Zoner Studio

I mainly photograph landscapes and street photo, so I expect both speed and intuitiveness from a photo editing program. Zoner Studio turned out to be one of the best, multifunctional editors I have ever used. It meets all my needs and offers features I was missing in other applications. Strengths

• Intuitiveness and responsiveness – the program loads in just three seconds and is ready to work. Slider response is instant, and switching between modules takes only a fraction of a second.
• Photo organization – Zoner recognizes keywords previously assigned in Lightroom, allows stacking photos, and offers fast searching. The map module and geotagging work quickly, enabling filtering by country or city.
• Editing and export – editing photos is simple, and exporting to the Zonerama service makes sharing easy. Zonerama is a cloud-based photo gallery platform directly built into the program. Creating a gallery is as simple as copying photos into the designated folder within Zoner Photo Studio, and they are instantly available online.
• AI Auto and presets – if you don’t know where to start editing, just press AI Auto. The results are excellent and sufficient for most photos. If you want to experiment, you can choose from over 200 presets. Remarkably, all presets together take only 760KB of disk space – that’s amazing. Applying presets is fast, and you can also create your own, even based on AI masks. These masks can select the subject, background, sky, or any object. And if you were annoyed in Adobe/LR by the halo on the horizon when the AI mask darkened the sky, don’t worry – Zoner offers smooth control over mask range and transitions.
• Integration and convenience – Zoner behaves as if it were integrated with Windows, supports Loupedeck, and allows opening any module in separate tabs.
• Price and support – the subscription cost is incredibly affordable, and technical support is at a high level. User experience Zoner allows browsing photos even without connecting a RAW disk, and the Develop module has its own browser. Transferring edits between computers is as simple as copying one small configuration file. Testing HDR on large files, I achieved results better than in Lightroom without tedious slider adjustments. This shows how thoughtful and refined the program is.

Zoner Studio is an absolutely brilliant tool – intuitive, fast, responsive, and well-designed. For a landscape and street photographer like me, it has become the natural choice and a reasonable replacement for Lightroom and Photoshop. The only downside is the subscription model, but at this price and with these capabilities, the program is worth every dollar. It’s no surprise it won the TIPA award for best photo software – I only regret not discovering it earlier.

What can I say, it's gotta be one of the best all in one photo editors out there. For my purposes it does everything I need, yes it could have a few more features but you can say that about any photo editor out there. I love how you can edit a photo and just export to Zonerama, a beautiful photo sharing site. A site that you can upload unlimited photo in full resolution for free and you can even edit the photo in Zonerama from Zoner Photo Studio and it will make the changes to your photo in Zonerama, how great is that. Zoner Photo Studio is also part of a great photo community. Zoner is always sending out great info to you via there magazine. I could go on and on, it's just a great photo editing program.

Reasonably priced and VERY capable. It's not quite Lightroom, which it resembles, but it's close. I purchased it a few months ago and I'm quite happy with it.

Edit: I'll put my latest comments here. Although Zoner Studio is still a 32-bit app, it works very well. My RAW edits are about as good as I get with LRC. It's also faster. Lots of preferences so do read the manual and give it some time. The auto-masking it now has works better, in some ways, than LRC. I can get answers from their tech support folks. Would like a user forum, though.

I'm re-writing this comment from scratch. After giving ZPS some time, I find it's a reasonable replacement for Lightroom Classic given the generous ability to have ZPS installed on an unlimited number of computers (all with your individual, licensed login). As the cost of ZPS is about $60/year compared to LRC's $120/year/computer, the value is undeniable. The feature set is not quite up to LRC's level but it's very close and, as the $savings may be spent of other excellent tools (ie, Photomizer, Luminar Neo, others) to augment ZPS's capabilities, I'm preparing to drop my Adobe subscription. I'll add that ZPS's tech support has been quite responsive and the training videos (at their site and on YT) and articles are very helpful.

Zoner Photo Studio is a terrific product even if you don't consider that its price is less than one third of that of its main competitor Photoshop/Lightroom. Zoner's ease of use is exemplified by the fact that even though I used to have access to Photoshop and Lightroom for free through my work, I happily paid for Zoner Photo Studio from my own pocket because it was so much easier to use. It is a comprehensive package, offering both simple and sophisticated photo editing methods whilst also having excellent cataloguing and metadata editing methods to make your photo collection readily searchable. Add to that its video editing capabilities and it is hard to find anything wrong with it.

I have been using Zoner Photo Studio for many years, as I found it easier to do what I wanted to do than Photoshop and Lightroom. Yes, it was annoying when the pop-up ads came on for the single license version. I hated that. I finally broke down and start the subscription (X) version. They seem to be very active with updates and photo taking and editing tips for their users.