Adobe Photoshop CC 2023 Review: Still the Best Photo Editor for Pros

As the go-to photo editing software for countless artists, designers, and photographers, Adobe Photoshop hardly needs an introduction. For over three decades, Photoshop‘s powerful tools have made it the industry standard for professional-level image manipulation, compositing, retouching, and graphic design. The latest 2023 release of Photoshop CC introduced impressive AI-powered features and continued performance optimizations to keep the king of photo editors firmly on its throne.

While the core experience remains familiar, Photoshop CC 2023 packs even more advanced capabilities under the hood to help you achieve stunning results faster than ever before. Whether you‘re a photographer enhancing images, a graphic designer creating compositions, or a digital painter starting from a blank canvas, no other program offers Photoshop‘s vast tool set and uncompromising editing power. Let‘s dive in and see why Photoshop still reigns supreme.

Fully Customizable User Interface

Photoshop greets you with a clean, dark UI designed to let your images take center stage without distractions. But behind this simple first impression lies a highly customizable interface that can adapt to suit your specific workflow and the task at hand.

Adobe understands that the key to working efficiently in a program as deep as Photoshop is having quick access to the tools and commands you need for the job. That‘s why Photoshop offers a variety of task-oriented "workspaces" that re-arrange the interface and panel layouts to put relevant tools front and center, with presets for photography, graphic design, web design, 3D modeling, and more.

But these presets are just a starting point. You can personalize your workspace by rearranging, resizing, adding or removing panels and then saving your custom layout. This flexibility to mold the interface around your needs is one of Photoshop‘s greatest strengths, making it feel tailored to you rather than forcing you to adapt to it.

Photoshop 2023 introduces an updated Home Screen with quick access to recent files, built-in tutorials, and a central search bar to help you quickly find tools, menu commands, and help content. This gives newcomers a more welcoming entry point to learn Photoshop without disrupting the familiar workflow for seasoned pros.

Unrivaled Photo Editing Power

When it comes to retouching and transforming photos, nothing else comes close to Photoshop‘s vast assortment of professional-grade editing tools. Photoshop‘s layer-based, non-destructive editing paradigm provides immense flexibility and creative control, while the fine-grained masking, selection, and retouching tools enable you to make targeted adjustments with finesse.

For general photo enhancements, the Camera Raw filter puts a full-featured RAW development tool right inside Photoshop, with intuitive controls for tweaking exposure, contrast, color balance, sharpening, noise reduction, lens corrections, and much more. It‘s great for editing photos and RAW adjustments non-destructively.

Anyone who works with portraits will appreciate advanced retouching tools like Content-Aware Fill for seamless object removal, AI-powered neural filters for subtle skin smoothing and face sculpting, and the Healing Brush and Patch Tool for cleaning up blemishes and distractions. Photoshop is also unmatched for compositing multiple photos together, thanks to its advanced auto-align and auto-blend features, powerful masking options, and comprehensive layer blending modes.

Photoshop continues to push the envelope with AI-enhanced tools powered by Adobe Sensei, the company‘s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. In Photoshop 2023, an improved Select Subject tool can automatically detect and create selection masks around people, animals, vehicles, and other distinct objects with just a single click, even in complex scenes. This turns previously tedious masking tasks into quick work.

Other AI-driven additions include a new Photo Restoration Neural Filter for reviving old and damaged photos, a Landscape Mixer for creating new scenes from multiple landscape photos, and an updated Colorize filter that can add realistic color to black and white photos in seconds. Adobe has also been gradually porting over web-based AI tools from Photoshop on the Web, such as the Remove Background and Replace Sky commands, making these one-click edits fully integrated into the Photoshop desktop experience.

While AI features help to accelerate certain editing tasks and open up new creative avenues, they don‘t replace the need for fine-grained controls and editing finesse. Thankfully, Photoshop still provides a full suite of manual editing tools that give you total control, letting AI assist your workflow rather than take over completely.

A Powerful Platform for Digital Art

Although Photoshop is primarily known as a photo editor, it also shines as a digital painting tool capable of producing professional illustrations, concept art, and designs from scratch. Photoshop boasts an incredibly deep brush engine that lets you customize every aspect of a brush‘s size, shape, texture, flow, scatter, and dynamics to achieve the perfect look and feel.

With a graphics tablet, painting in Photoshop delivers a fluid and natural experience akin to traditional media, with pen pressure and tilt controlling the brush strokes in real time. There‘s an endless assortment of custom brush packs you can download or even create your own to mimic everything from oil paint and watercolors to inking pens and charcoal.

While not quite as purpose-built for digital painting as dedicated art programs like Corel Painter or Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop holds its own impressively well and offers some unique advantages. The same powerful layering, masking, transformation, filters and effects that make Photoshop a compositing powerhouse also provide digital artists immense non-destructive flexibility for tweaking and fusing different elements in an art piece.

The latest 2023 release brought a boost to painting performance, with up to a 2x faster brush speed on large canvases when using a stylus. So you can paint in Photoshop without worrying about lag breaking your creative flow.

Seamless Creative Cloud Integration

In the age of multi-device workflows and remote collaboration, Photoshop‘s integration with Adobe‘s Creative Cloud ecosystem is a major advantage. With a Creative Cloud subscription, your Photoshop files can automatically sync across your computers and mobile devices, ensuring you always have access to the latest versions.

The Cloud Documents feature lets you save files directly to Adobe‘s cloud servers instead of your local drive, making them accessible from anywhere and shareable with collaborators. Saving large, complex Photoshop projects as Cloud Documents is a great way to back up your work without tying up local storage. It also enables seamless hand-off between Photoshop on desktop and the Photoshop and Fresco mobile apps on iPad, so you can keep creating on the go.

Other useful perks of the Creative Cloud include an extensive library of Adobe Fonts that you can sync to your computer for use in Photoshop and other apps, an Asset Library for organizing and sharing design elements like graphics, colors, and styles across different projects and apps, and integration with Adobe Stock for licensing photos, illustrations, and video clips without leaving Photoshop.

Of course, the value of these ecosystem benefits depends on how invested you are in Adobe‘s app suite as a whole. But considering many photographers already rely on Lightroom and designers frequently use Illustrator and InDesign alongside Photoshop, the Creative Cloud integrations add up to a smoother and more unified workflow.

Performance Optimizations

As the resolution of digital photos continues to grow and designers push the boundaries of multi-layered, effects-heavy Photoshop compositions, performance becomes increasingly important. Fortunately, Adobe keeps pace by steadily optimizing Photoshop to take advantage of the latest advances in computer hardware.

On high-resolution displays, Photoshop‘s interface elements now render crisp and sharp by default, no longer requiring you to dive into settings menus to enable high-DPI scaling. For MacBook Pro users, Photoshop supports the Touch Bar to give quick tap access to contextual tool and layer controls.

More significantly, Adobe has been building out Photoshop‘s support for hardware acceleration, tapping into the power of modern GPUs to speed up graphically intensive operations. On high-end systems, many filters, effects, and AI-powered neural filters now process significantly faster thanks to GPU acceleration.

Photoshop can intelligently allocate resources between CPU and GPU to avoid bogging down your system, even with many large files open. Even if you‘re not rocking the latest $6000 workstation, optimizations for memory management and caching help keep Photoshop running smoothly as you push the limits of layer count and file size.

In hands-on use, all this translates to a fluid and responsive feel as you retouch photos, paint with complex brush strokes, and build up elaborate multi-layered designs. Whether you‘re working with ultra-high-res photos, 3D objects, or advanced neural filters, Photoshop makes the most of your hardware to keep lag and sluggishness at bay.

Other workflow-smoothing additions include a new Background Save option that prevents the save dialog from halting your work, more efficient masking behaviors for selecting and scrolling, and native Apple M1 support for new Macs.

Learning Resources

There‘s no denying that Photoshop has a steeper learning curve than more basic image editors. The sheer depth of tools and options makes it challenging for beginners to know where to start. And even experienced users can struggle to keep up with new features and workflow enhancements added in each release.

Thankfully, Photoshop‘s popularity means there‘s no shortage of tutorials and learning content to help you get up to speed and master new skills. Adobe provides an extensive library of tutorials and guides right within the Photoshop, easily accessible from the Home Screen and Learn panel. For more in-depth training, check out Adobe‘s own library of video courses taught by expert instructors.

Third-party training academies like Lynda.com and Udemy offer a wealth of Photoshop video courses aimed at everyone from total beginners to advanced users looking to hone professional-level retouching and compositing skills. And the wider creative community creates countless high-quality Photoshop tutorials on YouTube and educational blogs like PSD Stack and Photoshop Essentials.

The bottom line is that while Photoshop takes effort to learn and truly master, you‘ll never have a shortage of resources and support to guide your journey. Like learning a musical instrument or foreign language, the key is regular practice and application of new concepts until they become second nature. But if you‘re willing to put in the time, the creative possibilities are practically limitless.

Pricing and Availability

Adobe Photoshop CC 2023 is available for Windows and macOS exclusively as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. The most affordable way to get Photoshop is the Photography plan, which bundles it with Lightroom for $9.99 per month with 20GB of cloud storage or $19.99 per month with 1TB. Students and teachers can get the bundle for a discounted $19.99 per month.

You can also get Photoshop alone in a single-app plan for $20.99 per month, or as part of the complete Creative Cloud suite with all of Adobe‘s creative apps for $52.99 per month (or $19.99 per month for the student/teacher edition).

Compared to the old days when a perpetual Photoshop license cost north of $699, the subscription plans offer a more affordable entry point, at least for the first few years. The upside is you‘re always entitled to the latest features and updates without paying for pricey upgrades. That said, some users still prefer the simplicity of a one-and-done purchase to avoid recurring subscription fees.

To see if Photoshop is right for you, check out the 7-day free trial, which gives you a chance to test-drive the full version without restrictions.

The Verdict

Adobe Photoshop started the digital image editing revolution over 30 years ago, and it just keeps getting better. The latest 2023 version introduces powerful AI-driven capabilities that can dramatically speed up previously tedious editing tasks, while classic tools like layer masks, adjustment layers, healing brushes, and the pen tool see continued refinements to keep them best-in-class.

Once you factor in the vast universe of learning content, third-party plugins, Photoshop Actions, and custom brushes, Photoshop becomes not just a photo editor, but a creative platform limited only by your skills and imagination.

While alternatives like Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro offer a solid subset of features at lower price points, none can match the depth, ecosystem, and community of Photoshop. Adobe‘s juggernaut remains the professional‘s choice for demanding photo editing and retouching needs.

So if you‘re a photographer, designer, or digital artist looking for uncompromising imaging power and control, Photoshop is still the app to beat. The learning curve is real, but well worth it for the creative possibilities Photoshop can open up. And with Adobe now supporting Apple Silicon Macs and constantly enhancing performance, you can be sure Photoshop will remain an industry pillar for years to come. The king stays king.