Photo Editing Software FAQ

The thing about Photoshop is that it’s such an important piece of software that even those who don’t use image editing software know its name.

It’s managed to dominate not only the photo editing software industry but our culture, too; no one says ‘that image looks edited’, but instead ‘that image looks Photoshopped’. It carries an extra meaning and stronger value.

But how can such an expensive piece of software survive such a demanding industry?

Photoshop is ‘professional’

Let’s not forget that Photoshop has been around for many years, well over a quarter of a century in fact. In the early days it wasn’t such a clear-cut leader in its industry, with the likes of Corel Draw and PaintShop Pro all fighting for dominance of a relatively young market. It could have been any one of the popular image editing suites, but it was Photoshop’s accessibility and focus on photo editing that helped it to stand out.

From there on it’s grown from strength to strength, adding new features with each version and becoming the ‘ultimate’ package for image editing. It reached a point where it became the number one program in its field, with designers, photographers and professionals who needed such software all agreeing that Photoshop was the best tool of its kind.

At that point Adobe could market it is as the software for professionals and, as Reddit user ‘thedylanackerman’ explains, this affects the sort of people who buy the software. “Adobe’s consumers are mainly businesses,” he explains, “and they can afford a larger cost than individual people”.

Photoshop has a reputation

Once a program earns the reputation as the best photo editing suite out there, it’s hard to dislodge it. With all the money it made Adobe could hire the best developers to improve its features, the best customer support to ensure its users were kept content, and the best marketing to make sure its reputation didn’t dwindle.

What’s more, this reputation means that business owners that might require use of such a service will already know that this is a product to trust. While more cost-conscious companies might look into alternatives, many businesses won’t bat an eyelid at such a cost. Another Redditor, ‘amoeba’, put it rather simply: “If you’re paying $50k/yr in salary to a graphic designer, who needs a $2,000 PC every 3 years, $600/yr for Adobe Creative Cloud is no big deal.”

It’s true, most businesses won’t even consider the cost as significant, especially if they know they’re getting the best tool for the job. In fact, when Adobe switched from its licensing based payment to a subscription, it received some negativity from consumers who weren’t willing to pay that much. Businesses, however, shrugged their shoulders and got on with it. They were paying the same each year for new annually released versions anyway.

So should you pay this much for photo editing?

No one is denying that Photoshop is a great product, but since it is mostly targeted at professional designers it’s unlikely you’ll need access to such a powerful suite, especially when equally as good software is available.

The cheapest possible price for Photoshop is $9.99 per month, or nearly $120 a year. For Xara Photo & Graphic Designer the cost is $44.99 for a year, and if you decide to stop paying then the software will still function as it always did, just without future updates. It’s just as complete a package as Photoshop, too, and a more than acceptable alternative for those looking for something equally professional.

You’ve probably heard the terms before, and perhaps you’ve never even stopped to consider that in fact they don’t mean the same thing. There are similarities, of course, but the tools used for retouching require quite a bit more effort than the basic features that will be needed for editing, and while it’s probably not the most important information to store in your brain it’ll be handy to know when it comes to searching the internet for the necessary software for the job.

What is photo editing?

For the most part, photo editing is the basics – though in truth some software will bundle everything under this one umbrella term. Editing is taking a base photo and applying certain enhancements to it to alter the overall look or quality of the picture. Mostly this means adjusting elements like lighting and exposure, contrast, color temperature and the RGB levels. Often it’ll also mean cropping and rotating a picture to remove unwanted elements, better position the perspective or give the image a better subject focus.

Many professional photographers will also include a process termed ‘culling’ into the aspect of editing, in which they will delete photos that are deemed unworthy of sharing. This likely means the subject’s eyes are closed, have been captured in an unfortunate pose or are simple test shots to get the correct settings from the camera; in these cases the images are being ‘edited’ since they are examined and thrown to the trash. It’s a process you, too, will probably go through if creating your own photo book.

Luckily, since photo editing mostly requires basic tools, the majority of such software will have these features included. Sometimes they may be missing fairly obvious options – such as cropping – but for the most part you won’t need to try too hard to find a program that helps you edit images.

What is photo retouching?

Retouching is a little more specific since it involves removing specific flaws within a photograph. At a basic level this means removing red-eye caused by a camera’s flash, softening someone’s skin to make it appear smoother and wrinkle-free or even repairing flaws with the quality of the image itself – such as removing grain from a darker picture. But there are more complex and intensive tasks involved with this, too, such as removing (or cloning) objects from a photo completely, shrinking to reduce the look of someone’s weight or bringing in aspects from one photo over to another.

The tools for these are often a little more specialized, and can come in a number of names and terms. Cloning is the most common tool for retouching since it allows the painting over of defects while still maintaining contextual sense within the image, while blending (or smoothing, or blurring) is typically used on photos of faces. Some programs even allow the selection of an item to be removed and have the software process its extinction automatically.

As you might expect, since these tools are a little more complex not all editing suites provide this sort of functionality. Not only that, but some are better than others at achieving believable results. Professional software that needs to be installed – such as Xara Photo & Graphic Designer – is practically guaranteed to include these features, but that doesn’t mean that online editing software doesn’t also offer these tools. Fotor, for example, provides a large number of beautification tools to allow for more than simple editing.

When it comes to picking software these days, it’s never an easy task. It used to be that if you wanted to complete a task with a computer then you had maybe no more than three potential programs to pick from, and typically there was always one that was the most recommended – in the case of photo editing, that honor used to settle squarely on Photoshop’s head.

But these days that’s just not enough, there are just too many options; and now there’s the new trend of seeing a lot of software transferred to the cloud, turning these applications away from your hard drive and instead allowing access to their functions from your favorite browser. So what exactly, then, is the benefit of online photo editing?

The differences between online and offline editing

Before you roll your eyes, this isn’t quite as obvious as it might first seem. The surface info here is that, of course, online photo editing software is used entirely online. But the benefit to this is that there’s no need to fill your computer up with any installed software and, lest we forget, it’s a very good idea to keep your disk space as clutter-free as possible.

Of course this does mean that an internet connection is required to make use of such tools, but how often is your computer without some data connection? And if there’s a time where you do find yourself offline, it’s unlikely that photo editing is the important task that you’re needing to complete.

Better still, many online photo editing tools include cloud storage as a bonus, meaning it is possible to save any work in the cloud and access it not only whenever you like but wherever and on any machine that is to hand. There’s no need to email yourself files, anymore.

But in that regard there are usually much fewer file types that are recognized with online software. Since being able to open and correctly read certain image types requires the information to be installed onto the computer, online apps usually only allow the editing of .JPG, .PNG and perhaps .GIF. Software specific or less common file types – for example Photoshop’s .PSD or the higher quality image file type .TIF – are rarely allowed in online editors, less so .RAW file types from cameras.

The false myth of online photo editing

In the earliest days of online photo editing the options were often limited to a handful of basic features, the likes of cropping or brightness adjustment available and little else. But these days that just isn’t the case, online editing suites are often just as powerful – if not more so – than offline equivalents. Editors such as Fotor usually include more complex features these days, too, with important tools like the cloning brush being among them.

Typically online tools are better streamlined, too, to present a more user-friendly experience that anyone can make the most of. Offline software will typically present a traditional computer program ‘look’, and that can be intimidating for those not already experienced with image editing.

What’s more, online photo editors now tend to have more options available than offline software. The ability to easily share edits to social media is not a core feature of software like Photoshop or Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, and neither has the option to easily create collages or also have mobile apps. If you’re a professional designer then offline software will always be the way to go, but everyone else should consider the ease-of-use and flexibility of online editors for future projects.

Good photography is about capturing a memory. Many will believe otherwise, that good photography is about framing a particular scene, moment, or person exactly as they appeared, but when observing their results these same people may end up believing that their skills with a camera are severely lacking.

They may tell themselves that they’re simply not good enough photographers, yet while there is a need to understand the intricacies of capturing a good image – such as framing, composition, and an understanding of aperture, ISO, and shutter speed – the truth is that a good percentage of photography is actually in smart post-process editing.

The basic edits you need to do

As a result of this it’s basically expected that at least a little bit of energy should be put into tweaking those photos. This typically means adjusting the contrast and brightness levels a little, just to edge the colors and lighting towards something more like the original moment. Contrast, for example, increases the range between blacks and whites to make those – and strong colors – stand out more. Adjusting the RGB levels will achieve a similar purpose, too.

And don’t forget the cropping and rotation tools, which can be integral to perfecting an otherwise fantastic photo. In fact, programs like Xara Photo & Graphic Designer even have tools that can automatically adjust the perspective for you.

When only basic editing is needed

While these basic adjustments aren’t necessary when sharing your photos to Facebook or Twitter, there’s no reason to not make a couple of tweaks before sharing images online since doing so will make them look better than before. The same is true for Instagram, but as this app includes its own basic editing functionality it’s not such a necessity.

One last thing to consider is that many photographers have their own particular style; some prefer high saturation or contrast images, some like softer, more muted colors while others like to really draw out the blacks to give everything a strong detail. Keep making these edits and playing around with software and you could come across your own style, too.

All image editing suites will include these editing tools, whether that’s professional software like Xara Photo & Graphic Designer or a browser-based suite such as Fotor. Both feature the option to make automatic adjustments for you, but if the results aren’t what you were hoping for then such programs also allow for manual tweaks too.

More complex editing

There may be times when you want to get a little more complicated, however, such as when you’re creating a photo book. If photography is going to have more of a permanent place in someone’s life beyond a new social media post, then it’s important to make sure these images are the best they can be.

This might mean applying certain effects to enhance their aesthetic. Or perhaps you want to draw a focus onto the subject by blurring the background, create a darkened vignette or turn an image black and white. It might also mean utilizing retouching tools to remove unseemly objects from an image, a passing bird or an unseemly trashcan for example. Or maybe you want to fix red-eye, hide wrinkles, or cover up scars and blemishes.

In any of these cases the tools required are a little more tricky and not available in all software – though Fotor does offer a number of handy beautification tools for just this purpose. Regardless of the program used, once you’ve got the experience your photos can be flawless and perfect for sharing as a gift.

This strange world we live in has created a new everyday problem for us all. From thousands of new memes a day to countless images of fake news passed around social media, photo editing has reached such capabilities that it can often be difficult to tell when an image has been doctored. And it’s not just those looking for a cheap laugh on the internet, either, but professionals working for magazines and newspapers. It doesn’t feel right, does it?

When is editing photos unethical?

The question here isn’t one of legality; there aren’t exactly any strict legal ramifications for editing a photo and sharing it with the world, despite how much of a gray area that is. But is it morally acceptable to edit a photo of someone? That depends on the circumstance. There are countless examples of newspapers and magazines altering an image in some way, sometimes for a positive cause and other times for more tricky or even salacious reasons.

There’s plenty of debate surrounding the heavy ‘photoshopping’ that most media outlets – particularly fashion and health magazines – take part in, especially on the front covers of magazines. Some claim it creates an unhealthy obsession with looking perfect, others say that no one – even an actress or model – wants a sub-par photo of them distributed to hundreds and thousands of people worldwide.

Luckily more and more media outlets are becoming more strict about the use of photo editing. Media guidelines in some of the Scandinavian countries, for example, insist that image manipulation is acceptable so long as it does not present a “misleading” message.

And in 2007 Reuters created a number of restrictions for its photographers, allowing for only simple image editing rather than retouching that meant the use of cloning or healing tools, airbrushes and even excessive use of sharpening or lighting alterations were outright banned.

So should you edit your photos?

Luckily the question of ethics doesn’t really affect the average photographer. Everyone tweaks their pictures before they’re uploaded to Instagram or Facebook, after all, everyone accepts that you most certainly want to look your very best online.

It’s when it comes to editing photos of other people that it begins to become more of an issue. The ethical thing to do when editing a photograph is to ask yourself two questions: what is the image being used for, and why are you’re considering editing the image in the first place?

If you’re simply sharing your photos online, then so long as your edits don’t place the photo’s subjects in a negative light then most people won’t have an issue with it. If the edits might make something look funny or untrue – perhaps at the expense of someone you know – then the best thing to do would be to first ask for permission from anyone that might be affected, or at least check with them before it’s posted online.

If the images are to go into a photo book as a gift (and therefore you obviously won’t want to spoil the surprise by asking for permission) then it’s best to use your judgment. Firstly, try not to overuse any retouching tools since this can often look very fake and even make the subject look worse. Secondly, try to edit only what needs editing: red-eye, for example, can be eliminated, but cloning away a mole or birthmark from someone’s face might make them feel self-conscious. Use smart consideration, you know the person in the picture, after all.

Ultimately, if you think a change might be negatively received, don’t make the edit.