Ever since Steve Jobs put a camera into the iPhone, everyone has become a photographer. However, just because you have a camera, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you are a great photographer. Anyone can point a lens and press a button.
While some photos are works of art, others need editing, and we’re not just talking about slapping an Instagram filter on it. This means you need some easy-to-use photo editing apps. Here are the best photo editing programs for beginners.
1. Photoscape
While many photo editing programs have interfaces that are similar to Photoshop, this app goes a completely different way. It aims to be easy for beginners, and once you get the hang of the interface, you’ll have a lot of power at your fingertips.
Photoscape is also one of the best ways to open a PSD fileThe 7 Best Ways to Open a PSD File Without PhotoshopThe 7 Best Ways to Open a PSD File Without PhotoshopWhat is a PSD file, you ask? A PSD file is Adobe's image file format. We'll show you how to open a PSD file without Photoshop.Read More.
2. IrfanView
Irfanview is an oldie but also a firm favorite among my friends and colleagues. Many people who don’t need to do a lot of image editing can make do with Irfanview. Which, as a bonus, is completely free.
Best 7 Beginner Photo Editors for Windows and Mac 1. Fotophire: Best Beginner Photo Editing Software on Windows This software can be used by Window users only, but is listed as one of the most affordable yet impressive editing tool.
One of the best features of IrfanView is its handling of batch conversions. You can rename a huge number of files in seconds, as well as resize them. You can also scan directly from a flatbed scanner, make screenshots, set wallpaper, and install plugins to extend the features even more.
3. SnagIt
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— NadineNBone (@NadineNBone) January 31, 2019
SnagIt is a simple photo editing software. Even though it’s surrounded by free rivals, the developer TechSmith seems to think that SnagIt is worth $50. But in its defense, the screenshots are 100 percent perfect.
The current version is tightly integrated with all other TechSmith products. You can also upload to Google Drive and Microsoft Office, record your screen, and edit your screencast by trimming out the parts you don’t need. Other features include the ability to blur sensitive details, highlight important parts, and annotate images.
4. FastStone
At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was Windows Explorer, as it does bear some similarity with its yellow folder tree-like structure. However, this image editing app boasts some impressive features, and once again, it’s completely free.
As well as covering all of the usual image formats, FastStone also supports RAW image formats from all of the major camera manufacturers. You can then crop and resize your images, as well as apply the usual filters like red-eye removal and color adjustments. There’s also flatbed scanner support, the ability to edit EXIF data, and batch processing to rename and resize quickly. A portable version of FastStone is available.
5. Paint.NET
The venerable Paint.NET seems to be the crowd-pleaser, being installed on pretty much everyone’s PC. Starting life as a Microsoft product, it is now being compared to Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Photo Editor, and GIMP. It prides itself on being “immediately intuitive and quickly learnable,” making it the ideal photo editing software for beginners.
Images open in their own individual tabs and you have an unlimited history, so you can undo and redo image alterations as much as you want (disk space permitting). You also have Photoshop-like tools such as the Magic Wand feature, the Clone Stamp feature, and Layers.
And if you get stuck, you just need to consult the forum where someone should be glad to help out.
6. GIMP
GIMP is the best photo editing software for beginners who want to have Photoshop-like features but with a slightly easier learning curve. But unlike Photoshop, GIMP is free of charge and open source. It is also cross-platform and comes with a portable version that you can throw on your USB stick.
What is really great about GIMP, though, is the army of plugins and scripts which make it even more useful. From the GIMP extensions pack for Windows, to 3D screenshots, to turning photos into comic book images—there are a huge amount to choose from.
7. Photos for macOS
Photos is the photo viewing and editing app for macOS. Photos is backed up by iCloud Photo Library, meaning that your photo collections are available on all of your Mac and iOS devices.
You can connect your camera to have your photos imported, drag a photo directly into Photos with your mouse, and also take advantage of the editing and sharing options. And if you want an easy-to-use photo editor, look no further—Photos offers one-click enhancements of a photo’s colors.
8. XnView MP
XnView MP supports over 500 file formats, with all the usual suspects (JPG, PNG, GIF) as well as some lesser-known ones such as Amiga IFF, Amstrad CPC, and Kodak RAW. Cross-platform for Windows, macOS, and Linux, you can also do batch conversion tasks and use the program under various translated languages.
Ratings, color labels, and categories ensure that your photos remain completely organized.
9. Zoner Photo Studio
Zoner has a free edition and a paid edition. When you download it for the first time, you are immediately put on one month of Pro. After the 30 days are up, if you choose not to pay for Pro, then you are switched to the free version.
The Pro version costs $89. At that price point, you would be hard-pressed to find a reason to buy the app. As a comparison, the professional Adobe Lightroom is only $9.99/month.
Zoner has extras such as photo frames and templates, a script to view PS and EPS files, and several extras for RAW file formats. Other features include camera photo imports, batch renaming, batch re-organizing, a range of editing tools, and more.
10. PixlrPhoto Editing Program That Is Easy For A Beginner Macrame
Pixlr is a web app for editing photos. This is another easy-to-use photo editor that’s ideal for beginners. You can use the app to open an image from your desktop or from the web.
There’s support for masks and layers, plenty of adjustment, effect, and filter options, and a way to add text to your images. It should be noted that Pixlr is ad-supported.
Editing Photos on Your Smartphone
The photo editing apps for beginners in this article all work on your desktop. However, there are times when you might need to edit photos on your smartphone. To learn about some of the options available, check out our articles listing the best photo editors for Android and the best photo editors for iOS. If you’re looking for web apps instead of mobile apps, try these simple single-purpose online apps for editing photos.
Photo Editing Program That Is Easy For A Beginner Machine
When you’re ready to share your photos with the world, try one of these Squarespace photo site templatesThe 6 Best Squarespace Templates to Display Your Photos and ArtThe 6 Best Squarespace Templates to Display Your Photos and ArtHere are the best Squarespace templates to display your photos or artwork. Invaluable for creatives of all types!Read More before you set up a website from scratch.
Explore more about: Image Editor, Photo Album, Photography.
What Kind of Photo Editing Software Do You Need?
Whether you merely shoot with your smartphone or you're a professional photographer with a studio, you need software to organize and edit your photos. We all know that camera technology is improving at a tremendous rate. Today's smartphones are more powerful than the point-and-shoots of just a few years ago. The same can be said for photo editing software. 'Photoshopping' pictures is no longer the exclusive province of art directors and professional photographers. Whether you're shooting from an iPhone XS or a DSLR, if you really care how your photos look, you'll want to import them into your PC to organize them, pick the best ones, perfect them, and print or share them online. Here we present the best choices in photo editing software to suit every photographer, from the casual to the professional.
Of course, novice shooters will want different software from those shooting with a $50,000 Phase One IQ3 in a studio. We've included all levels of PC software here, however, and reading the linked reviews will make it clear which is for you. Nothing says that pros can't occasionally use an entry-level application or that a prosumer won't be running Photoshop, the most powerful image editor around. The issue is that, in general, users at each of these levels will be most comfortable with the products that are intended for them.
Note that in the table above, it's not a case of 'more checks mean the program is better.' Rather, it's designed to give you the quick overview of the products. A product with everything checked doesn't necessarily have the best implementation of those features, and one with fewer checks still may be very capable, and whether you even need the checked feature depends on your photo workflow. For example, DxO Photolab may not have face recognition or keyword tagging, but it has the finest noise reduction in the land and some of the best camera- and lens-based profile corrections.
Free Photo Editing Options
So you've graduated from smartphone photography tools like those offered by Instagram and Facebook. Does that mean you have to pay a ton for high-end software? Absolutely not. Up-to-date desktop operating systems include photo software at no extra cost. The Microsoft Photos app included with Windows 10 may surprise some users with its capabilities. In a touch-friendly interface, it offers a good level of image correction, autotagging, blemish removal, face recognition, and raw camera file support. It can even automatically create editable albums based on photos' dates and locations.
Apple Photos does those things too, though its automatic albums aren't as editable. Both programs also sync with online storage services: iCloud for Apple and OneDrive for Microsoft. With Apple Photos, you can search based on detected object types, like 'tree' or 'cat' in the application (Microsoft Photos now offers this feature, too). Apple Photos also can integrate with plugins like the excellent Perfectly Clear, appeasing power users who lament the company's discontinuation of the prosumer-level Aperture program.
Ubuntu Linux users are also covered when it comes to free, included photo software: They can use the capable-enough Shotwell app. And no discussion of free photo editing software would be complete without mentioning the venerable GIMP, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It offers a ton of photoshop-style plugins and editing capabilities, but very little in the way of creature comforts or usability. Other lightweight, low-cost options include Polarr and Pixlr.
How to Edit Your Photos Online
In this roundup, we've only included installable computer software, but entry-level photo shooters may be adequately served by online photo-editing options. These are mostly free, and they're often tied to online photo storage and sharing services. Flickr (with its integrated photo editor) and Google Photos are the biggest names here, and both can spiff up your uploaded pictures and do a lot to help you organize them. They even approach the two entry-level installed programs here, but they lack many tools found in the pro and enthusiast products. The latest version of Lightroom CC includes a good deal of photo-editing capabilties in its included website, too. Other notable names in web-based photo editing include BeFunky, Fotor, and PicMonkey.
Image Editing for Enthusiasts and Prosumers
Most of the products in this roundup fall into this category, which includes people who genuinely love working with digital photographs. These are not free applications, and they require a few hundred megabytes of your disk space. Several, such as Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector, are strong when it comes to workflow—importing, organizing, editing, and outputting the photos from a DSLR. Such apps offer nondestructive editing, meaning the original photo files aren't touched. Instead, a database of edits you apply is maintained, and they appear in photos that you export from the application. These apps also offer strong organization tools, including keyword tagging, color-coding, geo-tagging with maps, and in some cases face recognition to organize photos by what people appear in them.
At the back end of workflow is output. Capable software like Lightroom Classic offers powerful printing options such as soft-proofing, which shows you whether the printer you use can produce the colors in your photo or not. (Strangely, the new version of Lightroom CC—non-Classic—offers no printing capability at all.) Lightroom Classic can directly share photos to sites like Flickr and SmugMug. In fact, all really good software at this level offers strong printing and sharing, and some, like ACDSee and Lightroom, offer their own online photo hosting.
The programs at the enthusiast level and the professional level can import and edit raw files from your digital camera. These are files that include every bit of data from the camera's image sensor. Each camera manufacturer uses its own format and file extension for these. For example, Canon DSLRs use CR2 files and Nikon uses NEF. (Raw here simply means what it sounds like, a file with the raw sensor data; it's not an acronym or file extension, so there's no reason to capitalize it.)
Working with raw files provides some big advantages when it comes to correcting (often termed adjusting) photos. Since the photo you see on screen is just one interpretation of what's in the raw file, the software can dig into that data to recover more detail in a bright sky, or it can fully fix an improperly rendered white balance. If you set your camera to shoot with JPGs, you're losing those capabilities.
Enthusiasts want to do more than just import, organize and render their photos: They want to do fun stuff, too! Editors' Choice Adobe Photoshop Elements includes Guided Edits, which make special effects like motion blur or color splash (where only one color shows on an otherwise black-and-white photo) a simple step-by-step process.
Content-aware tools in some of these products let you do things like move objects around while maintaining a consistent background, or remove objects entirely—say you want to remove a couple of strangers from a serene beach scene—and have the app fill in the background. These edits don't involve simple filters like you get in Instagram. Rather, they produce highly customized, one-off images. Another good example is CyberLink PhotoDirector's Multiple Exposure effect, which lets you create an image with ten versions of Johnny jumping that curb on his skateboard, for example.
Most of these products can produce HDR effects and panoramas after you feed them multiple shots, and local edit brushes let you paint adjustments onto only specific areas of an image. Affinity Photo has those features, but its interface isn't intuitive, and it lacks management and lens profile corrections. Capture One, Paintshop Pro, and Lightroom have those and even more precise tools for local selections in recent versions. For example they let you select everything in a photo within a precise color range and refine the selection of difficult content such as a model's hair or trees on the horizon.
![]() Professional Photo Editing SoftwareBest Macbook For Photo Editing
At the very top end of image editing is Photoshop, which has no real rival. Its layered editing, drawing, text, and 3D-imaging tools are the industry standard for a reason. Of course, pros need more than this one application, and many use workflow programs like Lightroom, AfterShot Pro, or Photo Mechanic for workflow functions like import and organization. In addition to its workflow prowess, Lightroom offers mobile photo apps so that photographers on the run can get some work done before they even get back to their PC. Those who need tethered shooting (taking pictures in the software from the computer while it's attached to the camera) may want Capture One, which is offers lots of tools for that along with its top-notch raw-file conversion.
Photoshop offers all and more of the image editing capabilities in anything mentioned above, though it doesn't always make producing those effects as simple, and it doesn't offer a nondestructive workflow, as Lightroom and some others do. Of course, some users with less-intensive needs can get all the Photoshop-type features they need from other products in this roundup, such as Corel PaintShop Pro. DxO OpticPro is another tool pros may want in their kit, because of its excellent lens-profile based corrections and unmatched DxO Prime noise reduction.
Photo Editing App For Mac
Photoshop is also where you find Adobe's latest and greatest imaging technology, such as Content-Aware Crop, Camera Shake Reduction, Perspective Warp, and Detail Enhancement. The program has the most tools for professionals in the imaging industry, including Artboards, Design Spaces, and realistic, customizable brushes.
Another advantage of pro-level photo editing software is that you can take advantage of third-party plug-ins such as the excellent Nik Collection by DxO. These can add more effects and adjustments than you find in the base software. They often include tools for film looks, sharpening, and noise reduction.
Some users have taken umbrage at Adobe's move to a subscription-only option for Photoshop, but at $9.99 per month, it hardly seems exorbitant for any serious image professional, and it includes a copy of Lightroom, online services like Adobe Stock, and multiple mobile apps. It definitely makes the app more affordable for prosumer users, too, when you consider that a full copy of Photoshop used to cost a cool $999.
If you're an absolute beginner in digital photography, your first step is to make sure you've got good hardware to shoot with, otherwise you're sunk before you start. Consider our roundups of the Best Digital Cameras and the Best Camera phones for equipment that can fit any budget. Once you've got your hardware sorted, make sure to educate yourself with our Quick Photography Tips for Beginners and our Beyond-Basic Photography Tips, too. That done, you'll be ready to shoot great pictures that you can make better with the software featured in this story. Click the links below for to read the full reviews.
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