Updated May 10, 2023
Adobe Photoshop – Twenty-six years ago, on Feb 19, 1990, Photoshop was first released worldwide. Back then, it was a simple software to meet graphic designing and, most importantly, edit the photographs to make them look better. Since then, Adobe Photoshop has grown bigger and bigger, accumulating more design solutions and stretching its possibilities to venture into many new avenues.
Today, Photoshop is not just a photo editing software. It is open to many possibilities for catering services for almost every Industry. Photoshop has a whole bunch of products in itself and several different versions targeted across numerous Industries, which makes it a little distinctive from each other variants and rather complicated sometimes to choose from the range of products available.
If your job primarily focuses on photo editing, you may not need the complete services and tools from Photoshop CS6 or higher versions, which is also costly. You may purchase a Photoshop Elements software pack that fits well within your budget and is intended for photo editing and color-correcting purposes.
In this post, we bring you the variants of Adobe Photoshop software so that you can choose the right version that will work for you.
Adobe Photoshop
Elements are relatively smaller when compared to the other Photoshop variant packs. But, it doesn’t leave the software anywhere behind when it comes to fulfilling the purpose it is intended.
It is a dedicated photo editing software that delivers quick and easy options to obtain clean, color-corrected, and well-edited photographs. The software is intended to help professionals working with digital photographs, front-end corrections, and photographers.
With the help of elements, you can organize, create, edit, and share photographs. Every new feature from the Adobe Labs that falls under the image editing category is shared with Elements. Elements itself has a number of versions of added tools and improved performance.
The best part about purchasing an Adobe Photoshop Element is its pricing. If photography or image editing is your thing, you may enjoy every photo editing tool in PS for just $100, rather than investing a staggering $1000 on Adobe Photoshop Extended versions.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Lightroom must deliver easy workflow in environments where complex file organization is an everyday scenario. The software provides an intuitive workflow in an easy-to-use interface that allows editing huge batches of photographs at one time.
To work on each photograph once at a time is a tedious process that just doesn’t work. If you have to work on an enormous pile of photographs of the same occasion, it is most likely that the files share the same lighting, exposure, and color temperatures as they are all simultaneously shot at the same place. During the initial stages of Photoshop, some photographers used action features to get this job done quickly. But still, the results are not yet fulfilling.
Adobe Photoshop moved a step forward by introducing Lightroom. You can take a bunch of your photographs and play with the color correction tools simultaneously. Color balance, exposure and temperature, and more can be edited for the whole batch of files simultaneously. Other tools like noise reduction and sharpening can apply to the batch while working on one photograph.
Lightroom’s ability to control the shadows and highlights is incredible! You can create Photo books and albums and extract and edit high-quality images from video files through Lightroom. The complexity of batch processing has been made easy with Lightroom, which makes it one of the best tools a professional Photo studio should have. And the price tag of Adobe Lightroom is just under $150.
Photoshop CS6
Adobe Photoshop cs6 has everything you want for photo editing, print, and graphic design. It gives you the total power of all Adobe software combined with unparalleled control over images and design.
Besides the control, you gain on white balancing, color correction, exposure, and all related to the photo correction process. Many other tools can help you edit and design the documents you need. The creative freedom users gain from these tools is limitless. You may even remove a person or a group from an image, which is impossible in packages like Lightroom or Extension. You can create graphics and FX with the help of unique designing tools that Photoshop CS6 offers. The filters catered in the Filter menu are the complete list which you will find only in the CS6 package.
Overall, Adobe Photoshop CS6 greatly differs in graphic designing, Photo editing, and correcting verticals. But it is not the ultimate on the list.
Photoshop Extended
Adobe Photoshop Extended is the end of the road, the comprehensive product from the Adobe factory in the Photoshop conveyer. Adobe has taken giant leaps in designing products that come to the use of many businesses. And Photoshop Extended is one software that gives unprecedented access to every Industry.
Adobe Photoshop Extended has powerful tools that help users create and edit three dimensions imagery. The benefits don’t stop here. You can also import the fully designed three-dimensional object files from third-party software like Maya and 3DS MAX and paint or texture them in Photoshop. Some of the many advantages of Photoshop Extended are below
-
3D object creation and extrusion
The two-dimensional screen in Photoshop can be converted to three dimensions. You may create objects in 3D or enhance and edit the three-dimensional content with the ease of working on a 2D platform. The workflow is very easy, and you need not use 3D software to create objects with minimum detail.
-
Advanced Editing
Before Adobe introduced the 3D editing options, texturing artists had a great problem bringing UV files into Photoshop and drawing the textures. It was impossible to check the result instantaneously in the 3D mode, and designers had to save and load the texture in 3D software to check every bit of it.
With Advanced 3D editing techniques in Photoshop, you can directly open the 3D object and start painting on it. The best part with live painting is that you need not wait for the final result to render in the 3D software, as you will experience the final product at the time of your texturing in Adobe Photoshop. It saves a lot of time and gives ease to fixing troubles quickly. You can also illuminate your Photoshop artboard with lighting and 3D shadow and reflections and further animate the objects with responsive lighting effects.
-
Mercury Graphic Engine
Adobe Photoshop Extended allows you to choose the frame of an Animation that you can run on Photoshop and select the facial expressions rigged inside the 3D software. The process is highly demanding and needs a powerful Graphic card and rendering engine.
Photoshop uses the state-of-the-art Mercury Graphic Engine to render the Three Dimensional objects in Photoshop to fulfill the purpose. It is exclusively put to use when you import a 3D object that is animated into your Photoshop.
-
3D Image analysis
Adobe Photoshop Extended enables the designers to obtain advanced measurement and counting tools to get the mandatory information in 3 Dimensions. You can record and export the information for further checking.
Some features like Video, and motion-based editing, which were initially available in Extended versions, have been recently made available in Photoshop CS6 versions.
Adobe Photoshop Touch apps
Adobe doesn’t want to distance itself from the enthusiasts who may not add money to their company but love to use the products and follow the company as a loyalty partner. For not so professionals people and common crowds connected through endless communication devices like smartphones, iPads, and Tablets, Adobe designed a set of free apps that you can use to correct your photographs or design basic-level graphics.
Photoshop opens the doors to encourage creative freedom for people who want a go one step ahead of what they can achieve from their gadgets photography.
-
Adobe Photoshop Mix
The app is fun and easy to bring creativity to the touch screen. Users can download it for free, play with cutting the images as per their requirement, and combine them with another set of images in new files.
The preset FX is readily available in the app and helps change the color and tone of the images instantly with one touch. Users can also share the images instantly on social media through the app.
-
Photoshop Sketch
There are a number of sketching apps for free out there on iOS and Android platforms. Adobe Photoshop Sketch is surely not one among the crowd. The free app can help you to draw or trace photographs using high-quality vector graphics. But it is not all it offers. You can take your work from Photoshop Sketch to Photoshop and start working on it from your desktop computer.
With fingertip scribbling, the Sketch tool can help you draw complex shapes easily. It also helps to add impressive shading to the images with its soft brushes.
-
Adobe Brush CC
Brush CC helps Adobe users create custom brushes out of everything. Suppose you come across an image that you may find interesting as a brush, take a picture and turn it into a custom-made brush. You can choose to create the brush for mobile usage or in Photoshop or Illustrator brush formats. So you may save it for your future use.
The app is helpful for amateur designers to use on their apps and professionals to share the brushes on the creative cloud and use them anywhere they intend to.
-
Photoshop Express
Everybody wants to take nice and memorable pictures with their mobile cams. Unfortunately, not everyone is a professional photographer, and no phone has a great camera like an SLR. But don’t worry. Photoshop is more powerful with the free Photoshop Express tool.
You can edit your images with the crop, resize, rotate, flip, red-eye removal, and color adjustments tools and features. Standard color correction tools such as hue saturation, brightness and contrast, white balance, and many more are also available and easy to adjust on a slide control.
The super cool pre-loaded color templates are also at the end of your fingertip to quickly choose and apply the effects to the images.
Finally, the borders and frames are also available by default to enhance the look of your final image.
Choosing a version of Photoshop is important to improve and fasten your workflow. Adobe knows your requirements and shipped the essential tool that every Industry needs independently in the above packages. We hope you are able to make out your pack of Photoshop that suits well with your requirement.
