Interview: Zoner Studio on skipping AI photo editing gimmicks | Daily Reports Online
I’ve been a fan of Zoner Studio since first reviewing it in 2025 – it’s a fusion of Lightroom and Photoshop-style tools for photographers, with some compelling advantages over both.
My team recently re-reviewed the photo editing and organizing software, complete with its big summer updates roll-out, where it earned an even higher score for 2026 (read our Zoner Studio review).
I spoke to Zoner’s Thomas Urban to find out what’s new in this Windows-only photo editor, why the devs prefer meaningful features over flashy gimmicks, and how the software handles the messy realities of shooting.
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Adobe has a near-monopoly on creative software. What is the elevator pitch to a photographer who is locked into the Lightroom/Photoshop ecosystem to try Zoner Studio?
Great point, they are a household name. If you want a single interface for all your editing, faster culling and RAW capabilities, not being stuck in a catalog while being able to work with local files if you’d like and all of this for a lower price, then you should try out Zoner Studio.
I hope with time, society as a whole, we make our way back to authentic things that matter
In your summer update, you intentionally avoided “flashy new features you’ll use once a year.” Why do you think so much of the industry is chasing AI gimmicks instead of fixing core editing speed?
Perhaps they think people will find these types of upgrades boring? Maybe the core issues are more difficult to address? And, some of these features like a completely revamped search engine, just aren’t visually that striking, for sure.
When you’ve taken thousands of photographs though and just want to get through the culling in a responsible and effective way with quality metadata and organisation, these less flashy things are going to save your time down the road and your mental state.
It seems the entire world now has the attention span of a few seconds and everyone is fighting for a fraction of your attention, god forbid your undivided attention. It may be that in order to actually present those important features, you need the flashy stuff to catch the attention first.
I hope with time, society as a whole, we make our way back to authentic things that matter, things that last and things we’re proud of because they’re done well.
Most suites force you to lock in your RAW edits before moving to layers. What’s the practical advantage of keeping a photographer’s entire pipeline inside a single workspace?
Photo editing should match that fun and complement this process instead of being a chore
Simplicity. We all started this whole photography thing because it was fun and gave us something we kept coming back to. Photo editing should match that and complement this process instead of being a chore.
We want photographers to have a proper partner to their camera and being able to do everything in a single UI just felt like the natural solution.
The fact that each photographer can stay in the same interface allows them to stay in the creative flow rather than worry about whether or not this particular photo is now good enough to move on to layers. That just seems counter to what we’re trying to do as photographers.
Cleaning sensor dust or portrait blemishes across a massive shoot is soul-crushing work. Where does your Smart Healing excel, and where do complex textures still force a photographer to step in manually?
Our tools are non-destructive and fast compared to our competition (which is a rare combination)
Our tools still require manual inputs as we don’t have automatic detection of dust or blemishes. Our tools however, are non-destructive and fast compared to our competition (which is a rare combination).
Source search is on the verge of being possible without the use of AI and they also allow for very complex retouching. Retouching is divided into individual layers, and individual strokes are separated on the layers.
Within strokes, the user can utilize entire strokes (some only allow circles) or subtract from them, brushes have all parameters and we have the best tablet pen integration on the market. It’s possible to customize and map out your parameters based on your pen pressure.
Again, I wanted to remind you of the non-destructive model because this combination is not common for most of these operations in other photo editors. Users have to go to bitmap editors like Ps or Affinity whereas with Zoner Studio, you don’t even have to leave the Develop module.
This makes it easy and there’s no need to make a complicated trip from one program to another while also considering the correct order of operations.
Manual keywording and file tagging is a major chore. How does your Search engine let someone instantly pull up shots without forcing them to build a rigid catalog first?
Our Catalog serves more as a cache. The photographer is not locked into Zoner Studio’s infrastructure
Yes, this is a core issue with many photo editors. To start, the difference between Zoner Studio and most of the competition is that you don’t need to create a Catalog as a blackbox per se but rather a Catalog built on market standard files or data that sits next to these common files.
Because of this, our Catalog serves more as a cache and does not contain unique data that the photographer could lose and is always “rebuildable” based on the data stored in those photos. Therefore, the photographer is not locked into Zoner Studio’s infrastructure.
We still rely on manual keywording and tagging (unfortunately, the program cannot replace manually entered data because it’s our interpretation of structures) and we’re also working robustly with names and the folder structure, which are an important part of manually entered data and are often ignored by other photo programs.
We also focus on working effectively with them and also with regards to the data that is inherently in the photos themselves. Then based on your knowledge of your data, you can effectively find a lot of things.
Automatically grouping and merging panoramas or focus stacks sounds great in theory. But how did you design the software to handle the messy reality of real-world shooting?
In our opinion, a large number of future disruptive technologies will be built on automatic stacking
For us, it’s not only good in theory but is great in practice. Of course, we can always improve but we have been optimizing the algorithms for several periods and are still working on them.
If the photographer uses the automatic camera functions like exposure and focus bracketing, and doesn’t make major mistakes when taking photos, we have an almost 100% hit rate.
Of course, it’s ideal to catch those deviations and we are very grateful to the user base for supplying us with samples. We’re really happy that in most cases it simply boils down to a shooting error. In our opinion, a large number of future disruptive technologies will be built on automatic stacking.
It’s necessary to realize that it’s not only about stacking panoramas and others that form a fraction of what a photographer processes but also continuous shots and generally similar images with which the user works as a whole and, for example, selects the best shot.
From turning burst sequences into time-lapses to simulating long exposures without an ND filter, what do you think are the most underrated creative tricks hidden in Zoner Studio?
Back to the basics; LUT’s. There are plenty of them on the internet and they are great for everyone.
They’ll be liked by the user who still can’t click and use sliders to achieve their desired results and by the user who has the ability to accurately utilize the entire RAW processing pipeline.
We aren’t exactly fans of the sort of “tricks” philosophy idea but if we had a choose an underrated function that can pull some serious weight, it would be the preview function in the Manager module that allows photographers to preview multiple images at once
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