Many people often think that Adobe Photoshop is the only tool for editing photos. However, this powerful software can be challenging for beginners to learn and also comes with a significant cost. Luckily, there are many other tools that let you Enhance your pictures without needing Photoshop, making advanced edits accessible and affordable. This guide will show you how to do just that, offering alternatives that are easier to use and often free.
What Does "Enhance Without Photoshop" Really Mean?
"Enhance without Photoshop" means making your photos look better by improving their overall quality, making them clearer, and bringing out important details. Photos are a powerful way to communicate messages, as the human brain processes images faster than other data types.
When you improve them, your images become more engaging and impressive, with content featuring relevant imagery getting 94% more views. People also remember information better when it's paired with images, and visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media.
This guide is helpful for everyone, whether you take photos with your phone or a camera, and no matter your skill level. You can achieve great results using free tools and simple features that offer functionality similar to Photoshop.
Quick Ways to Improve Photos Using Built-In Editors
Many phones, computers, and tablets have photo editing tools already built into them, which can provide quick improvements. These built-in editors are a great starting point for simple fixes.
One very simple way to enhance an image is to use Auto-enhance.
This feature can automatically correct a dark image, make a picture clearer, or adjust colors with just one tap, saving time and effort. It can be used alone or combined with other filters and adjustments for a perfect photo.
You can also easily adjust exposure, contrast, whites/blacks, and highlights/shadows. Changing brightness makes the whole photo lighter or darker, though it should be done carefully to avoid overly bright areas. Contrast helps your image stand out by making the light parts lighter and the dark parts darker, creating more drama.
However, using too much contrast can cause highlights to become too bright (blown out) and shadows too dark, leading to a loss of detail and dimension.
For color fixes, you can adjust settings like white balance, vibrance, and saturation. Saturation controls how strong or faded your colors look; higher saturation means bolder, brighter colors, while complete desaturation results in a black-and-white photo.
It's important not to overdo saturation, as too much can make colors look strange and unnatural, appearing almost glowing or neon. You can also fine-tune warmth and clarity using image enhancement sliders. These tools help to bring back natural colors or create a desired aesthetic.
To make your pictures sharper, use clarity/structure and sharpening tools. These help make blurry areas clearer, but be careful not to over-sharpen, as it can create odd lines around objects (sharpening halos).
Some tools also offer noise reduction for photos taken in low light, which helps clean up grainy images. PhotoWorks, for instance, allows you to fix blurry parts locally using tools like Adjustment Brush, Radial Filter, and Graduated Filter, or sharpen the entire image by adjusting the Clarity setting.
You can also crop, straighten, and correct perspective to improve composition. Cropping removes unwanted or distracting areas, improves the picture's layout, and helps emphasize a focal point. A good tip when cropping is to follow the "rule of thirds," which divides your photo into nine sections to guide placement of your focal point.
PhotoWorks offers custom aspect ratios and grids like the Golden Ratio and Rule of Thirds to assist with cropping. You can also fix slanted photos by slightly rotating them using a slider. However, significant cropping can reduce image quality and resolution, so it’s best to start with a large image.
Free Tools That Are Easier Than Photoshop
Many online tools and apps offer powerful editing capabilities without the steep learning curve of Photoshop.
Best Online Photoshop Editors
• Canva is an excellent graphic design program, widely used for creating social media images, presentations, and other designs. It includes basic photo editing tools like cropping, blurring, filters, and brightness/contrast adjustments. Canva also offers powerful AI features, some of which are paid, for tasks such as removing backgrounds, generating AI images, and using "Magic Studio" features like Magic Resize and Magic Animate. It's invaluable for maintaining brand consistency across teams, providing templates for various content formats, and even offers automation through Zapier.
• Pixlr E and X are robust free photo editors that work directly in your web browser, meaning you don't need to download any software. Pixlr E is similar to Photoshop, offering layers, advanced tools, and a familiar interface. Pixlr X is simpler and AI-focused, designed for beginners, with features like generative fill and expand that use AI text prompts to expand or reformat photos for social media. Pixlr also offers Pixlr BG as a free tool for easy background removal, which works very well using "AI Cutout" technology.
• Photopea is another free, browser-based tool that closely resembles Photoshop's interface, making it easy for users transitioning from Photoshop. It supports many file types, including Photoshop's own PSD files, as well as XCF, Sketch, and Figma files. Photopea allows the import and use of ABR format custom Photoshop brushes, Smart Objects, and vector tools like paths and shapes. It offers built-in cloud storage (Peadrive) and connectivity to other cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive. While all editing features are free, AI object replacement and unlimited background removal are premium features.
• Fotor calls itself "fundamentally Photoshop online" and combines features from Photoshop and Canva. It's known for its excellent AI Magic Eraser to remove unwanted objects, even without precise brushing, and also offers text removal, background removal/replacement, generative expand, upscaling, sharpening, and comprehensive portrait retouching tools like skin blemish removal and makeup enhancement. Fotor can also generate realistic AI photos and video clips from text prompts.
• BeFunky is simple to use with automatic tools for improving image quality, correcting colors, balancing exposure, sharpening blurry images, creating a bokeh effect with lens blur, and denoising. It is also suitable for creating photo collages and retouching selfies and portraits.
Best Mobile Apps For Image Enhancing:
• Snapseed is a powerful app with a user-friendly interface and extensive editing tools. It allows you to adjust exposure, color balance, and even overlay images using its Double Exposure feature. A standout feature is its selective editing tool, which lets you apply changes to specific areas. Snapseed also offers a range of creative filters such as Noir, Grunge, Drama, and Pop.
• Afterlight provides basic adjustments like brightness, contrast, and saturation, along with more advanced features like curves and selective colors. It also offers a wide range of filters, textures, and light leaks for unique touches.
• VSCO is a popular app known for its minimalistic interface and extensive selection of high-quality presets, helping users achieve professional-looking results quickly. It includes advanced editing tools for exposure, temperature, and skin tone adjustments, and a community platform for sharing photos.
• Picsart offers both basic and advanced features, including adjusting brightness and contrast, using curves, editing backgrounds, and correcting perspective. It also provides an embedded collection of stickers, frames, and backgrounds, along with AI-driven tools to instantly improve photo quality, apply filters, replace parts of images, and generate avatars.
• Upscale.media is an AI-powered SaaS application designed to quickly increase image resolution. It can effortlessly upscale and enhance images from 200% to 400% (2x to 4x) in a single click, converting low-resolution images into high-resolution ones without sacrificing quality. It enhances image quality by balancing sharpness and softness, and can remove JPEG artifacts like blockiness and color degradation caused by compression. The app features a simple user interface and is free to use on laptops, desktops, and iOS/Android devices.
Desktop Free Apps:
• GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free, open-source photo editor often considered Photoshop’s long-lost twin. It offers a comprehensive toolset including layers, masks, filters, and brushes, allowing for intricate edits. GIMP is compatible with Linux, macOS, and Windows, but its performance can be slower on larger, more complex projects or when processing high-resolution images with multiple layers.
• PhotoWorks is an easy-to-use desktop editor for Mac and Windows, offering pro-level tools for both amateur and professional users. With it, you can easily correct colors, remove unwanted objects, change backgrounds, dehaze images, and fix photo composition. It also features an extensive set of AI-driven retouching tools for removing skin blemishes and reshaping face and body parts. PhotoWorks supports over 450 RAW formats and includes a collection of presets, textures, and more than 200 filters.
• PhotoScape X is a powerful Photoshop alternative for photographers, especially those working with RAW format files. It combines features and an interface similar to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, offering robust tools for color correction, cropping, chromatic aberration removal, skin retouching, and noise reduction. It excels in fast batch editing, allowing the same edits to be applied to multiple photos at once. PhotoScape X also has "quiet AI" features like accurate auto-color and auto-levels. Some advanced features, such as curves and black & white conversion, are only available in its Pro version.
• PhotoDirector is a user-friendly alternative to Photoshop available on PC, Mac, Android, and iOS. It offers a wide range of features including touch-up capabilities to perfect subjects' skin and facial features, various color effects like Black & White, Color Splash, and color replacement, and powerful Content-Aware Editing tools to add, remove, or clone objects and alter subject size. PhotoDirector also simplifies layer editing, allowing for complex effects like double exposure, and uses AI for features such as Person Segmentation for background removal and Sky Replacement.
• Krita is a 100% free and open-source application available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, primarily geared towards artists and illustrators. It offers an advanced brush library, masking, selection options, path drawing, and can create both raster and vector artwork. While its photo editing process might be less direct than other apps, its noise reduction filter is excellent. Krita can also open and save PSD files, making it compatible with Photoshop workflows.
• MyEdit is a web-based tool known for its easy-to-use AI features that produce realistic results. It offers daily free AI credits (3 credits and one watermark-free download), which is unique among free alternatives. Key AI features include generative expansion and fill, text-to-image generation, upscaling, background removal, and product photo scene creation. MyEdit also includes audio editing capabilities, such as text-to-speech generation and sound effect generation.
• Photoroom is highly effective for creating product photos and social media content. It provides features like batch mode for editing up to 20 photos at once, high-quality background removal and swapping, realistic product mockups, and specific listing size formats for popular marketplaces like Etsy and Amazon. Photoroom also allows users to create grid posts, collages, and offers a large selection of graphic and font elements for marketing content. It can integrate with Zapier to automate design workflows, such as removing backgrounds from new images in specific folders.
Best AI Photo Enhancer EnhanceIT
EnhanceIT is an all-in-one free AI-powered photo enhancer and restorer tool. It is described as a service that can transform low-quality photos into crystal-clear 4K quality.
The Reason You should choose EnhanceIT
- It is a free AI-powered photo enhancement tool available online, meaning there is no need to download or pay for heavy software and apps.
- It offers one-click photo enhancement, making digital image processing easy to navigate and perfect for instantly enhancing low-resolution photos without needing long tutorials.
- It enhances photo quality without losing details and provides professional results with no watermarks on the enhanced images.
- It is a cross-device image upscaler, working seamlessly across Mac, iOS, Windows, and mobile devices.
- It offers a 99.9% enhancement success rate and <30s real-time processing.
- It can achieve 4K+ maximum resolution.
- It has a high user satisfaction rating of 4.9/5.
Features
AI Enhance & Restore
- Photo Enhancer: Transforms low-quality photos into 4K quality, unblurs photos, denoises images, and enhances resolution without losing details. It can sharpen images and apply automatic image denoising, improving overall photo quality by 200%.
- Photo Restoration: Brings cherished memories back to life by repairing scratches and tears, restoring faded colours, fixing discolouration, and enhancing details through AI technology.
- Anime Enhancer: So, if you’re an anime fan this tool is for you because it can enhance your favourite anime character image upto 4k quality in one go.
- Image Colorizer: This tool can be helpful if you have old images like of your childhood or of you grand parents beasue it can automatically using its AI technology can enhnace those photos and make them like they are taken now.
- Object Remover: Allows for the removal of unwanted objects from images. This can be helpful for beach images where you don’t want any third person to show into your images. (it can remove your ex from photo as well.)
- Background Remover: Offers easy background corrections and removal. Means if you’ve taken you photo in a dull background you can remove that in enhanceit tool and change it to background you like the most.
- Portrait Enhancement Technology: Resolves blurry portraits by applying intelligent facial detail enhancement through convolutional neural networks (CNNs), automatically performing photo clarification and image denoising to retouch, unblur, and enhance overall face details.
- Image Upscaler: Upscales images without quality loss, transforming low-resolution images into 720p, 1080p, 4K, and higher quality through advanced image interpolation, eliminating pixelation issues.
- • Supports PNG, JPEG, WEBP formats up to 5MB for uploads
Pro-Level Edits Without Photoshop
You can get professional results using these key techniques:
- Tone curves allow you to adjust contrast with great control.
- HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance) color mixing helps you fix specific colors in your image.
- Selective edits and masks let you make changes to only certain parts of your photo.
- For retouching, you can smooth skin, remove blemishes, and even reshape facial features or body parts.
- Lens corrections and fixing perspective issues can also be done in many ways.
Mobile Editing: Quick Fixes
Mobile apps make it easy to edit on the go:
- A 1-minute fix might include auto-enhancing, cropping, and adjusting clarity and white balance.
- A 5-minute fix could involve adjusting lights, mixing colors, and making some selective edits.
- For a 10-minute fix, you might use curves, gradients, and more detailed retouching.
- Many tools also help you prepare your photos for social media by adjusting their size and look.
Taking Better Photos to Edit Less
The best way to edit less is to start with great photos:
- Pay attention to light when you shoot.
- Use good composition, like the rule of thirds.
- Avoid blur by keeping your camera steady.
- Consider shooting in RAW format for more editing freedom.
Batch Editing and Presets for Speed
To save time, especially with many photos:
• You can create and use presets or filters to apply the same look to different images.
• Some tools, like PhotoScape X and Photoroom, allow you to apply the same edits to many photos at once.
Exporting Photos Professionally
When you finish editing, choose the right settings for sharing:
• Adjust the resolution, aspect ratio, and compression.
• Consider the file format (like JPG or PNG) and color settings.
• Choose different export settings depending on whether the photo is for printing or for the web.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
To make your photos look natural and professional, avoid these common errors:
• Over-saturation can make colors look strange and fake.
• Over-sharpening can create odd lines around objects.
• Making shadows too dark or highlights too bright can lead to a loss of detail.
• Over-smoothing skin can make people look unnatural or "plastic".
By following these tips and exploring the many great alternatives, you can enhance your photos beautifully without ever needing Photoshop.
Conclusion
Adobe Photoshop has long been the industry standard for image editing, often becoming synonymous with the act of "photoshopping" itself. However, its high price tag and complex, steep learning curve present significant barriers for beginners and even some professionals.
Fortunately, the digital landscape for photo editing has evolved significantly, now offering a multitude of powerful, user-friendly, and often free alternatives that can achieve professional-level results without the complexity or financial investment of Photoshop.
These accessible alternatives encompass a range of formats, including dedicated desktop programs like PhotoWorks, GIMP, PhotoScape X, and PhotoDirector; mobile applications such as Snapseed, VSCO, and Picsart; and a growing array of online, web-based editors like Canva, Pixlr E/X, Fotor, Photopea, and EnhanceIT.
A key driver in this evolution is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has become an integral part of modern photo enhancer free. AI-powered tools simplify and accelerate tasks such as auto-enhancement, background and object removal, image upscaling, noise reduction, and advanced portrait retouching, often achievable with just a single click.
Users can now achieve a wide array of enhancements, from fundamental adjustments like cropping for focus and composition, adjusting brightness, contrast, and saturation to more sophisticated operations. These include restoring old photographs, unblurring images, enlarging without quality loss, applying artistic filters, and seamlessly manipulating elements within a photo.
Many of these tools are also cross-device compatible, working efficiently across various operating systems and mobile devices, making high-quality photo editing accessible to a broader audience for both personal and professional projects.
By leveraging these innovative alternatives, individuals and businesses can produce stunning visual content efficiently and affordably, proving that professional-grade photo enhancement is no longer exclusive to Photoshop users.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What does "enhancing photos without Photoshop" really mean?
Enhancing photos without Photoshop refers to using alternative software, mobile applications, or online tools that offer similar or even advanced photo editing and enhancement capabilities, but without the need for Adobe Photoshop itself. These tools often aim to be more user-friendly, affordable (or free), and less resource-intensive than Photoshop, making professional-level photo editing accessible to a wider audience.
Why should I consider alternatives to Photoshop for photo enhancement?
Photoshop is powerful but has significant drawbacks, including an excessively high price tag and a complex interface that can be challenging and time-consuming for beginners to learn. Alternatives offer similar functionality at a much lower cost or for free, with simpler user interfaces and often AI-powered features that automate complex tasks, saving time and effort.
What types of tools are available for photo enhancement without Photoshop?
There are several categories of tools:
- Desktop Programs: Full-featured software installed on your computer, such as GIMP (free, open-source, similar to Photoshop), PhotoWorks (for Mac and Windows with pro-level tools and AI retouching), inPixio Photo Studio (for quick edits, filters), PhotoScape X (for professional RAW photo editing and batch editing), and PhotoDirector (user-friendly alternative with AI tools, color controls, layer editing).
- Mobile Apps: Applications for smartphones and tablets, including Snapseed (user-friendly interface, selective editing), Afterlight (basic and advanced adjustments, filters), VSCO (minimalistic interface, high-quality presets), Picsart (basic and advanced features, AI-driven tools), and Lightroom Mobile (free features for light and color mix).
- Online Services/Web-based Editors: Tools accessible through a web browser, often AI-powered and free, such as EnhanceIT (all-in-one free AI photo enhancer and restorer), Upscale.media (AI image upscaler for resolution increase), Canva (graphic design with photo editing, AI features, templates), Pixlr E/X (free, robust, Photoshop-like interface, AI features), Fotor (AI object removal, photo/video editing), Photopea (browser-based, Photoshop-like, supports custom brushes), BeFunky (ease of use, automatic tools, denoising), Photoroom (product photos, social media, background removal/swaps), and MyEdit (pro-level AI effects, daily free AI credits).
Are there completely free options for enhancing photos?
Yes, Tools like EnhanceIT is an all-in-one free AI-powered photo enhancer and restorer which is completely free as well.