Get more work done with this industry powerhouse!
July 04, 2021

Get more work done with this industry powerhouse!

Michael Prewitt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe PhotoShop

Photoshop is a primary tool of our creative process. It is used across all departments that need to do photo editing — primarily the Creative Services and Media Production departments. It is also widely used by design contractors we work with. We use the app for editing, retouching, and color correcting photos; for creating product packaging artwork; for creating banners, signs, displays, social media graphics, and more. It is a highly versatile tool that is considered an industry standard, and works with many plugins and presets that we want to use.
  • Photoshop is very useful — in fact, it is practically the only app we use — for editing photos. This includes color correcting, cropping / straightening, compositing, retouching, masking (removing a background), and more.
  • Photoshop is easily extensible. There are literally thousands of presets and plugins available for it. This includes brushes, masks, shapes, color palettes, effects plugins, productivity plugins, import/export extensions, and more. This makes it easy to create unique and evocative images, and works well with many productivity workflows.
  • Photoshop is very accurate for bitmap colorwork, which is the foundation of both digital and print production. It supports all the important industry color spaces and has a great color management workflow.
  • There are many things Photoshop can do besides basic photo editing. You can create layouts, set up multi-artboard projects, create automated processes (scripts, actions, and data merge, among them), created 3D rendered imagery, edit video (including exporting animated GIFs), and various technical/scientific processes, among other things.
  • It is pretty expensive. I subscribe to the full Creative Suite, and that runs about $600 per year. Subscription is the only way to get the app, which may be concerning for some users. However, other graphics apps can read the Photoshop format, including at least its basic layer types, so you are not completely blocked in.
  • The data merge functionality is a bit of a pain to work with and doesn't seem to work precisely as described. (I could not get image link references to work on a Mac system.) But, I expect most users would not need or use this.
  • The app is kind of slow to start and a bit cumbersome to use if you want to just fire it up and do something quick and dirty, or if your graphics needs are pretty basic.
  • Color accuracy and output quality.
  • Wide range of professional graphics features.
  • Large supporting ecosystem of third party extensions.
  • Since it is critical to our design process, and we are a media-based organization, the ROI for us is great. I would estimate that it pays for itself somewhere between 500 and 2000 percent (i.e., for every $1 spent on Adobe Creative Suite, we bring in $5-20 dollars in revenue from the projects we create with it). Sorry that I don't have the figures or data to give a more accurate estimate.
  • We don't know of any similar software that would allow us to get our work done.
I have used some competitor apps a little bit, including Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, and GraphicConverter. These apps are fast, have some cool features, and in some cases do things that Photoshop cannot do, or maybe even do them better or faster. But compared to the full package of Photoshop and available third-party content, they don't really measure up for our purposes.

Do you think Adobe PhotoShop delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Adobe PhotoShop's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe PhotoShop live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Adobe PhotoShop go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Adobe PhotoShop again?

Yes

If you are a graphic designer, photographer, or other graphics professional, you should really get Photoshop. But you probably already knew that. It is the industry standard and it does all sorts of bitmap/raster/photo production very well.

If you need something only for basic or occasional work, the cost and complexity of this app are probably not worth it. If you mainly want to do quick edits or apply filter effects to digital photos, there are other apps that are cheaper and more efficient.