Zoner has been developing photo editing software for over three decades, and Zoner Studio features a comprehensive photo workflow and image editing tools that rival those of Adobe's flagship programs. It organizes a complete range of adjustments, corrections, and effects into an easy-to-use, tabbed interface, and we like that a subscription provides online storage and the ability to create shareable galleries of your work. Decent output and printing options enhance the overall experience. Our biggest complaint is that it doesn't offer as many cutting-edge tools as Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, which, respectively, remain our Editors' Choice winners for photo workflow and manipulation.

Pricing: An Affordable Subscription

Zoner Studio is available only via subscription. The good news is that it costs just $5.99 per month or $59 per year. A subscription includes 20GB of cloud storage, online galleries, and 15 photo prints per year. Zoner doesn't limit the number of computers on which you can install it, whereas Adobe restricts you to two machines with its software. If your subscription lapses, you will lose access to most of the program's functions, but you will retain the ability to view and export your photos. A full-featured, 7-day trial is available.

For comparison, you pay $11.99 per month for both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic or $19.99 to add Photoshop (all with an annual commitment). If you don't want to deal with a subscription at all, consider ACDSee Photo Studio ($109.95), Capture One ($329), CyberLink PhotoDirector ($99.99), DxO PhotoLab ($239.99), or Skylum Luminar Neo ($417).

If you're looking for a low-cost alternative to Photoshop, consider Photopea, which offers a free version and charges just $5 per month for its paid version. It's a web app, meaning you can use it on any computer with a browser.

What's New in Zoner Studio?

Zoner Studio receives updates twice a year, in the spring and fall. As with most photo editing software, the latest updates primarily focus on generative AI. Here's the rundown of the major updates:

• AI Close-Ups. I haven't seen anything like this culling tool in other photo software. It uses AI to automatically zoom into the important part of the image (such as a bird), saving you from having to do so yourself. It's particularly of interest to me as a bird photographer, but should also appeal to product, sports, wedding, and any other type of photographer who works with many photos of the same scene.
• AI Masking. This tool automatically selects and masks the background, an object, the sky, or the subject.
• AI Resize. Zoner claims that this upscaling feature's new "reconstructive interpolation" yields more natural images and calls out its quick performance.
• Collages for Instagram. These work for your carousels, feed, and stories. You can also use them for Facebook, YouTube, and more.
• Color range and luminance range masking. These catch the software up with capabilities that Adobe's software has had for several years. In addition to creating masks based on color range and brightness, you can combine masks from these tools with the aforementioned AI-produced ones.
• Lights Clarity and Shadows Clarity. You can use these tools to brighten eyes and hair in portraits or to add texture to fine details.
• Multi-canvas printing. The Print feature can divide a photo for printing on multiple surfaces.
• Photo book layouts. Lightroom Classic has had this capability for many years, and you will certainly appreciate it if you make books from your photos. It features drag-and-drop functionality and a filmstrip view.
• Split view. This is a feature dear to my heart, as I like to compare a photo before and after edits. It works both horizontally and vertically.
• Support for HEIF and HEVC formats. These high-efficiency formats are standard with modern camera phones.
• Video and audio editing. You can now separate the soundtrack of a clip and take advantage of keyframes.

Previous updates added HDR and LUT capability and support for more lens correction profiles. Perhaps most notably, the company has eliminated most of the sluggishness and instability that plagued older versions.

System Requirements: Windows Only

Zoner Studio runs on 64-bit Windows 10 and Windows 11. You need a minimum of 8GB of RAM and a 1,280-by-800-pixel display. No macOS version is available. Its requirements are lower than those of Adobe Lightroom, which takes up about 3GB of disk space compared with Zoner's 1.5GB. Considering the latter can replace both Lightroom and Photoshop (which adds about another 3GB), that's a real disk space savings.

During the setup, you choose a language, though some major world languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, and French, are missing. Upon the first run, the program encourages you to sign up for an online Zoner account. It makes sense to do so, since that's how you get your 20GB of cloud storage and set up online galleries.

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Without prompting, the program shows your photos from the Photos folder. On startup, the program shows a notification box linking to "Your Photo Inspiration for the week," updates, and other messages.

Interface and Ease of Use: Browser-Like Tabs

Zoner's interface is visually pleasing and flexible. It has an efficient layout for organizing and editing photos, though tabs and layers can sometimes make it more complex than programs like Lightroom and Skylum Luminar Neo. Tabs for separate images across the top are reminiscent of those in web browsers—you can even hit Alt-Forward and Back Arrow to move back and forth between views in a tab.

As with most other photo apps, Zoner uses a dark gray interface by default, letting your photos take center stage. You can change it to a darker or lighter look. The left panel gives access to source material, be it on your hard drive, in your Zoner catalog, on a smartphone, on Facebook, or on OneDrive. I appreciate that you can hide this panel with one click on a triangle icon, as you can in Lightroom Classic.

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The photo thumbnails take up the large center section of the screen, and a right-side panel switches among Manager, Develop, Editor, Print, and Video modes. Editor mode supports layers, while Develop will be familiar to photographers who use Lightroom's identically named mode. Print is for both local printing and print service orders. You don't have to switch from Developer mode to Manager mode to browse your image collection. You can just tap the Browser button at the top.

You zoom in and out with a simple mouse-wheel spin or buttons that instantly take you to 100%, Fit, or Fit Shorter Side. Double-clicking on an image conveniently takes you back to the thumbnail grid view of your photo collection. I'm happy to report that double-clicking on adjustment sliders now resets the adjustment, as it does in Lightroom and Capture One. A curved back arrow appears when you change a slider, but it undoes all adjustments in the group—not the most helpful option. All your undoable actions show up in a dropdown menu when you click the down arrow next to the curved arrow, righting the program's previous lack of a history panel.

Compare view for multiple images now works in Develop mode as well as in Manager. You can customize which control sets appear in Develop, which cleans up the interface of things you don't use much.

The Full View button takes your photo to full-screen mode, and when you nudge the sides of the screen with the cursor, the editing panels fly out, which is clever. That said, it's less elegant than some products that float the adjustment panels over the full-screen image, such as DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Lightroom Classic. Yet another full-screen viewer lets you step through your images unencumbered by interface elements, though moving the cursor to the bottom reveals a navigation toolbar.

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You can customize which toolbar buttons appear in each of the five modes, but you can't customize the modes that display. For example, if you never use Video mode, you still have to live with that mode selector being ever-present at the top right.

Importing and Organizing: Better Than Most

You don't need to import photos to Zoner, since you can open any image file on your system from the folder tree, but the app has an Import button at the bottom of the Manager panel to get photos off an SD card. You can copy or move at import, and automatically apply naming and keyword tags. You can now apply effects, such as auto-corrections, at import. If you don't import a photo, but instead open it from the folder structure, you can view either a Fast or Full Quality preview. The latter, as you might expect, takes a bit longer to load.

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The search box, just above the source list, lets you search any text in the photo file and filter based on format (RAW, JPEG, or other), rating, color label, or GPS coordinates. You can't, however, filter by camera model or lens, or use AI-powered object search like in Lightroom.

Any workflow app designed for serious digital photographers can import and work with raw camera files, since it gives you more correction possibilities. Try recovering a blown-out sky from a JPG, and you get nowhere. Zoner recently updated its raw processing, creating custom DCP (DNG Camera Profile) files for popular camera bodies. I was impressed with its updated raw conversion, though I still find that Lightroom and Capture One provide more detail and lifelike colors, as in the example of a Tropical Kingbird below. Zoner's result is on the left, while Lightroom's is on the right. The breast feathers next to the wing on the left show more detail in the Adobe conversion:

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And this portrait of my niece shows Zoner (left) coming very close to Lightroom (right):

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And here's one more bird comparison, a White-crowned Pigeon from an island off Colombia. If Lightroom has any advantage, it's very, very slight:

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At the bottom of the photo view in Zoner, star ratings, color labels, and a delete trash icon appear when the mouse is over the photo. There's a reject button but no pick button, oddly. The keyword tagging tool is a basic text-entry box, with none of Lightroom's presets and keyword memory features. Additionally, you don't get any face recognition features like the ones in Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector. Other organization options I like are missing, too, such as the ability to view the last import batch and to view recently edited photos.

The Location view entry on the left panel uses embedded GPS data to show photos shot in specific locales, but only for those you add to a catalog. You can also select a folder or group of images and drag them onto a map to apply location data.

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The software supports newer raw formats, like those from Canon's and Nikon's recent mirrorless cameras. Zoner says it supports all "well-known full-frame mirrorless cameras." Still, I got an "unsupported" message that recommended converting to DNG using Adobe's conversion tool for an image file from a recent Sony model. I could view the images, even at a large size, but not adjust them in the Develop mode.

AI Close-Ups

Zoner Studio's use of AI subject recognition to help you cull photos is a unique tool. The idea is that, while you're going through a day's worth of photos, you don't have to manually zoom in on the important part to see which of a group of similar shots is best. You can choose to zoom in on animals, airplanes, birds, faces, people, and vehicles, as well as combine any categories. Magnification levels of 100%, 150%, or 200% are available.

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In testing, this feature worked impressively well. It can save bird photographers a significant amount of time and effort while culling through photo sessions, and even identify out-of-focus images or those with poor exposure. I also tested it on people shots, and the tool zoomed in on faces without issue. If a photo includes more than one face, you get a tile view of each.

HDR Support: All You Probably Need

Zoner can display HDR images on monitors capable of this type of content. (Adobe Lightroom added this capability recently, as well.) HDR view works in both the Manage and Develop modes, but not in Editor mode. You don't need an HDR format like AVIF or JPEG XL (JXL); you can use raw camera files to create HDR images. Though it's not possible to show you the Differences between SDR and HDR editing on a web page like this, when I enabled HDR for an image from my Canon EOS R7, I noticed a distinct difference between the modes, with hardware showing a bluer sky and brighter highlights. Here you can see the hardware controls. Note also that, like in Lightroom, you get a wider histogram that clearly shows the HDR content, and you can do SDR previews of your HDR edits.

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When you go to export your edited HDR image, you can use those formats that natively support HDR, such as AVIF, HEIF, and JXL.

Image Adjustments: The Full Panoply

Zoner's Develop panel has the full panoply of photo adjustment tools, particularly as it concerns color. You can expand and collapse panels for color, exposure, color shift, noise reduction, sharpness, white balance, and more. The Color Shift tool lets you change the color you sample in your photo using an eyedropper. You also get Clarity and Dehaze sliders in the Exposure section, a single-shot HDR tool, Vignetting, and a Grain option in the Effect section.

The Clarity tool goes beyond what you get in Lightroom, with Lights Clarity and Shadows Clarity options. I appreciate this, since Lightroom's equivalent tool tends to overly exaggerate contrast and black levels. Increasing the Lights Clarity has a very subtle effect, mostly on light backgrounds, whereas increasing the Shadows Clarity brought out hair color in a dark photo with a bright face.

An eyedropper tool in the Hue correction shows a line on the image you can slide back and forth to change the hue of pixels in the selected color range. You can limit the range of this tool to, say, blue hues for the sky. For more detailed work, the Advance panel shows a color wheel with several control points, letting you extend or constrict the range of affected colors. The outer ring represents the new color that the selected range will take.

The Tone Curve panel lets you choose as many points as you want and select RGB, Luma, or primary colors. Color Shift is an unusual tool with Basic and Advanced Tabs, the latter of which sports an adjustable color wheel.

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Shift Primary Colors is simpler, with Hue and Saturation sliders for Red, Green, and Blue.

The Auto correction button works as well as in any photo app, and a slew of presets let you apply corrections and effects in one shot. The presets show you the color and light settings they change, so you could use them as a starting point for your own effects. Auto correction worked much faster than the last time I tested it.

The crop tool is good. It lets you either bring the crop in from the edges or start a new crop by drawing inside the image preview. The same tool lets you rotate, but there's no auto horizon detection as you get in Lightroom. Perspective Crop distorts an image based on where you mark the crop corners, for example, straightening out a non-horizontal horizon. A Smart button detects prominent lines in the image and straightens them accordingly. It worked impressively well in my test shot:

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The program does include camera and lens-profile-based corrections, and it detected my Canon EOS 6D and Sigma 150-600mm lens automatically. It found the profile for an older T3i with an EF-S18-55 lens after hitting "Detect automatically." It's also possible to upload lens profiles. You can get them from Canon's free DNG conversion tools, or if you have an Adobe app installed, you can find them in the C:\Program Files\Adobe\[program name]\Resources\LensProfiles folder. Even doing so, however, didn't yield as good a chromatic aberration reduction and geometry corrections as I got with Lightroom or DxO PhotoLab.

Noise reduction consists of two sliders, Luminance and Colors. They work acceptably, though I miss the excellent automatic option found in other software like DxO PhotoLab or Topaz Photo AI. Lightroom recently got automatic denoising, too, which works in a pinch but can't compete with the standalone denoisers.

In addition to the barrel-distortion correction in the Lens set of adjustments (which couldn't fully correct a fisheye distortion for me), you can straighten the horizon with the Straighten Lines sliders. You can add several alignment lines, both vertical and horizontal.

A good selection of presets is at your disposal, including adjustments for the photo type—landscape, portrait, high-key, low-key, and so on—as well as color and black-and-white enhancements. It's not quite as full a collection as the effects in Exposure and Skylum Luminar Neo, but what's there looks impressive:

Local Adjustments, Layers, and Effects: AI Makes a Difference

Most pro workflow apps include local adjustments such as spot repair, and many now come with content-aware tools that let you remove or copy objects while maintaining the background. Zoner's new AI masking tools and support for color and light range masking beef up these capabilities.

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Zoner includes a Retouching brush, a Smoothing brush, and a Filter brush, along with gradient and radial filters. If you head over to the Edit tab of the right-side panel, you also get red-eye removal, Liquify, drawing tools, text tools, and a tilt-shift effect.

You can use any adjustment locally on a selection in Zoner Studio, including all the lighting, color, and even denoising tools.

Though the software supports editing in multiple layers, it neither imports nor exports Photoshop PSD files, but instead uses its own ZPS format.

AI Mask Selections

The latest version of Zoner Studio offers improved selection tools. It still offers the traditional, Photoshop-like Magic Wand, along with shapes and Magnetic Lasso. New are the color range and luminance range masking tools.

The more exciting news is that Zoner now has AI-powered selections. The software can identify and mask the background, objects, the sky, and the subject. In testing, it did a good job of identifying and selecting even fine details, whether strands of hair in a portrait or trees on the horizon. You can control how the selection appears from the mask icon, making it red or checkered. But the AI mask settings go deeper; you can hide or invert the mask from its nearby controls, and the mask button lets you switch among the red subject selection and the blue background selection tint (which is somewhat unhelpful for sky selection).

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After you make a selection, you can remove an object or apply effects to it, but not replace it with the background in a content-aware way. The Clone Stamp tool lets you remove an object, as does the Fill with Surroundings tool, but those work well only with a regular background texture. Neither is like the Firefly generative AI tools in Adobe's software. Unlike Adobe's software, Zoner Studio doesn't have AI tools that generate imagery from text prompts. Still, that won't interest you if you're just trying to make your images look the best that they can.

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The Resize tool stretches unimportant areas in the photo. You can mark parts you don't want stretched, like faces or other recognizable objects, like the heron in the image above. The Resize tool also lets you remove marked objects from the result with the minus brush. It's harder to use than equivalent tools in Adobe software, and it takes a long time to produce hit-and-miss results.

The above is not to be confused with the AI Resize tool, which is for upscaling. It's accessible in both Manager and Edit modes. You have two choices with this tool: Generative and Reconstructive Interpolation. The former is better for graphics, and the latter is better for photos. Generative takes longer (20 seconds in my testing) and can blur noise and fine detail. Despite that recommendation, I found the Generative result better on my test photo. Each picture below shows the original next on the left next to the AI-resized version. The first one below uses the Reconstructive tool, and the next one uses the Generative one:

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For face detail smoothing, the Smoothing Brush works well:

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The Liquefy tools go deeper than I expected. They can automatically identify facial features and modify them. For example, you can slim cheeks, raise jaws, and enlarge eyes. For me, these tools are more fun than useful, though maybe nipping and tucking is more prevalent in photo portraiture than I think.

Finally, one fun effect is Lens Flare, which is highly configurable:

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Video Editing: Surprisingly Deep

Like Lightroom, Zoner can do some video editing, and it goes beyond Lightroom in this realm. A Video mode button at the top right lets you create projects by joining clips. You get a single-track timeline and can adjust brightness and color. You can split clips, and even add text title overlays and apply a choice of seven transitions. New capabilities for this module include keyframing and adjusting playback speed. The program even has a decent set of transitions for your digital movies. Zoner also now allows you to copy clips, objects, and text between video projects.

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Performance: Getting Better

As noted, Zoner has become a lot more responsive with recent updates, especially in loading raw files and performing advanced edits. Its import speed is as good as any other photo app, too. As with most programs, Zoner makes you wait a bit for generative AI features to complete. Interestingly, the program includes a photo benchmark to evaluate your PC's nimbleness at working with photos.

Sharing and Output: Good Options for Digital and Print

The program doesn't include a prominent output button like most of its competitors do, but its options are generous for this stage of the workflow. As mentioned above, you can output not only to the standard JPG, TIFF, and PNG, but also to newer HDR-capable formats, such as AVIF and JXL. You also get color-space choices, handy for pro printing. Metadata, resizing, sharpening, and compression options are also at your fingertips during export.

Zoner's Print tab gives you drag-and-drop templates for photo books, calendars, canvas prints, collages, standard photo prints, magnets, and contact sheets. Layout options are strong. With the Book tool, you can flow all the pictures in at once and perform Develop edits while working on your book. From within the program, you can order photo books, calendars, standard prints, and canvas prints. One cool option is to have a service print and even mail your postcards for you!

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Cloud Services: Show Off Your Work

Zoner has two cloud services: Zoner Photo Cloud, which is simple online photo storage, and Zonerama, an online gallery. Every user of the software gets 20GB of online storage on Photo Cloud, and Zonerama gives you unlimited storage for free. You access both within the program as another folder in the left-side Navigator pane. Zonerama is similar to Flickr in that you can discover other photographers' work as well as showcase your own. You get a URL in the form yourname.zonerama.com with named subfolders, and the site can play slideshows—including in full-screen. You can designate folders as public or private. The presentation isn't quite as slick as Adobe Portfolio, however.

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Uploading to Zonerama from within the program could be more straightforward. As it is, you have to choose Publish > Upload to Zonerama, and then, in a split window, drag the local images onto the Zonerama area—as long as the file format and folder type permit it. Once your gallery's on Zonerama, sharing to Facebook or Twitter (but not Instagram) is a one-click operation, via a link to the hosted image. Like Apple's iCloud Photos, Zoner lets you create shared galleries on Zonerama, in which everyone is invited to the party of contributing (but not editing) photos.