Best Photo Editors for Amateurs and Experts

BEST PHOTO EDITORS FOR AMATEURS AND EXPERTS

Whether you take photos with your compact, DSLR or smartphone, you need to use photo editors to enhance your photographs before posting or printing. Good photo editing software will help you adjust color balance, retouch face and fix composition problems in no time.

If you don’t know which option to choose, take a look at the programs below that are useful for any photo editing task regardless of your level of expertise.

1. Adobe Photoshop – Industry Standard

Price: Free Trial, then $9.99/month

Pros:

• Lots of actions, overlays, textures, brushes
• Comes with layer support
• Opens all file formats
• Many photo enhancement tools

Cons:

• A hefty price
• A steep learning curve

Adobe Photoshop is one of the most advanced photo editing products for photographers, designers and other creative professionals. Regardless of your area of interest, it’s the primary option for advanced tasks.

What makes Photoshop unique is its set of professional features, such as smart auto-correction commands, masks, HDR, color adjustment, overlays, sets of brushes, point selection tools, layer management, etc.

Thanks to this photo editor software you can quickly improve any photo by using a set of convenient tools that allow removing chromatic aberrations, fixing lens distortion, adding vignettes.

If you need to draw an image or adjust colors, it doesn’t take much effort in Adobe Photoshop. You can also use a mobile version. Photoshop Express is one of the most helpful free photo editing apps for iOS and Android. It features an easy-to-navigate interface with a wide array of basic photo editing tools.

2. GIMP – Free Open-Source Photo Editor

Price: Free

Pros:

• Supports many file types
• Open-source software
• Customizable functionality
• Plenty of useful features and tools

Cons:

• Occasional lags
• No batch editing feature

GIMP is easy photo editing software for beginners that offers advanced functionality. GIMP is great for digital graphics and photo editing. Using it, you can create drawings and logos, resize photographs, adjust colors, combine images with the help of multiple layers, convert different types of graphics files.

This photo editor program has a unique multi-window interface that might seem a bit confusing for beginners. However, once you have mastered it, it is quite easy to navigate.

3. Skylum Luminar – HDR and Filters for Photographers

Price: Free Trial, then from $89.00

Pros:

• Layers
• Instant changes thanks to Luminar Looks
• Top-notch color correction
• Can be used as a plug-in for Lightroom and Photoshop

Cons:

• Overpriced
• Inconvenient RAW editing options

Skylum Luminar has been designed as a professional software tool for photo editing. It is equipped with tools that can be used for the most complex tasks. This program comes with such advanced features as chromatic aberration adjustment, distortion reduction and ragged edge trimming. You can also apply many non-destructive filters to transform your photos and undo these effects at any moment.

Just like Photoshop, Luminar 4 comes with layer and mask tools, great filters, convenient blending modes and such pro-level features as LUT display. With this software, you can open any file in a RAW format.

Among other helpful features of this photo editor, you will find manual lens correction, smart background replacement, edit history panel and auto-correction tools.

4. Adobe Lightroom – For Professional Color Correction

Price: Free Trial, then $9.99/month

Pros:

• Batch photo editing
• Advanced color correction
• Convenient search options
• Many presets and brushes

Cons:

• Monthly subscription
• Limited number of imported files

Adobe Lightroom is a powerful tool for photo editing. With its help, you can perform a wide variety of changes to enhance your photos, from importing an image from your camera to printing or sharing it on the net.

By using Adobe Lightroom you can analyze your images, adjust balance and exposure, edit details, fix a slanted horizon, change calibration, add labels and geotag your pictures.

This photo editor comes with the tools that will help you manage collections of photos and organizing them by dates, folders, keywords and meta-data information.

Edited images can be used in professional print layouts. You can also use them to create beautiful slide shows and upload them to different platforms, such as Facebook, SmugMug and Flickr.

5. Corel PaintShop Pro - 360-Degree Image Editing

Price: Free Trial, then $79.99

Pros:

• A wide selection of brushes, textures, and color palettes
• 360-degree picture editing
• Informative tutorials, user support
• Camera Shake Reduction option

Cons:

• Incompatible with macOS
• The interface has too many tabs

Corel PaintShop Pro is advanced image editing software that has a well-thought-out interface divided into three main parts. The tools can be found under the Manage, Adjust and Workspace tabs.

There are options under the Manage tab that allow adding a keyword tag to an image, viewing detailed technical data and reviewing pictures. Under the Adjust tab, you can quickly apply filters and use the Smart Photo Fix feature that automatically detects current brightness, contrast, sharpness and other parameters before applying optimal ones.

Sometimes, using this tool might result in a worsening of the image quality but, in most cases, the Smart Photo Fix tool improves quality and makes a picture more beautiful. This software will be appreciated by photo editing specialists, who need to reduce color noise.

6. Fotor – For Beginners

Price: Free Trial, then $4.99/month

Pros:

• Color correction in ten minutes
• A web, desktop and mobile versions
• Stunning effects and filters
• Has a social network

Cons:

• Annoying ads
• No advanced photo retouching

Fotor is a photo editor program that comes with basic cropping and color correction tools. If your image has some lighting issues, you don’t need to adjust brightness, contrast and color manually. You can select the lightning conditions to indicate that a photo was taken at night, dusk or on a rainy day, and the rest will be done automatically.

If the lighting is perfect but you want to edit a picture in a certain style, there are more than 60 various color and light effects that can bring the desired effect. By using the preview option, you can see a result that can be achieved by using different combinations of effects. You can also add a photo frame and edit it to your taste.

7. BeFunky – Best Online Photo Editor

Price: Free or $4.95/month

Pros:

• Drag-and-drop functionality
• No need to register
• Batch photo editing
• Full-screen mode

Cons:

• Distracting ads
• In-app purchases

BeFunky is an online photo editor that will help you to improve pictures and fix any color defects. You can apply various filters, adjust brightness, contrast and other parameters, crop and rotate your image, etc.

As the service comes with a waste library of beautiful frames, you can enhance your pictures even further by choosing one of the available options. Some frames have been designed by other users as there is an active community that helps developers work on the project.

Another advantage of BeFunky Photo Editor is that it allows adding inscriptions, choosing fonts and adding all kinds of stickers.