Image editors are a dime a dozen and are available on most platforms but one name stands out among the rest: Photoshop. In fact, Photoshop is so dominant that the very name itself has become synonymous with video editing, similar to how Google is synonymous with web search and Kleenex is with tissues. The reason I’m writing about this is because king of the image editing world has turned 25 today. 

These days there are a lot of image editors to choose from, and they run on computers, the web, smartphones and tablets. Whatever your price range you’ll find one to suit. For me, however, there’s really only one photo editor, and that’s Photoshop. I’ve been relying on it for work and home image editing for a good 15 years (probably longer) and while I’ve used other rival packages, I always end up returning to Adobe’s powerful suite. As an example, for the past few weeks I’ve been scanning in hundreds of old photos, slides and negatives. Removing dust, scratches and other flaws and rebuilding missing areas in all those has only been manageable thanks to brilliant time-saving Photoshop innovations like layers, the healing brush and content aware fill. Photoshop is, without question, my favorite program — bar none.