Verdict: 4 stars Lightroom is Adobe’s bold vision of a cloud-based photo organizing and editing tool where all your images can be organised, edited and viewed anywhere on any device. For mobile users and content creators it’s a clever and effective proposition, but for regular photographers, while its editing tools now include AI masking, A lens Blur and the rest of Adobe’s latest Lightroom features, its restrictions, the closed nature of its editing ecosystem and its cost remain a major barrier.
Subject recognition
A new branch of AI-powered technology in both cameras and software. In software, subject recognition is used to work out how to optimise images for different photographic genres and also to identify and mask specific areas for adjustment such as skies, subjects and other object types.
Adobe Lightroom Classic review 2023
Verdict: 4.5 stars Lightroom Classic is the traditional, desktop-based version of Lightroom. Its editing tools are powerful and versatile, aided by new and steadily improving AI masking tools. Lightroom Classic continues to be the professional cataloguing and editing tool by which all others are judged, though it’s not always the best.
Radiant Photo review
Verdict: 4 stars Radiant Photo sounds like countless other ‘magic’ photo apps and plug-ins that use the power of AI to make your photos perfect. The difference is that it works. Not every image will be transformed equally, but the dullest, most difficult and downright impossible images are the ones that get the most benefit.
Local adjustments explained
‘Local adjustments’ is a bit of a catch-all term. It means picking out an area of an image for adjustment while leaving the rest unchanged. So how do local adjustments work and which software does them best?