automatically create editable albums based on photos' date and place groupings. Apple Photos does those things too, though its automatic albums aren't editable. Both programs also sync with online storage services: iCloud for Apple and OneDrive for Microsoft. With Apple Photos, you can search based on detected object types, like "tree" or "cat" in the application, while Microsoft Photos offers this feature only for photos stored online in OneDrive. Apple Photos also can integrate with plugins like the excellent Perfectly Clear, appeasing power users who lament the company's discontinuation of the prosumer-level Aperture program.

Ubuntu Linux users are also covered when it comes to free, included photo software: They can use the capable-enough Shotwell app. And no discussion of free photo editing software would be complete without mentioning the venerable GIMP, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It offers a ton of photoshop-style plugins and editing capabilities, but very little in the way of creature comforts or usability. Unfortunately, the well-liked and once-independent Picasa app was recently shuttered by Google, so those looking for free installable applications may want to simply use the photo app included with their OS or turn to other lightweight, low-cost options like Polarr and Pixlr.

Editing Your Photos Online

In this roundup, we've only included installable computer software, but entry-level photo shooters may be adequately served by online photo-editing options. These are mostly free, and often are tied to online photo storage and sharing services. Flickr (with its integrated Aviary editor) and Google Photos are the biggest names here, and both can spiff up your uploaded pictures and do a lot to help you organize them. They even approach the two entry-level installed programs here, but they lack many tools found in the pro and enthusiast products.

Image Editing for Enthusiasts and Prosumers

Most of the products included in this roundup fall into this category, which includes people who genuinely love working with digital photographs. These are not free applications, and they require a few hundred megabytes of your disk space. Several, such as Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector, are strong when it comes to workflow—importing and organizing the photos from a DSLR. Such apps offer nondestructive editing, meaning the original photo files aren't touched. Instead, a database of edits you apply is maintained, and appears in photos that you export from the application. They also offer strong organization tools, including keyword tagging, color-coding, geo-tagging with maps, and in some cases face recognition to organize photos by what people appear in them.

At the other end of workflow is output. Capable software like Lightroom offers powerful printing options such as soft-proofing, which shows you whether the printer you use can produce the colors in your photo or not. And even the Lightroom, which you might think is above the social fray, includes directly sharing photos to social networks like Facebook and online photo hosts like Flickr and SmugMug. In fact, all really good software at this level offers strong printing and sharing, and some, like ACDSee Ultimate and Lightroom, offer their own online photo hosting.

The programs at this and the professional level can import and edit raw files from your digital camera. These are files that include every bit of data from the camera's image sensor. Each camera manufacturer uses its own format and file extension for these. For example, Canon DSLRs use CR2 files and Nikon uses NEF. (Raw here simply means what it sounds like, a file with the raw sensor data; it's not an acronym, so there's no reason to capitalize it.)

Working with raw files provides some big advantages when it comes to correcting (often termed adjusting) photos. Since the photo you see on screen is just one interpretation of what's in the raw file, the software can dig into that data to recover more detail in a bright sky, or it can fully fix improperly rendered white balance. If you set your camera to shoot with JPGs, you're losing those capabilities. In my testing, Phase One Capture One was tops at producing the most detailed images from raw files.

Enthusiasts want to do more than just import, organize and render their photos: They want to do fun stuff, too! Editors' Choice Adobe Photoshop Elements includes Guided Edits, which make special effects like motion blur or color splash (where only one color shows on an otherwise black-and-white photo) a simple step-by-step process. Content-aware tools in some of these products let you do things like move objects around while maintaining a consistent background, or remove objects entirely—say you want to remove a couple of strangers from a serene beach scene—and have the app fill in the background. Note that these edits don't involve simple filters like you get in Instagram. Rather, they produce highly customized, one-off images. Another good example is CyberLink PhotoDirector's Multiple Exposure effect, which lets you create an image with ten versions of Johnny jumping that curb on his skateboard, for example.

These products can also produce HDR effects and panoramas after you feed them multiple shots, and local edit brushes let you paint adjustments on only specific areas of an image.

Professional Photo Editing

At the very top end of image editing is Photoshop, which really has no rival. Its layered editing, drawing, text, and 3D-imaging tools are the industry standard for a reason. Of course, pros need more than this one application, and many use workflow programs like Lightroom, AfterShot Pro, or Photo Mechanic for workflow functions like import and organization. In a