These include postcards, posters, invitation letters, or even a fancy Instagram post. You can upload right from the browser and play around with filters and such.Ĭanva has tonnes of templates to create different types of items. Canva isn’t your typical photo editor, it’s more of a collection of professional-grade templates in your browser.
However, by basic I mean there are no manual fine-tuning controls. It’s quite basic and really simple for anyone to get the hang of it.
Sure, Darktable is mostly based on changing the lighting, hue and other related aspects to the picture, but a lot of that is what makes a good picture great. While it’s not as slick as Lightroom, it’s the best free alternative out there.Ĭanva is perhaps the easiest to use photo editor on this list. There are a lot of modules here with which you can change a lot of elements in your pictures. It also offers lens and perspective corrections.Īpart from that, you can tune the contrast, brightness, saturation, white balance, exposure, shadows, highlights, and much more. It even supports Raw photos, which makes this the best raw photo editor out there. It has the same style of cataloging, nondestructive editing, and a lot of the same tools. It has a lot of the same features as Lightroom. When I say free, I mean completely ad-free as well. It’s actually quite more powerful than you’d expect a free photo editor to be. It’s actually a bit mind-boggling just how similar it is to lightroom. The exports support high resolutions so you can stop worrying about visual fidelity.ĭarktable is basically the best free alternative to Lightroom. It also has a one-click enhancement feature, which works well unless you have a specific aesthetic in mind. They are finely tuned and well balanced.Īpart from that, there are sliders for exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, tint, vignette and a lot of other options you can pick from. There are a lot of professional-grade filters here, and they’re not the type you see on Instagram. Once imported, you’ll access a variety of tools. Just select the files from your designated folder, and drag and drop them into Fotor. Importing photos into Fotor is incredibly easy and simple. Still, I’d recommend doing so as then you can save all your edits. This makes it incredibly easy to use, and you don’t have to sign up if you don’t want to use it for a long term period. Well, it’s more of a web-app as some would say, as it opens up in your browser. Fotorįotor is an application that has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent times. So you could also say this is the best free photo editor for beginners. While GIMP is a much more powerful tool and can be used by a lot of professionals, Fotor is more aimed at beginners. I contemplated a considerable amount on deciding where to put Fotor on this list. All in all, this is hands down the best free photo editing software.
However, that method is a bit technical and aimed at more professional folk. Though you can’t edit raw images in its base form, you can add a plugin to make it work. This means you can add tonnes of licensed plugins that work flawlessly with this program. Just like any other popular open-source piece of software, it has a large and dedicated community that is always striving to make the program much better than it already is. The best part about GIMP is that it is completely open-source. It has support for multiple languages such as Python, C, C++, Scheme, and more. You can also perform scripted image manipulation via the scripting framework. You can make mockups, icons, graphical elements, and even artistic user interface elements. Apart from that, it’s also a graphic designing tool. You can create completely original pieces of art by using its powerful painting tools as well. It’s a very powerful program used by many professional editors and beginners alike. GIMP has a lot of tools that it lets you have at your disposal. With image-enhancing tools that allow you to retouch or even restore images, and even create something entirely new, I think I’ll have to agree with their bold claim. GIMP calls itself an “image manipulation tool”. It’s baffling just how similar it is to Adobe Photoshop.
GIMP is the ever-popular free editing software that covers multiple bases.