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Easy Photo Editing Tools

Posted on by Budget Banners
01
Jun

Let’s discuss photo editing tools

Have you ever looked at an old photograph and thought to yourself: “what was I thinking”? Thankfully with the invention photo editing tools such as photoshop, we are now able to take more flattering photographs than those canvases hanging on our parents’ walls. Even the scenic photographs of tourist attractions we take while on vacation look better with the help of a nifty photo editing app on our phones.

For the last decade, Photoshop has been the king of image editing. However, it is also notoriously expensive and difficult to use. Mastering this software requires considerable amount of training and many of the skills are not even applicable to everyday use.

Graphic designers aside, the rest of us at Budget Banners prefer to rather use other photo editing tools to enhance our photographs. It is now easier than ever to produce a beautiful image for all your printing needs. Here is a list of our favourite photo editing tools:

  1. Apple Photos

For all you Apple fans out there, the first on our list is Apple’s upgraded image management app appropriately named Photos (not a very creative name if you ask us). This tool is a significant upgrade from iPhoto which did not have that many features. Even if the user interface can be somewhat confusing at first, you will find that it is surprisingly user-friendly once you become accustomed to it. It is best described as simple on the outside and refined in the core. The best part about using an Apple in-house app is that everything can be synced via icloud and all the versions are identical across all Apple devices.

  1. Serif PhotoPlus Starter Edition

What do we love most about starter versions of a software? The answer is of course that it’s free. This is basically an older version of the Pro Edition and has been re-engineered to accommodate the amateur editors. With this tool, you can add effects to your photos, crop them to any shape and retouch them with a range of filters. Additionally, you can make collages by making cut-outs of a wide range of original images. This is certainly one of the nifty photo editing tools to have on your Windows computer. Even though you need to pay for the upgrade into the professional version, it’s still free for you to try it out (we don’t think you would need the pro version in any case).

  1. Pixlr Editor

If you are looking for an image edit tool that works across any and all platforms, Pixlr Editor is the one for you. Whether you have an IOs or an Android phone, Pixlr Editor allows you to immediately edit the photo you just took. You are short a photo or two for your custom pillow case? That’s certainly no problem, just take a photo on the spot and it’ll be ready to go into print within the next 5 minutes. Now isn’t that nifty? Alternatively, if you feel like editing on a bigger screen, just upload to your MacBook or Windows computer and Pixlr Editor will take care of the rest for you. It has all the tools on a sidebar that you’ve seen in Photoshop but is just so much easier to use. We’ve got good news for those of you that are scared of commitment, this software comes in a web page version so you don’t even have to download it.

  1. Picasa

Picasa is an app that many people overlook. We have this easy desktop image organising app courtesy of Google. This tool is perfect for those times when you don’t want to heavily modify a photo. It does not permanently change the original image, but instead allows you to put on layers of special effects that can be reversed at any time (even after you accidentally save over the original file instead of saving as a new file). The other advantage of the app is that it automatically organises all of the images stored on your computer so you can access all of them from one Picasa folder that’s linked to your entire hard drive. In our opinion, this is also one of those photo editing tools that come in handy.

  1. Fotor

Similar to Pixlr Editor, Fotor is an easy to use and simplistic tool that’s compatible with almost any platforms. It is mostly used by amateur editors to enhance the image, but not to completely change it. It has an array of impressive effects that you can simply apply to the image and the strength can be adjusted using a slide bar. However, if you are looking for a more advanced tool to layer raw files or completely organise your album, you might need to move onto something a bit more robust. In most our cases though, we are simply looking for an app to take away that annoying pimple or apply a filter to give us a glow. Fotor is definitely a good enough choice for those small edits.

There is of course a huge array of free apps that can help you with your image edits. Look around for something that suit your needs and have fun pimping your photos.