We all love to edit our photos and we surf the web everyday looking for the best photo editor out there, but with so many free online photo editors out there, it is very hard to find the perfect one.
The best online photo editor for 2020 have features like magic photo effects, background remover and more. Our daily busy routine is always challenging us to improve upon ourselves and find better solutions for things we wish to accomplish. So, here are the best…
Scratch Photos
Best free photo editor online to remove background
Scratch Photos gives social sellers a tool to remove the background of product photos quickly and easily. It’s powered by advanced AI technology that scans and removes backgrounds from even the toughest photos. After removing the existing background, you can use Scratch Photo to insert a different color or texture or source a background from Burst.
Scratch Photos is also a great tool if you run Amazon and Google Shopping ads. At the moment, product images need white backgrounds, which Scratch Photos can make in seconds.
Features include:
- AI-powered background remover that automatically takes out any background.
- Auto-adjust feature for improving darkly lit images and photo quality.
- Ability to cut and erase background and replace with plain pastel or custom background.
- Undo and redo edits for best results.
- Direct sharing to social media.
- Download images as PNG files.
Available for: iOS and Android
Price: Free
Fotor
Best free photo editor online for beginners
Free photo editor Fotor is a browser-based option with an interface that makes it easy for creatives, photographers, and marketers to edit photos. Unlike other web-based programs, Fotor is fast and won’t slow up your computer while using it.
Fotor makes advanced photo editing techniques achievable for less-technical people. You can easily apply filters, add effect, and edit images on the go. It’s intuitive and simple application helps you do more with your photos even without a background in photo editing and graphic design. Fotor is one of the best free photo editors out there, though for a small monthly fee you can upgrade to Pro for added features.
Features include:
- One click batch processing for Scenes, Effects, and Borders.
- State-of-the-art photo processing engine for adjusting exposure, brightness, contrast, white balance, and saturation, removing red eye, and more.
- Flexible text editing tool for adding text to any photo.
- Collage tool with over 80 templates and up to nine photos per collage.
- Batch resizing, renaming, and file format conversion.
- 100+ exclusive photo effects, 30+ photo frames, and 300+ custom stickers.
Available for: Web, iOS, Windows
Price: Free, ($4.99 per month for Pro)
Instasize
One of the best free online image editors for influencers.
Instasize is the free online photo editor app for working with images before uploading them on social media. While the name hints it’s for Instagram, you can upload your edited image to any social platform.
There is a range of filters to improve your images instantly, and you can use layers to add backgrounds to your photos. What’s more, you can also add text, vintage overlays, and even edit short videos all on your smartphone.
If you don’t have the image you need, there is also a library of stock images to work from. The premium version includes 100+ filters not available in the free app and advanced beauty tools to fix blemishes, remove redness, and whiten teeth.
Features include:
- Over 130 filters grouped by colour and type.
- Apply vintage overlays.
- Add a text layer to photo and video.
- Resize narrow images automatically.
- Hundreds of backgrounds.
- One-click presets to resize your image for different social platforms.
Link: iOS app Android app
Canva
Best free online photo editor for collaborating with teams.
Canva is a popular online design and publishing solution, with a free online photo and image editor as part of the package. Canva’s users have created over 1 billion designs since the tool launched in 2013.
Canva’s free service gives you 250,000 templates to customise and 5GB of cloud storage to save your designs.
The online free photo editor requires registration; then, you can apply filters, resize images, and add text overlays.
If you like Canva and opt to pay the $99 annual subscription, you can schedule social media posts, create brand kits, and use 100GB of cloud storage.
Features include:
- Quickly add stickers and drag and drop speech bubbles.
- Straighten photos and apply textures and filters to enhance your images.
- Add photo frames to images
- Add animated text.
- Templates sized for most social media platforms.
- Offers a desktop client for Mac and Windows, plus smartphone apps too.
Link: Canva
Adobe Photoshop Express
Best free online photo and image editor for mobile.
Adobe Photoshop is the gold standard in image editing. So good that the name is used as a verb to describe image enhancement. Alongside their premium product, Adobe also offers a free smartphone image editor called Adobe Photoshop Express for editing on the go.
It’s free to download, and you can access the tool with a Google or Facebook account. The
Adobe Photoshop Express app lets you quickly improve your images using filters it calls ‘looks’. Plus, you can also add text, correct image faults like red-eye, and use textures to add that finishing touch.
A premium subscription package is available, which has more advanced tools like cloning and RAW image editing.
Features include:
- Stich photos together to create a collage.
- Artistically blur parts of your photo.
- Straighten images with perspective correction.
- Blend your photos with creative textures.
- Remove haze and fog using an easy slider.
- Add captions to create meme style images.
Link: iOS devices Android devices
Photo Pos Pro
Best free photo editing software for Windows
The beauty of Photo Pos Pro is that you can choose your interface right off the bat, including a simple, beginner-friendly one with core tools and editing features. There’s also a more professional interface equipped with advanced functions like layers and layer masks and tools for adjusting curves and levels manually.
Photo Pos is a great option for store owners and marketers who want a simple photo editor to remove background and unwanted objects, apply color correction, and create borders and overlays. Because of its user-friendly interface, you can perform various image enhancement tasks from basic edits to more advanced photo effects, creating new works from scratch, and more.
Features include:
- Support for all file formats, including RAW, GIF and PSD.
- Customizable interface for editors for different levels of experience.
- Pixel image-editing tools, including drawing, selecting the necessary area, adjusting the size, filling, eraser, and more.
- One-click browser tools to adjust size, resolution, reflection, rotation, and more.
- Semi-automatic color correction and various filtering and effects options.
Available for: Windows
Price: Free (Pro Upgrade starting at $29.99)
Taler
Taler is a scrappy new social design and photo editing tool that’s free forever and perfect for launching a new business, brand, or store. With Taler you can customize templates for Instagram Stories, t-shirt mock ups, and social banners for Facebook and YouTube.
New templates are being added every week, with more design sizes for all social platforms coming soon. Think of Taler as a sandbox for creating your digital branding with some great starter styles to help entrepreneurs grow their Shopify stores faster.
Features include:
- Hundreds of customizable design templates tailored to size requirements for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more.
- Drag-and-drop editor for easily customizing visual content to match your Shopify theme.
- Powerful suite of filters, overlays, and photo editing tools for carefully refining and adjusting your header template design.
- Text tools to move, resize, and color text to amplify your message.
- Over 17,000 high-resolution, royalty-free images to use in your design.
- Free stickers, shapes, emojis, and graphics.
Available for: iOS and Android
Price: Free
Photoshop Express
Best Adobe photo editor for mobile
Adobe, a company well known for elite image and video editing tools, also offers a free photo editor called Photoshop Express for your smartphone. Photoshop Express is easy to use, boasts impressive on-the-go editing features to crop, fix red eye, and even share your finished work on social media, and more. You can also sync the tool with other Adobe products if you are already using them.
Features include:
- Quick-fix tools that heal blemishes, adjust perspective, and more.
- Hundreds of themes, effects, text styles, and stickers you can apply in one click to express your brand’s creativity.
- Edit, retouch, and create collages or combine photos in a tap.
- In-app tutorials and playbacks that show you how to create and apply edits to your photos.
- Ability to post favorite photos to social media sites or share them in email or messaging apps.
Available for: iOS, Android, and Windows
Price: Free
GIMP
Best open source online photo editor for pixel art and animation
GIMP is a free photo editor online that’s considered the best free Adobe Photoshop alternative. It comes packed with professional tools for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, and converting different image formats.
Whether you’re a hobby photographer or learning how to take photos with a smartphone, GIMP gives you sophisticated tools for making your images standout. GIMP also has a full customizable interface and, since it’s open source, you can add your own filters and features.
Features include:
- Fully customizable interface for making changes to the photo editor that meet your needs.
- Powerful photo enhancement tools for fixing distort and imperfections.
- Digital retouching for getting rid of minor details quickly and easily.
- Hardware support for various devices to create custom tools and speed up workflow.
- File format support for JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF and other special use formats, including the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files.
Available for: GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows
Price: Free
LunaPic
LunaPic is a free, secure open source program that allows users to upload, edit, and share their images. The photo editor is made to let you edit, crop, apply effects and filters, and other artistic effects to edit your images, create slideshows and collages, convert videos to GIFs, and make simple animations.
As a free photo editing tool, LunaPic doesn’t require any sign ups or installation. The website also provides an extensive help section with over 200 FAQs to help solve any technical issues or designing problems you might encounter with their tool.
While LunaPic is packed with animations and effects, the app is quite limited in terms of canvas size. The image size can only be a maximum of 1,000 x 1,000 pixels, which can be extremely limiting for those with larger images to resize.
Best for: Creating animation and adding effects.
Phixr
Phixr is a simple photo editor that allows you to edit images in a browser window. Regardless of the image format, you can easily open one of your pictures and edit directly on your desired browser. While the tool is simple, it is still super functional and effective.
Editing photos is made easy with over 200+ photo filters and effects. Phixr allows you to effectively make edits, crop avatars, tune colors, make edits to images like teeth whitening and remove stray hair for portraits. You can make use of their paint effects to stylize your images as well. In addition, the tool also supports social media websites and other photo sites, allowing you to easily upload and send images. The tool also works with other third-party websites like Dropbox, Flickr, Twitter, Photobucket, and more.
Best for: Image editing with extensive filters.
Photo Editor by Aviary
This free iPhone photo editor is widely lauded for its variety of photo editing tools and effects, clean interface, and wealth of sharing options that make posting your shots online a breeze. Photo Editor by Aviary contains more correction and enhancement tools than nearly any other mobile/desktop-based competitor on the market. Similar to Instagram, creative filters are available to improve more lacklustre images.
It is important to note that it’s only available on iOS, so you’ll have to look elsewhere if you want something on your PC/desktop, Linux box, or Android phone.
Best for: Mobile photographers using iPhones.
Pixlr
For editing photos with pro-level tools
If you’re ready to do a deep dive into photo editing, Pixlr Editor is a great choice. It has extensive features and offers many of the same powerful tools as Photoshop. You can perform numerous complex operations in Pixlr: working in layers for compositing or to finetune effects; using color correction and sharpening tools to make your subject pop; and superimposing text, shapes, and other elements onto your image for eye-catching originality and flair.
The top menu bar features a series of pulldown menus for adjustments, filters, transformations, and distortions. While some elements like History, Layers, and Navigator can stay visible in the interface while you’re working on an image—similar to Photoshop’s docked panels—other elements, like Unsharp Mask, must be adjusted and accepted before proceeding to the next operation. How effective some controls are depends entirely on your image, but there are so many pro-level tools that you should be able to find a cure for most image problems.
Just because it’s complex doesn’t mean Pixlr is hard to use. It has friendly, colorful icons and handy sliders that let you easily adjust the parameters. Plus, it operates within its own application frame, which means it doesn’t take up your entire browser window. Bonus: Pixlr can open Photoshop PSD files and save to its own format as well as PNG, JPEG, BMP, and TIFF formats for posting to social networks or saving to your hard drive.
Pixlr is a deep tool—and it has a learning curve, much like Photoshop. Before diving in, you’ll want to either be familiar with similar photo tools or check out some online tutorials. Or, you know, be brave.
Note: The app comes in several different flavors: The web app, a free downloadable desktop app, a Chrome extension, and an online Express version that just lets you add quick Instagram-style filters, overlays, and stickers.
Pixlr pricing: Free
Photopea
For pretending you’re using Photoshop
Launching Photopea for the first time can give you an odd sense of déjà vu—specifically of the Photoshop variety. Photopea mimics the look and feel of Photoshop to an uncanny degree with an almost identical toolbar and nested controls and tools that generate similar menus.
Like Pixlr, it accepts native Photoshop PSD files, opening images with the exact layers contained in the original picture. It also works with native GIMP and Sketch files. Unlike Pixlr, it can also export to PSD format, which is convenient if you routinely handle Photoshop files.
Photopea isn’t designed as a quick novelty or social networking app, but as a genuine alternative to Photoshop, with adjustment layers, layer styles, masks, text, and smart objects. That means it has fewer Instagram-style filters and effects than rival photo editors. Save your selfies for a different app.
Photopea can run on any device, but a big screen and precise pointing device will give you the best experience. Photopea runs locally—there’s no server or internet upload—so you can even disconnect from the internet and keep using the app offline.
Photopea pricing: Free; 30-day licenses are $5 for a single user, $15 for a 5-person team, and $50 for a 20-person team. 90-day licenses are $12 for a single user, $40 for a 5-person team, and $120 for a 20-person team.
Polarr
For supporting raw formats
The first time you use Polarr, it walks you through the major features with a sample image before setting you loose on your own photos.
You can choose a preset from the huge variety of built-in filters, which include unique options like Modern Film and Art Film. You can also tune up the image with a utility that’s reminiscent of Apple Photos to fix brightness, contrast, highlights, haze, cropping, aspect ratio, and color tint and temperature. The free version also offers tools for hue, saturation, and luminance adjustments, as well as lens distortion, a spot removal healing brush, and the ability to fix facial imperfections for portraits.
Polarr supports raw formats, which is unusual for online image editors: just drag and drop your raw image into the web interface. When you’re done with your image, you can save it in JPEG, PNG, or TIFF. You can even batch save with a choice of three quality settings and crops that include a range of precise output dimensions for LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
As you work, the free version gives you access to the Pro version’s radial, gradient, color, text, liquify, and brush mask effects, which you can try but not save.
Polarr pricing: Free; premium subscriptions for $20 (one-time fee, includes any upgrades)
Sumopaint
For showing off artistic painting effects
Sumopaint is yet another app with a Photoshop-style look and feel. As an online service, Sumopaint’s features are more limited than Photoshop’s, but the main players—an assortment of selection, paint, and text tools; gradients, shapes, curves, blurs, smudges, foreground and background colors; cropping and magnifying—are all pretty familiar. The app’s elegant interface highlights each tool as you choose it while a context-sensitive top menu shows only the controls related to that tool.
A series of Photoshop-inspired docked panels lets you zoom in and out and otherwise navigate your picture, choose colors, add layers, and apply numerous filters like 3D Effects, Blur, Distort, Sharpen, Stylize, and more. It also has a large collection of brushes that offer adjustable sizes, rotations, orientation, scattering, and other artistic painting effects.
You can use the Lite version for free, but the Pro version is ad-free and allows you to download the app for offline use; import images from URLs; send images via email; and get tons of additional presets, special effects, and brushes, along with perspective mapping, a sphere designer, and more.
Sumopaint pricing: Free; premium subscriptions for $2/day (~$30/month), $5/week (~$20/month), $9/month, or $48/year ($4/month), along with other pricing schemes
BeFunky
For editing photos with special effects
BeFunky is known for its special effects, as evidenced by the Layer Manager feature at the top of the main toolbar.
A pulldown menu, accessible from each major section—Edit, Touch Up, Effect, Artsy, Frames, Graphics, Overlay, Text, and Textures—lets you toggle between the photo editor, designer, and collage maker, which all have free and premium elements that you can refine with slider adjustments. The free version has a huge roster of elements and styles in addition to a mind-boggling array of stickers, fonts, and backgrounds. And the Paint mode lets you lay in effects with the paint brush rather than having to apply it uniformly through the entire shot.
You can do a lot with the free version of BeFunky, but if you like what you see, upgrade to access the editor’s enhanced effects: HDR DLX, Sharpen DLX, Vibrant Colors DLX, and DeNoise DLX are easy-to-use tools that set it apart from other online editors by using updated algorithms to enhance the precision and photo realism of the chosen effect or function. The Touch Up feature gives you basic controls for free, but the majority of its corrections are available only the with premium version. The Artsy section is also part of the premium version, but you can try out all of the effects first to determine if it’s worth it for you. Upgrading also removes the ads and can output high resolution 4000 x 4000 pixel images.
BeFunky pricing: Free; premium subscriptions for $4.95/month or $34.95/year ($2.91/month)
Adobe Photoshop Express Editor
Best Photo Editing Software Overall
Although Photoshop can be a bit intimidating, its sister product Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is an altogether different animal. All the tools are readily accessible and easy to use.
Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is a free photo editor. It is jam-packed with features that will allow you to make your images pop. You will be able to remove red-eye, resize images, make color corrections, and more.
It works right from your browser or mobile app. Editing photos is a snap with tools to balance color, resize, crop, change lighting, rotate, and more. The interface is appealing yet user-friendly. Our only gripes are that it was designed in Flash and not HTML5, and image formats can be somewhat limited.
👆 Special Features:
- Crop
- Rotate
- Remove Red and pet-eye
- Auto-Fix
- Text Tool
- Blemish Removal
- Corrections
- Customization
- Perspective Correction
- Pop-Color Tool
- Image Resize
- Watermark Images
- JPEG Quality Output
- Looks
- Borders
✅ PROS:
- Simple and complex customization
- Easy to use
- Compatible with other Adobe Products
- Gives you the edits you need to improve photos significantly
⛔️ CONS:
- Some features require creative cloud membership that has a fee
- The photo organizer tool is a separate app
Conclusion
Online photo editor or photoshop online free is a way for you to edit your photos and to apply effects and filters so that the output will look different and more interesting than the original. Nowadays this editing work is not limited to people who can afford to buy photoshop, since there are several online photo editors that could help you to edit your photos for free or just for fun!