. Photo editing tools are becoming essential as the quality of social media images escalates.
Customers want to see ads that are and fit in with the rest of their highly visual feeds. That means you need to produce high-quality posts for your Facebook and Instagram campaigns. But what if you don’t have an art department or your budget for fancy software tools is minuscule or nonexistent?
Paint.NET is a free image and photo manipulation software for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003. Paint.NET started development at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft and continues to be updated and maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it.
Use free photo editing apps! We’ve collected eight of the best free tools to help you convert images to black and white, correct and retouch colors, sharpen specific details, and much more.
Time to get creative! GIMP Those who love Photoshop will also love the GNU Image Manipulation Program. GIMP is an open-source application that relies on volunteer developers to maintain and update it. As a result, it has a current set of professional-level editing and touch-up tools. In particular, GIMP can be a great tool to use for black-and-white conversions. The platform offers an in-depth tutorial for converting your color images to black and white, along with for layer masks, basic color curves, and more. To convert an image to black and white using GIMP’s basic desaturate command, users can select from three shades of gray: Lightness, Luminosity, and Average.
Each produces a slightly different variation, based on the tones in the original image. In the first black-and-white adjustment, Lightness, the subject’s shirt is relatively flat compared with her skin tones, but it becomes more pronounced, along with her lips, when using Luminosity. If you’re a fashion designer looking to add an extra edge to your social media posts, consider using GIMP’s black-and-white editing tool. Black and white advertising is proven to get viewers to focus on a product’s, which the jeweler David Yurman succeeds at below: This professional, black and white image underscores the edgy links of the new DY Madison® chains.
The lack of color emphasizes how bold these necklaces can be against bare skin and/or paired with a simple tank top and jacket. Although GIMP is lacking a few of Photoshop’s professional features, such as working exclusively in Pantone colors and saving RAW image files, it is perfect for marketers looking to polish their images. Pro Tip: Making small adjustments will bring your images up to a more professional level. Pixlr The Pixlr photo editing tool is perfect for marketers looking to make small, creative changes to their photos before publishing. Pixlr Express offers quick fixes and simple overlays and borders, while Pixlr Editor allows you to work with image layers, color replacements, and object transformations. Both options are free.
For marketers interested in pixelating their images, the app features a, which allows users to transform all or part of an image. Several gaming companies, for example, use pixelated images to capture the virtual feel of their products. Sega works in a pixelated call-to-action below. In this ad, Sega is able to evoke a game-like feel with pixelated text, recreating the world of their products and drumming up more excitement for “Cyber Monday Savings.” Pixelation can be a great way to highlight the extent of your creative skills — like the communications agency Vorealia does by re-creating a set of images below: Blasting open these photos with a pixelation tool gives them an added power and dynamism. It’s difficult to scroll past these thrilling images.
They’re effective, enticing to the user’s eye, and showcase the agency’s impressive creative abilities. Pro Tip: Using highly stylized elements like pixelation can be a great way to appeal to a niche audience.
IPiccy If you want a more automated photo editing process, take a look at iPiccy. Instead of manually changing parts of images with wands and other tools in Photoshop, iPiccy allows you to use a set of processes, including fixing, resizing, cropping, rotating, and flipping an image, to instantly edit an entire photo.
To add a slightly more professional feel, adjust the space between your pictures, the sharpness of photo borders, the resolution, the proportions, and the layout. IPiccy provides excellent capabilities for photo editors who need to quickly make all-encompassing changes to their images.
The vast range of templates and adjustments offered, for example, makes creating a collage user-friendly and fun. The clothing brand Desigual stitched together a photo-collage to give a fuller view of its prints in action.
The collage above also gives the viewer the sense that the couple is in a photo booth, adding to the sweet, lighthearted nature of the ad. Showcasing products or scenes in a photo collage is a great way to give off the vibe that your work is worthy of a 360-degree view. Pro tip: If you want to show more than a few items, consider a carousel ad.
We explained how to do this in our! PicMonkey PicMonkey is a great photo editing tool for amateur photographers who want to make a few quick adjustments to images.
In addition to adding popular effects like sepia and enhancing portraits with tools like Smooth, Wrinkle Remover, Blemish Fix, and Teeth Whitening, PicMonkey also allows users to add their own stickers, graphics, and logos. Below is a clip from PicMonkey’s tips for using its basic to add clip art, stickers, and unique text to existing work. Here, the user added a decorative banner over a base image of citrus: You can even base sales or seasonal campaigns on images, so customers get that flash of excitement whenever they see a familiar backdrop and know everything is 30 percent off. If you’re integrating a call to action on top of an existing image, PicMonkey’s unique colors and designs could help you catch your viewer’s eye—as with the Dunkin’ Donuts example below: If you’re not an advanced photo editor but still want to make small, high-quality tweaks to your social media posts, PicMonkey is a great option, particularly in e-commerce.
Pro tip: The Overlay tool can help you repurpose stock or product photos repeatedly. This tactic will lower your overall spend on ad art and keep your branding strong. Note: PicMonkey’s free seven-day trial is $4/month. If you want to keep it free, however, you can select most of the basic editing options via PicMonkey’s website. Vsco Vsco is best known for its filters or presets, which lots of pro accounts use instead of Instagram’s suite of features. The presets below highlight the range of artistry Vsco can provide. The additional custom profiles for Canon, Fuji, Leica, Nikon, Olympus, and Sony cameras make Vsco a great tool if you are already working with professional equipment.
If you are a travel company, for example, try a Vsco preset to enhance the depth of natural beauty in your posts, as Utah Unique does below. Increasing the saturation of the mountains and honing the edges of the peaks make Zion National Park look even more stunning to viewers planning to book a trip. Vsco also illustrates additional photo editing tools at the bottom of an image’s editing screen for fine-tuning (right screenshot) after selecting a preset (left screenshot). The myriad tools available for tweaking an image’s exposure, contrast, and alignment helped make the doughnut stand out against its backdrop. Take a cache of RAW photos and use Vsco to create mini masterpieces. If you need support to get started or you’d like help with sharing your images, Vsco has a loyal, which any user can join for inspiration. Pro Tip: Instead of creating new content, use a photo editing tool for remodeling what you already have, making your ad team efficient and keeping costs low.
Although you can download the Vsco app for free, users can also opt for a for $19.99 USD/year, which provides access to enhanced tools and community content. PhotoScape X If you’re new to photo editing, PhotoScape X is a great tool that allows you to easily create GIFs and add an extra flair to your feed. In addition to basic photo editing, is perfect for creating slideshows and animated GIFs. The screenshot below, highlights the minutiae an editor can delve into when selecting angles and duration for various animations within the GIF. Here, the editor is working on transition effects throughout the GIF, along with setting the exact sizes of his subjects. Many food businesses use GIFs in crafty ways to whet their followers’ appetites like Blue Apron does below: GIFs can rapidly highlight the process of creation, such as the scallion dicing above for one of Blue Apron’s home recipes. Because GIFs are more compressed than videos, the likelihood that viewers will is far greater.
For best results, use a GIF with a file size that is less than 8MB and covers less than 20 percent of the image with text. Pro Tip: Use GIFs to add a dynamic feel to your ads and catch your followers’ attention immediately.
But keep in mind that animated ads might. Darktable An open-source photography workflow app, is a virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. This photo editing tool allows editors to organize digital negatives, view them through a zoomable lighttable, and develop and enhance RAW images. Each darktable user’s main catalog will appear as below: A collection module on the left panel helps organize images according to their attributes, including focal length, exposure, and resolution.
Clicking on an image will open it for editing: Darkroom mode allows users to see before and after segments of an image—as with the shift from green to orange in the leaf. If you’re making a series of changes to a photo, darktable’s platform can be key to ensuring that your edits are fully integrated.
If you’re a small creative business, like Lp Alain Photography, darktable can be a fantastic way to show off your most advanced skills. Using darktable, Lp Alain Photography crafts a stunning, other-worldly setting. Followers gawk at the level of precision and range of hues available with his services. While tools like Pixlr, iPiccy, and PicMonkey could be better choices for simpler tasks, like removing red eye from a selfie, darktable is well-suited to marketing teams looking to manage and enhance a large number of images in RAW format. Pro Tip: Using plenty of high brightness and light in your images is a feature of. Dartkable is an excellent choice to help marketers achieve this. Final Thoughts Photo editing tools are becoming essential as the quality of social media images escalates.
Ensure that your followers notice—and admire—your posts by experimenting with the tools above, all without breaking the bank! What do you think? Do you use, or plan to test, any of these photo editing apps to improve the image quality of your next Facebook and Instagram ads? Let us know in the comments which one is your favorite! Thank you for this post, very interesting.
I am a marketer in Grenoble (France). I use on an everyday basis Gimp and Canva. Gimp is not very intuitive, you need months and months of use to begin making amazing stuff with it.
On the other side, Canva is the most intuitive photo editor ever. In 5 minutes you can create catchy images, background that do not look like an old ‘paint’ image.
So the best combo is to modify your image with Gimp, put it in PNG format, and ‘work’ on it with Canva. Hope it will give you ideas Stefan marketer at.
VSCO (Android &iOS) A hugely popular photo editing app amongst Instagram users, VSCO is more than just photo editing, it offers a community for photographers to connect and create. Simply searching the Hashtag #VSCO on Instagram will reveal the huge community of photographers and casual users that use VSCO every day, a testament to the app’s popularity. VSCO houses all the tools you’d expect from a favourable photo editing app; saturation, highlights, temperature and vignette can all be adjusted alongside many other settings. VSCO also offers a built in camera with advanced controls, allowing you to capture the perfect shot, edit and save, all without leaving the app, an A for convenience. Filters are also a huge feature for VSCO, with the option to buy filter packs each with their own distinctive styles and tones, very popular amongst users of the app. Well.the more I read the more confusing it all becomes so I need help reading the help.don’t laugh, maybe I’m too old to pick this up but I desperately need a program that can help me as I need to produce photos and images with text on them for fundraising for charity so it has to be REALLY free.
I just got started on inpixio photo clip and then it kept saying I had to upgrade and pay for it. I need something that will take out background and add basics like a frame and maybe just automatically improve the contrast etc on photos plus allow me to add the text. Is there anything genuinely free out there that is very user friendly that will do these things.or should I just give up? VSCO (Android &iOS) A hugely popular photo editing app amongst Instagram users, VSCO is more than just photo editing, it offers a community for photographers to connect and create. Simply searching the Hashtag #VSCO on Instagram will reveal the huge community of photographers and casual users that use VSCO every day, a testament to the app’s popularity. VSCO houses all the tools you’d expect from a favourable photo editing app; saturation, highlights, temperature and vignette can all be adjusted alongside many other settings.
VSCO also offers a built in camera with advanced controls, allowing you to capture the perfect shot, edit and save, all without leaving the app, an A for convenience. Filters are also a huge feature for VSCO, with the option to buy filter packs each with their own distinctive styles and tones, very popular amongst users of the app. A popular photo editing app amongst Instagram users, VSCO is more than just photo editing, it offers a community for photographers to connect and create.
Simply searching the Hashtag #VSCO on Instagram will reveal the huge community of photographers and casual users that use it every day, a testament to the app’s popularity. It houses all the tools you’d expect from a favorable photo editing app; saturation, highlights, temperature, and vignette can all be adjusted alongside many other settings. It also offers a built-in camera with advanced controls, allowing you to capture the perfect shot, edit and save, all without leaving the app, an A for convenience. Filters are also a huge feature, with the option to buy filter packs each with their own distinctive styles and tones, very popular amongst users of the app.
From powerful software packed with features that give Photoshop a run for its money to simple tools that give your pictures a whole new look with a couple of clicks, there's something for everyone. Many free photo editors only offer a very limited selection of tools unless you pay for a subscription, or place a watermark on exported images, but none of the tools here carry any such restrictions. Whichever one you choose, you can be sure that there are no hidden tricks to catch you out.
Note that if you're looking for a way to optimize images for your website, there's no need to process them all individually - just enter your URL into the from WebsiteToolTester, and the web app will check for any images that can be compressed. Once it's finished, you'll be provided with a link to download the optimized files in a ZIP archive. Learning curve is a little steep (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the best free photo editor around. It's packed with the kind of image-enhancing tools you'd find in premium software, and more are being added every day.
GIMP’s interface will be instantly familiar if you have ever used Photoshop or other premium photo editing software – especially if you select the single-window mode, which lays out all its toolbars and canvases in an Adobe-style layout. The photo editing toolkit is breathtaking, and features layers, masks, curves, and levels. You can eliminate flaws easily with the excellent clone stamp and healing tools, create custom brushes, apply perspective changes, and apply changes to isolated areas with smart selection tools.
GIMP is an open source free photo editor, and its community of users and developers have created a huge collection of plugins to extend its utility even further. Many of these come pre-installed, and you can download more from the. If that's not enough, you can even.
Less powerful than GIMP More is not, believe it or not, always better. 's simplicity is one of its main selling points; it's a quick, easy to operate free photo editor that's ideal for trivial tasks that don't necessarily justify the sheer power of GIMP. Don't let the name fool you, though. This isn't just a cheap copy of Microsoft's ultra-basic Paint – even if it was originally meant to replace it. It's a proper photo editor, just one that lands on the basic side of the curve. Paint.NET’s interface will remind you of its namesake, but over the years, they’ve added advanced editing tools like layers, an undo history, a ton of filters, myriad community-created plugins, and a brilliant 3D rotate/zoom function that's handy for recomposing images.
It might not have every feature you can dream of, but if your machine is a little underpowered we can't think of a better free photo editor. Limited file export resolution isn't as well known as Paint.net and GIMP, but it's another top-quality free photo editor that's packed with advanced image-enhancing tools.
This free photo editor's interface is smarter and more accessible than GIMP's array of menus and toolbars, with everything arranged in a logical and consistent way. If it's still too intimidating, there's also an optional 'novice' layout that resembles Fotor's filter-based approach. The choice is yours. The 'expert' layout offers both layers and layer masks for sophisticated editing, as well as tools for adjusting curves and levels manually.
You can still access the one-click filters via the main menu, but the focus is much more on fine editing. Photo Pos Pro also includes a clone brush for erasing unwanted blemishes, and there's extra support for batch-editing and scripts to help you save time when refining a whole folder of photos. The free edition of Photo Pos Pro only has one drawback: files can only be saved at a maximum resolution of 1,024 x 2,014 pixels, which might be too small if you're planning to have them printed professionally.
If you want to remove this restriction, is available for a license free of £24.50/US$24.90/AU$41.89. Unusual interface might look like a rather simple free photo editor, but take a look at its main menu and you'll find a wealth of features: raw conversion, photo splitting and merging, animated GIF creation, and even a rather odd (but useful) function with which you can print lined, graph or sheet music paper. The meat, of course, is in the photo editing. PhotoScape's interface is among the most esoteric of all the apps we've looked at here, with tools grouped into pages in odd configurations. It certainly doesn't attempt to ape Photoshop, and includes fewer features.
We'd definitely point this towards the beginner, but that doesn't mean you can't get some solid results. PhotoScape's filters are pretty advanced, so it's if good choice if you need to quickly level, sharpen or add mild filtering to pictures in a snap. No fine manual editing tools is a photo editor that runs in your web browser, and is ideal for turning your favorite snaps into cards, posters, invitations and social media posts. If you're interested in maintaining a polished online presence, it's the perfect tool for you. Canva has two tiers, free and paid, but the free level is perfect for home users. Just sign up with your email address and you'll get 1GB free cloud storage for your snaps and designs, 8,000 templates to use and edit, and two folders to keep your work organized.
You won't find advanced tools like clone brushes and smart selectors here, but there's a set of handy sliders for applying tints, vignette effects, sharpening, adjusting brightness, saturation and contrast, and much more. The text editing tools are intuitive, and there's a great selection of backgrounds and other graphics to complete your designs.
If you need to make graphics, cards and flyers for a business, it's worth checking out, which costs $12.95 (about £10, AU$18) per person per month. For that, you get access to hundreds of thousands of stock images, the ability to export animated GIFs and unlimited storage. No plugin support is more a photo enhancer than a full-fat manual editing tool. If there's specific area of retouching you need doing with, say, the clone brush or healing tool, you're out of luck.
However, if your needs are simple, its stack of high-end filters that really do shine. There's a foolproof tilt-shift tool, for example, and a raft of vintage and vibrant colour tweaks, all easily accessed through Fotor's clever menu system. You can manually alter your own curves and levels, too, but without the complexity of high-end tools. Fotor's most brilliant function, and one that's sorely lacking in many free photo editors, is its batch processing tool – feed it a pile of pics and it'll filter the lot of them in one go, perfect if you have a memory card full of holiday snaps and need to cover up the results of a dodgy camera or shaky hand. Pixlr Editor. Needs Flash to run Most browser-based free photo editing tools are simple Instagram-style affairs that give you a set of filters and little else. Is different.
Provided you have a reliable internet connection and don't mind the lack of plugins, this free web app is almost as powerful as the best free desktop photo editors. Load up a photo and you'll have access to layers, masks, clone stamps, selection tools, and everything else you'd expect from a top-notch image editor. There's no batch-editing unfortunately, but you can open several pictures at once and edit them individually. Unfortunately, Pixlr Editor has one major disadvantage: it requires Flash to run. That's not too much of a problem at the moment, but more and more browsers are beginning to, and Adobe is planning to end support for the plugin before too long, which will render Pixlr Editor obsolete. It has been superseded by Pixlr X (below), but unfortunately this is a less powerful free photo editor. Less powerful than Pixlr Editor is the successor to Pixlr Editor.
It's a superb photo editor (and uses HTML5 rather than Flash, so you can run it in any modern browser), but the two are very different. Pixlr X is slick and well designed, but has more in common with Adobe Photoshop Express.
It allows you to make fine changes to colors and saturation, sharpen and blur images, apply vignette effects and combine multiple images, but it doesn't have the same huge toolbox as Pixlr Editor. There are no paintbrush or pencil tools, you can't create a new image from scratch or use layers, and there are no healing or red-eye tools for fixing your snaps.
If your photos are fundamentally sound then Pixlr X can get them looking great with a few clicks of its sliders, but if you want to get creative or correct problems, Pixlr Editor remains the superior choice. Requires Flash As its name suggests, is a trimmed-down, browser-based version of the company's world-leading photo editing software. Perhaps surprisingly, it features a more extensive toolkit than the downloadable Photoshop Express app, but it only supports images in JPG format that are below 16MB. Again, this is a Flash-based tool, but so you won’t miss out if you’re using a smartphone or tablet. This free online photo editor has all the panache you’d expect from Adobe, and although it doesn’t boast quite as many tools as some of its rivals, everything that’s there is polished to perfection (with the exception of a couple of options that are currently in beta).
The Pop Color tool is particularly interesting, enabling you to quickly change the hue of a particular part of your image. Fill Light is a welcome addition too, helping compensate for photos taken in less than ideal lighting conditions. On top of those, theres a healing brush, automatic color correction, and manual adjustment of white balance and exposure – all very slick and simple to use. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is a pleasure to use. Its only drawbacks are the limits on uploaded file size and types, and lack of support for layers. Some tools behind a paywall Free online photo editor is available in both HTML5 and Flash editions, making it suitable for any device.
You can choose to work with a photo from your hard drive, Facebook, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Search, or a catalog of stock images. This is an impressive choice, though some of the stock images are only available to premium subscribers, and you'll need to watch out for copyright issues if you use a pic straight from Google Images.
![Photo Photo](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125501822/217735081.jpg)
PiZap’s editing interface has a dark, modern design that makes heavy use of sliders for quick adjustments – a system that works much better than tricky icons and drop-down menus if you’re using a touchscreen device. Like Fotor, piZap offers lots of stickers, with many more available to users with a paid account. All the options have a fun, cartoon aesthetic (though some of the clipart is a bit corny), and together with the meme tool that adds custom text to the top and bottom of images, prove that this is an online photo editor created with social media sharing in mind.
![Manipulation Manipulation](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125501822/496213981.jpeg)
When you’re done, you can share your creation on all the biggest social media networks, as well as piZap’s own servers, Dropbox and Google Drive. Alternatively, you can save it to your hard drive, send it via email, or grab an embed code. You can only export your work in high quality if you’ve opened your wallet for the premium editor, but for silly social sharing that’s unlikely to be a problem. Get your videos YouTube-ready with our pick of the. Looking for more free software?
Check out the options.