Regardless of its popularity level, Photoshop’s efficiency is not arguable. The ones who stand by this affirmation are professional artists and designers who met new horizons with Adobe’s well known graphics editor. Labeled as an industry standard, Photoshop is shipped with an impressive feature set that encourages imagination and creativity to turn into genius.

What sets Photoshop aside from the rest of the crowd are the endless possibilities to manipulate images while making almost no compromise at all on quality. Photoshop goodies reside in features such as intelligent auto-correction, masks, HDR imaging, color management, effects, animations, histogram palettes, brushes, accurate selection tools, layer control etc.

The software enables you to make quick picture corrections like those for removing chromatic aberrations, lens distortions or vignetting. Managing colors or painting and drawing become easy tasks with Photoshop since it packs all the necessary tools for these activities.

While these basic editing capabilities are valued by beginners and professionals as well, Photoshop is nonetheless aimed at photography experts and as such, the software includes advanced and complex tools for accomplishing state-of-the-art digital imaging. One of the most interesting features is the Content-Aware tools, designed to enable users to remove content from a photo and replace it with an inconspicuous patch, thus enabling you to retouch photos just the way you want it.

Productivity is greatly improved with the aid of the Mercury Graphics Engine that allows users to perform image and video editing at amazing speed. Tone control can be managed in a simpler way via the HDR imaging and toning, while the black-and-white conversion capabilities allow you to interactively color your photos via the rich collection of presets.

Since Creative Suite 3, Photoshop is delivered in two different editions: Standard and Extended Edition. The latter is slightly different in the way that it includes extra features, out of which two stand out the most. The first one is aimed at designing 3D graphics and includes an extensive set of tools for creating shadows, reflections, animations, cartoons and sketches. The second one is intended for performing quantitative image analysis for fields such as engineering, medicine and science. By extracting quantitative data from pictures, it allows to easily calibrate, scale DICOM files, for instance.

In both editions of Photoshop, workflow is greatly improved by the possibility to migrate and share presets, while the modern interface creates a pleasant working environment. All in all, Photoshop maximizes efficiency and is a great helper for photographers insofar as digital picture processing and adjusting is concerned.