7 Best Photo Editing Software for Photographers

Have you ever wondered how a landscape photographer can capture such amazing sunsets that look so breathtaking and magical? Or how a portrait photographer can find such beautiful models with perfect skin? Well, there's an excellent chance that those photographers used photo editing software in post-processing to refine and polish their photographs.

What is post-processing? It's an integral part of a digital photographer’s “process,” whether you're a professional or merely a hobbyist. This is where you edit your photos to balance hues, create special effects, improve saturation, remove blemishes, and more. These image enhancements and alterations can be done using special photo editing software.

There are many photo editing programs on the market. Like everything, each one has its unique advantages, disadvantages, and features. If you're still getting started as a photographer, our advice is just to keep it simple. You don't need the most advanced software on the market.

Well, what do you need? Here are the essential capabilities you should be looking for:

It should allow you to share your photos

It should enable you to perform necessary adjustments

It should have an adequate selection of filters and effects

It should be able to import and organize your photos

These are the basics. With these criteria, we've come up with a list of seven photo editing tools that any skilled real estate photographer can use.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is perfect for an intermediate or professional photographer. We have all heard of Photoshop — the industry-standard photo editing software. It contains all the tools to edit photos to the highest quality and is the world industry standard in Photo Editing software.

Adobe Lightroom

This powerful photo editor has become the standard tool for both professionals and novice photographers alike. With it, you can adjust the color, exposure, and tonality of a digital image. However, it is limited and not as powerful as Adobe Photoshop in terms of image manipulation — changing colors, removing spots, or composting it with other images.

Adobe Lightroom comes as one of the software applications in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, a subscription-based service with monthly plans starting at $9.99 per month. But along with it comes Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and other excellent Adobe applications.

Corel Paintshop Pro

Corel Paintshop Pro is a favorite of both professionals and novices because its photo editing tools and functions are easy to use. One of its capabilities is the ability to correct perspectives and change color gradients, color levels, white balance, and more. It also utilizes GPS data for geo-tagging. It can also help you detect faces in a collection of photos and it can do HDR (High Dynamic Range) merging as well.

Even with all those features, perhaps its most significant advantage or asset is its affordability. Because it has a large assortment of useful tools, you will be getting your money's worth.

GIMP

Do you think you need Adobe Photoshop? Here is a software program that can do about 80 percent of what Photoshop can do. GIMP is a bitmap-based image manipulation program that is ideal for quick and simple retouching and editing tasks. However, its user interface is not that polished compared to other applications.

On the plus side, it's an open-source program. Therefore it's free to use. And being platform-independent, it can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. You can also use free scripts and plugins to enhance its capabilities.

Serif PhotoPlus

This software's user interface is perfect for quick and easy fixes. It has the tools, power, and capability to do more creative and advanced edits. For example, it has a smart-selection feature to auto-select interesting image sections. Those sections can be customized to look like watercolor and oil paints.

Serif PhotoPlus can also restore old scanned photos. It can help you remove creases, marks, scratches, and other defects.

PicMonkey

This is not just a small piece of software, but a complete graphic design package. You can hone your design skills as you creatively edit your images. Aside from editing photos, it also allows you to crop, make collages, touch up, and more

Upon availing of the free trial, you can immediately take all the features for a test drive before you decide to invest your hard-earned cash. Some of the features you can try are the options to arrange your images into a collage or to edit your photos using specific templates. You can get started with the paid plans for as low as $7.99 per month.

Here are some of the features included:

Automatic sizing for social media

Basic filters

Blank canvas design

Collage effects

Templates

PicMonkey also gives you the ability to directly print canvases, cards, photos, and more.

Canva

This simple but elegant graphic design software has a huge fan base since it operates on the freemium business model. It comes with multiple products and photo editing tools.

The Canva Marketplace makes it super-easy for you to create dazzling visual content for your blog or website — what with its several cards, icons, photos, and templates. You can also download Canva on your phone so you can edit your photos on the go.

So what can you do with Canva? You can add templates and fonts to your pictures if you want to use them on your website, or you can adjust the various elements of your images with a simple drag-and-drop editor.

Here are some of the features included in Canva:

Add texture

Design grids and photo frames

Image cropping and straightening

Image transparency tool

Over 8,000 templates

Photo blur and vignette

Photo enhancer

Speech bubble maker

Stickers and badges

The Bottom Line

As photo editing technology advances, along with customer demands, look out for more tools to be offered in the photography community. So which software did you find easiest to learn and use when you were just getting started? Let us know in the comments below!

Do you want to scale your photography business, increase your sales, and free up your evenings for family and friends? Outsource your photo editing to PhotoAndVideoEdits.com.