The best free photo editors for PC and Mac for August in 2023 so far

If you just need to touch up holiday snaps and crop and resize the occasional business asset, the best free photo editors will cater to your every need. The best photo editor overall is: Adobe Photoshop If you're serious about photo editing, or are thinking about turning your hobby into a job, you can't beat industry standard software Adobe Photoshop. It's certainly not free like the photo editors below, but it's surprisingly good value with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Find out more about how we test. It's packed with the kind of image-enhancing tools you'd find in premium software, and more are being added every day. We found this photo editing toolkit to be breathtaking. It features layers, masks, curves, and levels. You can eliminate flaws easily with the excellent clone stamp and healing tools, create custom brushes, apply perspective changes, and apply changes to isolated areas with smart selection tools. GIMP is an open-source free photo editor, and its community of users and developers have created a huge collection of plugins to extend its utility even further.

Many of these come pre-installed, and you can download more from the official glossary. If that's not enough, you can even install Photoshop plugins. Read our full GIMP review. If you've got a lot of photos that you need to edit in a hurry, Ashampoo Photo Optimizer could be the best free photo editor for you. Its interface is clean and uncluttered, and utterly devoid of ads although you'll need to submit an email address before you can start using it. Importing pictures is a breeze, and once they've been added to the pool, you can select several at once to rotate or mirror, saving you valuable time. You can also choose individual photos to enhance with the software's one-click optimization tool. In our tests, this worked particularly well on landscapes but wasn't always great for other subjects.

Adobe Photoshop Mac

If you want to make manual color and exposure corrections, there are half a dozen sliders to let you do exactly that. It's a shame you can't also apply the same color changes to a whole set of pictures at once, but this is otherwise a brilliant free photo editor for making quick corrections. For more advanced editing, check out Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 7 — the premium version of the software with enhanced optimization tools. Read our full Ashampoo Photo Optimizer review. Canva is one of the best free photo editors online, ideal for turning your favorite snaps into cards, posters, invitations and social media posts. If you're interested in maintaining a polished online presence, it's the perfect tool for you. Canva has two tiers, free and paid, but we think that the free level is perfect for home users. Just sign up with your email address and you'll get 1GB of free cloud storage for your snaps and designs, 8, templates to use and edit, and two folders to keep your work organized.

You won't find advanced tools like clone brushes and smart selectors here. But there's a set of handy sliders for applying tints, vignette effects, sharpening, adjusting brightness, saturation and contrast, and much more. The text editing tools are intuitive, and there's a great selection of backgrounds and other graphics to complete your designs. And it's so, so easy to use, too. Read our full Canva review. Fotor offers free photo editing software for beginners, ideal for giving your pictures a boost quickly. If there's a specific area of retouching you need to do with the clone brush or healing tool for example, you're out of luck. However, if your needs are simple, its stack of high-end filters really shine. There's a foolproof tilt-shift tool, for example, and a raft of vintage and vibrant color tweaks, all easily accessed through Fotor's clever menu system. You can manually alter your own curves and levels, too, but without the complexity of high-end tools.

Fotor's standout function, in our humble opinion, is its batch processing tool, which is the one feature that's sorely lacking in many of the best free photo editors. Feed it a pile of pics and it'll filter the lot of them in one go, perfect if you have a memory card full of holiday snaps and need to cover up the results of a dodgy camera or shaky hand. Read our full Fotor review. Photo Pos Pro isn't as well-known as Paint. This free photo editor's interface is smarter and more accessible than GIMP's array of menus and toolbars, with everything arranged in a logical and consistent way. If it's still too intimidating, there's also an optional 'novice' layout that resembles Fotor's filter-based approach. The choice is yours. The 'expert' layout offers both layers and layer masks for sophisticated editing, as well as tools for adjusting curves and levels manually.

Previous version

You can still access the one-click filters via the main menu, but the focus is much more on fine editing. It's a shame that the free version of Photo Pos Pro only allows you to export at a maximum of 1, x 1, pixels. If you're preparing images to share online this might not be a problem, but it limits the software's usefulness if you want to print your work. Read our full Photo Pos Pro review. More is not, believe it or not, always better. NET's simplicity is one of its main selling points; it's a quick, easy-to-operate free photo editor that's ideal for trivial tasks that don't necessarily justify the sheer power of tools like GIMP. Don't let the name fool you, though. This isn't just a cheap copy of Microsoft's ultra-basic Paint — even if it was originally meant to replace it. It's a proper photo editor, just one that lands on the basic side of the curve. We found Paint. NET to be fully featured, even though it's in simplicity where it finds core strength.

Read our full Paint. NET review. PhotoScape might look rather simple - but a glance at the menu of this top free photo editor reveals a wealth of features: raw conversion, photo splitting and merging, animated GIF creation, and even a rather odd but useful function with which you can print lined, graph or sheet music paper. The meat, of course, is in the photo editing here. PhotoScape's interface is among the most esoteric of all the apps we've looked at here, with tools grouped into pages in odd configurations. It certainly doesn't attempt to ape Photoshop, and includes fewer features.

Adobe Photoshop for Mac Download (FREE)

We'd definitely point this toward the beginner, but that doesn't mean you can't get some solid results. PhotoScape's filters are pretty advanced, so it's if good choice if you need to quickly level, sharpen or add mild filtering to pictures in a snap. Read our full Photoscape review. Pixlr X is the successor to Pixlr Editor, which was easily one of our candidates for the best free photo editor online. Pixlr X makes several improvements on its predecessor. It's also slick and well-designed, with an interface that's reminiscent of Photoshop Express, and a choice of dark or light color schemes. With Pixlr X, you can make fine changes to colors and saturation, sharpen and blur images, apply vignette effects and frames, and combine multiple images. There's also support for layers, an advanced feature that you won't find in many free online photo editors, as well as an array of tools for painting and drawing. You just need to find those tools, and figure out how they work.

Experience with software like Photoshop won't help much, because GIMP does things its own way, and expects users to figure those ways out on their own. There's going to be a learning curve, and it's going to involve a lot of Google searches. If you're the kind of person who likes thinking about design, you might end up wondering what exactly the creators were thinking. So there are downsides, but they might be worth it, because this is a full-blown photo editor that's completely free. No ads, no gimmicks: just open source software that you're free to use as you like. If you're not concerned with flexibility, and just want to quickly make a few changes to your photos, Fotor might be what you're looking for. This simple app gives you access to a bunch of one-button adjustments. When you load a photo, you'll see the "Scenes" toolkit, which allows you to choose from one of several lighting adjustments. There's not a lot of fine-tuning: just click a button and decide if it looks better.

There are similarly simple tools for adjusting the focus, adding text, and cropping your image. Again, if you're looking for a full-blown photo editor, this isn't it. But it's free, with one tiny ad in the bottom-right corner. It's worth a look. Not everyone realizes this, but you can use macOS' built-in Preview app to edit images. Just open any image, then click the toolbox icon. A second toolbar of icons for editing images will show up. From here, you can add simple shapes and draw. It's not the most complete photo editor on the planet, but it gives you access to the basics without any third party software. If you organize your photo collection using the built-in Photos tool on your Mac, you can also edit images in Photos. Just open any photo, then click the "Edit" button, which looks like a bunch of sliders.