Unlike these other programs, Helicon Filter is designed primarily to edit and improve existing photos and not for graphics creation.

Helicon Filter's interface also differs from other programs in that compact toolbars and menus containing editing tools are replaced with labeled "filter" tabs, each tab containing labeled edit options specific to a single aspect of the picture.

[1] By 2005, Helicon Filter had become known for its noise reduction ability,[2] though it also had some other basic features such as raw support, exposure correction, color adjustments, red eye removal, and resizing/cropping.

[3] More recent versions of the program have yielded more advanced features also found in Photoshop CS including cloning, selective color editing, and HDR imaging, though Helicon Filter still lacks other features found in Photoshop such as layer support, full selective editing abilities, and the ability to create graphics.

The program runs in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian.

A slider exists to select custom zoom, and in most filter tabs, a magnifying class can be used to view portions of a picture at higher magnification.

[4] In Helicon Filter Home and Pro, one is able to stack several images of the same subject where the pictures are of the same dimensions.

Finally, the program is partially capable of stacking images of a moving subject together to create effects of time-lapse or multi-exposure photography to capture such things as moving stars, however Helicon Filter cannot spread out the frames to amplify a subject's motion (e.g. landing bird, flipping gymnast) or create GIF movies from these images.

This filter works by taking all areas in a picture with the defined aberration color and reducing its saturation to zero.

In expert preview mode, an equalizer can be used to sharpen specific colors and leave others unchanged.

In the Retouching tab, brushes can be selected to perform such tasks as removal of imperfections, cloning, brightness correction, color alteration, saturation alteration, focus correction, noise reduction, red-eye removal, distorting, and replacing of a background or subject.

The Delete scratches, Reduce noise, Distort, and Replace sky/background brushes are only available in expert preview mode.

Helicon Filter, on the other hand, is designed for less experienced users while still providing advanced tools needed to improve already existing photographs; menus and toolbars containing edit options are replaced with "filter" tabs, each tab containing labeled edit options.

Even with these workarounds, however, Helicon Filter, due to its lack of layer support, can not do some things that Photoshop can.

Although Helicon Filter supports many of these 8BF plugins, they are generally not needed due to the program's built-in features such as noise reduction, aberration removal, perspective adjustment, and so on.

Both Helicon Filter and Adobe Photoshop are able to blend and combine images in several different ways, most notably as multi-exposures and HDRs.

One image blend type Photoshop is capable of while Helicon Filter is not is that of panoramic photography.