Adobe Photoshop Review 2025: Still the King, But at What Cost?

Thirty-Five Years of Defining an Industry

I learned Photoshop in college. Version CS3, I think. The interface was grey and intimidating and I had absolutely no idea what most of the tools did. I remember spending forty minutes trying to figure out how to make a selection follow hair strands and eventually giving up and painting over the edges with black. This was 2008.

Now I click "Select Subject" and Photoshop's AI identifies the person, separates them from the background -- including individual hair strands -- and gives me a near-perfect mask in about two seconds. That single comparison tells you a lot about how Photoshop has changed. And also about what has stayed the same: the sheer depth of the tool, the layers panel on the right, the feeling that there is always a feature you have not discovered yet even after years of daily use.

Photoshop has been around since 1990. The word "photoshopped" is in the dictionary. That kind of cultural penetration is almost unheard of for a software product. But cultural dominance does not mean the product is above criticism, and 2025 is an interesting moment for Photoshop because the competition has genuinely improved while Photoshop has accumulated both incredible new features and decades of accumulated complexity.

So I want to look at this from two angles: what Photoshop does that nothing else can, and what competitors now genuinely do better. Because the answer is not as one-sided as it used to be.

What Only Photoshop Can Do

Let me start with the things where Photoshop still has no real peer.

Complex compositing. If you need to combine elements from multiple images into a single scene with realistic lighting, shadows, and color matching, Photoshop is still the only serious option. The layer system -- with blend modes, clipping masks, layer masks, smart objects, and adjustment layers -- gives you a level of control that no competitor fully matches. Affinity Photo comes closest, but its layer management is not quite as fluid for deeply nested compositions with dozens of layers.

Generative AI (Firefly). The integration of Adobe Firefly into Photoshop is, I think, the most significant change to the software in the last decade. Generative Fill lets you select an area and describe what should appear there in plain language. I tested it by selecting an empty area of sky and typing "dramatic storm clouds at sunset." The result was photorealistic and blended naturally with the existing image on the first try. Generative Expand extends images beyond their boundaries. Both features are trained on licensed content, which matters for commercial work -- you are not going to get a lawsuit because the AI trained on someone's copyrighted photo.

The brush engine. For digital painting and illustration, Photoshop's brush system is extraordinarily deep. Pressure sensitivity, tilt, custom dynamics, the Mixer Brush that simulates real paint blending. Procreate has a better experience for pure illustration on iPad, and Clip Studio Paint is arguably better for comics. But for versatility across painting styles? Photoshop has no single competitor that matches its range.

Camera Raw and the photography workflow. If you shoot in RAW, the pipeline of processing in Camera Raw and then refining in Photoshop is still the most powerful editing workflow available. The masking system in Camera Raw -- AI-detected subjects, skies, and manual brushes -- has gotten remarkably good.

What Competitors Actually Do Better

Alright, here is the part where Photoshop loyalists might disagree with me. But I think honesty matters more than loyalty.

Affinity Photo does 80% of what Photoshop does for a one-time payment of $69.99. It handles layers, masks, adjustment layers, RAW processing, batch editing, and PSD import/export. It is missing Generative Fill, and its plugin ecosystem is much smaller. But for a photographer or designer who does not need AI generation and does not want a subscription? Affinity Photo is genuinely great. I know several professional photographers who switched and have not looked back.

Pixelmator Pro on macOS is shockingly good for a $50 app. Its machine learning-powered tools -- like the auto color adjustment that is right about 70% of the time -- make common edits faster than Photoshop. It will not replace Photoshop for complex work, but for the majority of everyday photo editing tasks, it is faster and simpler.

Procreate on iPad is a better drawing experience than Photoshop on iPad. Period. The Apple Pencil responsiveness is tighter, the brush library is curated rather than sprawling, and the animation features are genuinely fun. If your primary use case is digital illustration on a tablet, Procreate at its one-time $12.99 price is the obvious choice.

And then there is GIMP, which is free and open source. I will not pretend GIMP is as good as Photoshop -- the interface is clunky, the workflow is slower, and it lacks AI features. But it handles basic-to-intermediate photo editing competently, and for hobbyists or people on a tight budget, it is worth knowing about.

Let Us Talk About the Bloat

Photoshop in 2025 is a massive piece of software. The installation is multiple gigabytes. It wants a modern processor with good RAM. It runs a background process called Adobe Creative Cloud that starts with your computer whether you asked it to or not. If you have an older machine, Photoshop will let you know.

There is also interface bloat. Photoshop has accumulated features for 35 years, and not all of them are elegantly organized. The toolbar has tools that 95% of users never touch. The menu bar has sub-menus within sub-menus. Filter galleries contain effects that feel like they have not been updated since 2010. There are at least three different ways to sharpen an image, and figuring out which one to use requires either experience or a tutorial.

Adobe has tried to address this with contextual taskbars, improved onboarding, and a "Discover" panel that helps you find features. These help, but they are band-aids on a deeper problem. Photoshop was designed incrementally over three decades, and it shows. Newer tools like Affinity Photo had the advantage of designing from scratch with modern sensibilities.

But I'm getting off track. The bloat is real. It is also somewhat unavoidable for a tool this powerful. The question is whether you need the power, and whether the power justifies the friction.

The AI Features in Practice

I want to spend more time on Firefly because I think it is the most interesting development in Photoshop in years. Generative Fill is not just a gimmick -- it is a production tool that I have used in actual client work.

A few examples from the last month. A client wanted a product photo with a different background. I selected the background, typed "marble kitchen countertop, soft morning light," and got three variations. One of them was usable with minor adjustments. Total time: about five minutes. The old way -- finding a stock photo, masking the product, matching the lighting and color grade -- would have been an hour.

Another project required extending a landscape photo wider for a banner. Generative Expand added realistic terrain and sky on both sides that matched the style and perspective of the original. Not perfect -- I had to clone stamp one area where the AI generated a weird artifact -- but the time savings were substantial.

The limitations are real though. Generative Fill requires an internet connection, which is annoying if you are working on a plane or in a spotty-Wi-Fi cafe. It uses Firefly credits, which are allocated based on your subscription tier. The generated content is sometimes slightly off in lighting or perspective, requiring manual cleanup. And for anything involving text or detailed brand elements, AI generation is unreliable. But for backgrounds, textures, sky replacements, and object removal? It genuinely changes the workflow.

Pros and Cons

The Subscription Debate

I am going to say something that might be unpopular: the Photography Plan at $9.99 per month is actually reasonable. You get Photoshop, Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and 20GB of cloud storage. That is two world-class applications for the price of a fancy coffee each week. If you are a photographer who uses both, it is hard to argue against the value.

The standalone Photoshop plan at $22.99/month is where it gets harder to justify. That is $276 a year for a single application. The All Apps plan is $59.99/month, which makes sense if you use four or more Adobe apps regularly. The student plan at $19.99/month for everything is genuinely generous.

The deeper complaint about the subscription model is not about the monthly cost -- it is about ownership. When you paid $699 for Photoshop CS6, you owned it. If Adobe went bankrupt, your software still worked. With Creative Cloud, you are renting. Stop paying, lose access. Your PSD files are yours, but the tool to open them requires an ongoing subscription. That feels wrong to a lot of people, and I understand why. At the same time, the subscription model has funded genuinely rapid development -- the AI features, the iPad app, constant improvements to Camera Raw -- in ways that the old release cycle probably would not have supported.

There is an argument for both sides, and I do not think either is clearly right.

Photoshop vs. The Alternatives

A Nuanced Take on Where It Stands