Adobe Photoshop vs Canva

• Retouching. While there are plenty of programs out there designed for adjusting overall exposure, contrast, color, etc., and while some of them (i.e., Capture One, Lightroom) also have retouching tools that are getting better every day, nothing comes close to Photoshop for retouching portraits, doing pixel-level manipulation.
• Preparing images for print. Photoshop's resizing and sharpening features are unparalleled, and when preparing images to be printed on paper (or for the web), it allows the control needed to make sure that the image is represented properly for each medium.
• Layouts and graphics. While Photoshop is primarily known for image editing, it also has robust tools for designing things like Christmas cards and web graphics. Although InDesign is probably a better option for designing print materials, Photoshop certainly leaves the user with plenty of options in a pinch.
• Plugins. Countless (and I mean COUNTLESS) companies have written plugins for Photoshop, which add functionality.

Read full review

• User friendly.
• Great templates for marketing, promotion, and design.
• Anyone can learn to use it quickly.

Read full review

• Learning curve. This is due primarily to the extensive feature set, so I can't complain about it too much, but just like a 747 is more difficult to fly (or to learn how to fly) than a Piper Cub, the sheer number of things you can do with Photoshop means it may be daunting for new users.
• Working with large numbers of images. Wedding, event, and portrait photographers will certainly want a companion program to help organize images and apply adjustments to groups of images. Photoshop just doesn't seem designed to handle this aspect of the workflow efficiently.
• Beyond these, I can identify several minor areas where I'd like to see Photoshop improve (better built-in black and white presets, better image enlargement) but in general, any quibbles I have are the result of Adobe saying, "Hey, let's not dumb this down. Let's provide the best possible base-level tools to our users, and let them create art with it." I would rather have more potential that's harder to use, than an easy to use program that's limited in functionality.

Read full review

• The app has some glitches (closes without saving changes, text placement is dodgy), better used on desktop
• Design in RGB, not CMYK which can be problematic for printing

Read full review

• Our business runs off of the Photoshop files that our graphic designers create daily, therefore it has greatly increased our ROI and overall objectives.
• When a client calls, wondering about their website template or with a question about the Photoshop file we might have sent them, Photoshop makes it easy for our graphic designers to explain exactly what is going on within Photoshop and how the client can use it and understand it better.
• The only slightly negative impact our business has sometimes encountered with Photoshop is, as I mentioned before, the slower runtime on our computers.

Read full review

• As a small business person, Canva is saving me thousands. Canva's massive library of presets for virtually any social media and business communications resource makes it invaluable. Public domain and creative commons libraries like Unsplash and Pexels extend the range of Canva's usefulness without adding a dime to the budget. These two resources are the perfect partners and have taken both my personal and organizational budget down by hundreds of dollars a month. When you're a resource-constrained startup this is critical.
• Canva has reduced the amount of time it's taking me to produce high-end marketing and communications tools by at least 50%. I can spin up a blog slider in minutes, and a full corporate brochure in under an hour, with both looking like they were done by an agency.
• Canva has reduced both the amount of time it takes to produce client assets and the cost of doing so. We've yet to do a case study to determine the ROI, but it's significant, freeing up critical resources on our team. When you're a startup, this is a game-changer.

Read full review