Best photo editing software in 2016

          Best photo editing software in 2016

There's more to image-editing than Photoshop, and we check out some smart and affordable alternatives

Once upon a time, if you asked anyone which was the best photo editing software, they'd always say Photoshop. OK, so Photoshop is still the most powerful program there is at what it does, but what we want to do as photographers has changed.

Photoshop is not much good if you need creative inspiration – it can create any effect you ask of it, but you have to know what you want. If you need creative inspiration, there are better places to look.

• What better way to edit photos than with a brand-new MacBook?

It's not much good at organising your photos, either. It does come with Adobe Bridge, but that's just a glorified folder/photo browser, not an image cataloguing tool.

And while many photography experts understand the value of shooting unprocessed raw files and processing them later on the computer, very few are aware that not all raw converters are the same and that Adobe Camera Raw – as used by Photoshop – is not necessarily the best.

So can Photoshop hang on as the best photo-editing software on the market, and which are the rival apps you should be looking at too? Read on to find out.

1. Adobe Photography plan :

Get Photoshop and Lightroom for a single and surprisingly affordable subscription

Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: Yes | Raw conversion: Yes

Adobe caused a storm when it moved over to a subscription system for its software, and it did initially look like a pretty pricey deal. But the price has dropped, the dust has settled and the world has carried on turning on its axis. Now, if you take out an annual subscription, you can get Photoshop and Lightroom for just £8.57/$9.99 per month.

And you do need both programs. Photoshop is sophisticated but limited. For layers, masks, selections, retouching and complex, multi-step imaging processes, it's impossible to beat, and it manages to present these tools in a remarkably clean, fast and efficient interface. On the downside, it doesn't offer a library of single-click creative effects or any way of organising a large and growing photo collection. Photoshop is like a giant box of spanners – it has all the tools you could possibly want, but it's not going to show you how to fix your car.

That's why Lightroom is an indispensable part of the Adobe double-act. Lightroom combines an image cataloguing database with Adobe Camera Raw's 'non-destructive' editing tools in a slicker interface. It means that you can make non-permanent adjustments to an image which you can change later – and your original photos are never modified. These tools can't do everything – for selections, layers, masks and many more complex effects you'll need Photoshop. But that's OK, because you get both programs in the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan and they complement each other really well.