If you’re a photographer with a decade’s worth of digital files totaling 100,000 or more and you’re tired of endlessly searching through thumbnails in either Windows’ Explorer view or the Mac Finder, Lightroom will revolutionize things. On the other hand, Lightroom’s cataloguing and search tools have to be seen to be believed.

It’s important to say that there’s not much in it, but if you’re looking for a full-on per-pixel editor and you don’t want to roundtrip images through Photoshop – like, ever – Capture One might be the one for you. Capture One offers more editing tools, and they’re generally more sophisticated.

Perhaps because of this, its editing tools are a little less full-throated than Capture One’s.

Lightroom is a standalone application, but is affordably available as a Creative Cloud subscription that includes Photoshop. The web app is free to use, but a $5-per-month subscription removes a time limit on advanced features like subject selection and increases Peadrive storage from 0.5GB to 5GB, removes ads, and doubles the available history steps.The applications aren’t interchangeable, though. Photopea plays well with major online storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, but also includes its own Peadrive online storage. Still, Photopea is an impressive feat of web functionality, and if you prefer a more application-like experience, you can install it as a progressive web app (PWA) and export to a choice of 16 formats, including JPG, PNG, SVG, and WebP. You lose some of Photoshop's cutting-edge tools like Neural AI-powered filters as well as some slickness and usability. Photopea includes templates for social image sizes like Facebook or YouTube cover pages as well as standard photo, print, screen, and mobile sizes. Unlike the web version of Lightroom, Photopea even takes over the browser's right-click context menus, so you can use those for editing functions rather than just for browser functions. You can work with PSD and PDF, but Photopea couldn't open an HEIC file from a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. It includes masking (raster and vector), layers, raw camera file support, text overlays, drawing tools, and even some of Photoshop's more impressive features like Subject Select and Smart Objects. Photopea resembles an online version of Photoshop, or perhaps more accurately, GIMP.

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Lightroom software cost