Inpixio Photo Studio

This picture app offers four different web apps, all HTML5 applications that load right in your browser. Pixlr Editor is their best free web app, and it offers a lot of features, even layers and color replacement tools. Photoshop’s best photo editing tools and squeezes them into a mobile app. And despite providing plenty of advanced features, this free photo editing app is easy to use on a small touchscreen. Facetune remains the best photo editing app for retouching portraits. Using sophisticated intelligence, it goes beyond skin smoothing and toning and teeth whitening.

If you are looking for a free photo editing app with essential editing tools, but you place more emphasis on the sharing features and a good community, then this free picture editor is for you. When over 1 billion people are using it, there has to be something special about it, right? But this free photo editor focuses on sharing your day to day life in the form of photos and seeing what others are sharing on your feed. Instagram also allows for direct messaging with fellow users for private conversations or photo sharing. The ability for a user to put updates in different creative ways like Stories, Live, Text, is fantastic.

Beginners can also benefit from Afterlight's regularly updated selection of filters. Mextures allows you to apply textures, light leaks and gradients to your images. It has a nondestructive workflow, so you can adjust and edit photos at any stage of the editing process and not worry about your file's quality diminishing. Mextures is ideal for creative business owners looking to create engaging, heavily edited photos. The app's robust services include more than 150 textures, the ability to stack infinite filter layers, and standard editing tools such as exposure, contrast and tint.

With VSCO you can publish images and journals and curate content in your profile. Lens distortion is another best photo editing app which is mainly used to add glass textures, natural sunlight, rain, and fog. A photographer has the option to make the effect stand out or blend in by customizing according to their needs. The app also has a paid version, which gives you more than 200 filters to expand the possibilities of getting creative results. A user in this free image editor can add layers and blend multiple effects on the same image. The filters Instagram provides for editing photos are intuitive and straightforward. The editing tools are not nearly comprehensive as Snapseed or Afterlight 2.

If you’d rather re-mix photos than create simple touch-ups and filters, PicsArt may be more your style. For example, with PicsArt, you can also cut an object out of one photo and layer it on top of another. WhilePicsArt’s stand-out feature is the re-mix (and the community for finding re-mix inspiration), you may not even need a separate app with tools for cloning and cropping. Snapseed is a professional-grade photo editing app designed by Google. It features a massive amount of editing options to help even the most mundane photos jump to life. It gives you control over your images by including a host of sliders capable of altering a photo’s vignette, blur, temperature, and other attributes. You can also add effects like grain, 1960s-style film looks, or the unique Retrolux filter.

Its ever-growing library of interactive tutorials will teach you to edit your images like a pro. And that’s good, because the feature set is quite deep, with dozens of tools to work with exposure, color, selective edit, filters and such. The vast majority of edits involve slider controls, with quick responsiveness so you know exactly how the adjustment affects your picture. What’s more, the edits are non-destructive, so you can always return to your original image. In addition to the intuitive social sharing, Lightroom has a Discover area, where you can see animations of the steps other photographers and artists used to create their best images. And you can contribute your own edited pictures to Lightroom Discover.

Plus, the app should make it a cinch to share out your images once you think they're ready to be shown to family and friends. However, in terms of editing tools, Google Photos offers only the barest minimum, helping you quickly prepare pictures for easy sharing. It does have facial recognition built in, so you can quickly search for all photos of a particular person.

For instance, its makeup tools, contours with subtle color, shadows and highlights. I particularly like the ability to turn a serious expression into a more appealing smiling portrait.

Users with advanced skills can use its tools to change curves, selective hues and saturation, and tone. Other tools include the option to add overlays, frames, artwork and text. You also get the photo editing basics, such as typical color, exposure, sharpness and crop tools.

You can even stack effects, similar to Photoshop layers, making it easy to produce a brand-new result each time you edit a photo. VSCO is an app that supports advanced camera controls and a photo editing community.

The simple slider controls allow you to increase or decrease the intensity of the effects. You can even alter your portrait in the camera’s preview before you snap the picture.