These free photo editing apps will help make the photos you take on your mobile device or tablet even more amazing than they already are. In fact, you might love them so much that you won't find much of a need for free online photo editors or free photo editing software.

You'll find a ton of features in each of these free photo editing apps that include options to adjust colors, change orientation, crop, add effects, frame a photo, add stickers, remove red-eye, add fonts, and so much more.

If you have an iPhone or an Android phone, you'll be pleased to know that nearly every one of these apps is available on your phone and completely free to download and use.

Pixlr

What We Like

• Robust, easy-to-use tools.

• Offers more than 200 overlays for collages.

• Workspace is customizable.

What We Don't Like

• Lacks tutorials and instructions.

• Doesn't work with TIFF or RAW images.

• No phone or online live support. Only email and FAQs.

Pixlr is another free image editing app that lets you edit images from your camera roll as well as new ones you take from inside the app.

One of the first things that stand out to me is the fact that Pixlr can overlay multiple images on top of one another, and even adjust their opacity and size, a bit similar to a full-blown desktop image editing program that supports layers. Instead of placing your own images on top of each other, you can also use some of the partially-transparent overlays that are provided, such as a smoke, chemical burn, or outer space image.

Lots of adjustment tools are included with Pixlr. You can apply a pencil, silk, poster, watercolor, old, unicolor, vintage, or cross effect to an image, among others. Also supported is cropping and rotating the image, applying an auto fix to it, and adjusting contrast, blur, hue, sharpen, smooth, saturation, and lightness settings.

Tons of borders are available in categories like squared, nature, ripped paper, rounded corner, ink, grunge, and film. There are also plenty of text types you can choose from and dozens of stickers.

When you’re done using Pixlr, you can email and share your edited picture on social media sites. You can also resize it to any custom size before saving it back to your device.

Snapseed

What We Like

• Loaded with professional-level effects.

• Fun to experiment with nondestructive effects.

• User-friendly interface.

What We Don't Like

• Pro-level tools may require a learning curve for beginners.

The effects and styles you can add to an image with Google’s Snapseed app are very nice, and applying these changes is extremely easy with simple finger swipes.

All the tools are hidden away and only accessible if you swipe up and down while swiping left and right changes the intensity of the selected tool. For some tools, tapping the tool's button will show even more styles and effects you can apply in relation to that one tool.

You can edit an image with Snapseed by pasting one into the app, opening one from your photo library, or snapping a new one right through the app.

At the bottom of the app are around 15 different categories where all the tools are held. Some of Snapseed's categories include simple features like cropping and straitening tools while the others provide a way to make manual or automatic color adjustments, blur and focus parts of the image, add a frame to the picture, and, among other things, change brightness, ambiance, saturation, and warmth levels.

Snapseed also has cool effects like Vintage, Drama, HDR Scape, Grunge, and RETROLUX, each with their own set of color manipulation options and other customization opportunities.

A feature you may miss lets you compare your edited image with the one you originally imported. Just press and hold down on the image when you're not using any tools and you can instantly compare the two editions.

There are several options for saving and sharing your picture when you're finished. You can store it on your device, copy it, print it off, or share it over email, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

BeFunky

What We Like

• Fun collage mode with dozens of collage layouts.

• User-friendly and intuitive interface.

• No account required.

What We Don't Like

• Only the paid Pro version is ad-free.

• Difficult to align text precisely.

BeFunky is an extremely easy app to use because you can simply slide your finger side to side to adjust the intensity of the tools.

There are lots of things you can do with BeFunky, such as crop, straighten, and rotate an image. You can also adjust brightness, fill light, contrast, hue, soften, exposure, temperature, saturation, and other settings.

BeFunky has a text tool and can apply a border as well as a number of effects to an image. A red-eye remover, eye color changer, lipstick applier, wrinkle remover, and, among others, a teeth whitener tool is also included.

Undoing changes are super simple with BeFunky because it shows a thumbnail history of the changes you've made so you can easily determine how far back you want to revert the image to.

After you're done using BeFunky, you can download the edited image to the camera roll, save it to your BeFunky account, or send it to social media websites.

piZap Photo Editor

What We Like

• Free app contains filters, stickers, and stock images.

• Well-suited for making memes.

What We Don't Like

• Access to most features requires a monthly Pro subscription.

• Background images and borders no longer included in free version.

PiZap lets you edit images you have on your device or one from your Facebook account. You can also open a free background image from a gallery preloaded with the app.

The very first step lets you crop the image, and then you can add an effect, text, stickers, and borders, as well as remove the background in images. There's also a brush tool so you can paint any color on your photo with one of four brush sizes.

Because piZap supports layers, you can import more than one photo on top of the original, as well as move stickers behind or in front of other pictures.

When finished editing, you can save the picture to your device or send it to Facebook, Twitter, or email.

PicsArt Photo Editor + Collage

What We Like

• Superlative functionality includes time lapse, collage, effects, and stickers.

• Robust social interaction possibilities with other artists.

• Plenty of creative user controls.

What We Don't Like

• Serves up excessive ads.

• Not suitable for children under 13 due to some mature content.

PicsArt is a great photo editing app with ton of features, some completely unique to the other in this list. For starters, you're not limited to editing a picture from your device only; you can import an image from your Google Plus, Dropbox, Flickr, Facebook, or PicsArt account.

You're able to zoom up on the image regardless of what tool you're using, which is really helpful.

All the tools are listed at the bottom of the screen, such as a clone, curves, enhance, stretch, and crop tool. Along the menu bar are also effects, drawing tools, light/border/texture/artistic masks, and lens flare tools.

In addition to saving your image to any of the websites from above, you can also export it to Tumblr, Instagram, or DeviantArt.

PicLab Photo Editor

What We Like

• A fun, easy-to-operate app.

• Great for collages.

• Shares to social media sites.

What We Don't Like

• In-app purchases required for many features.

• Free version lacks advance editing options.

PicLab is another free editor for pictures. While many of the features are free to use, a small watermark is displayed on the bottom of the image when you save it.

The first edit you can perform with PicLab is scaling and cropping the photo. You can zoom up to the picture to reveal no background, select a photo from your library as the background, or choose from over 40 background textures and colors that you can apply.

There's a text tool with PicLab so you can add one or more pieces of text, each with a custom color and shadow options.

One of over 20 instant effects can be applied to the picture as well as borders, light effects, textures, and patterns.

Adobe Photoshop Express

What We Like

• Full-featured customizable app packed with goodies.

• No Photoshop experience required.

• Easy-to-use app that delivers top-notch results even for beginners.

What We Don't Like

• Free Adobe account required to access many features.

• No community features.

• Lacks tutorials.

Adobe Photoshop Express is Adobe's mobile photo-editing app. There are several nice tools to use, zooming is allowed at any time, and you can easily compare your edited image to the original while editing.

One of several 'looks' can be applied to the image, which is simply color effects, such as Glow, B&W, Memory, and more. You can also adjust the shadows, temperature, highlights, tint, exposure, vibrancy, and other levels of the image. The intensity of the effect and colors are easily adjustable with a slide bar.

If you'd rather not adjust these levels manually, there's an auto-fix tool that can attempt to enhance colors automatically.

A neat feature in Adobe Photoshop Express removes red-eye automatically by detecting the eyes in the picture. However, you can also manually apply the fix if the auto tool doesn't work.

The crop tool lets you straighten the picture, apply a manual crop, flip or rotate the image, and apply a preset crop size, such as one that fits the device perfectly, among other sizes.

To finish up the edit, there are lots of frames, edges, and borders you can choose from. There's also a small tool that can remove unwanted spots or blemishes.

Photos you've edited with this app can be saved to your camera roll, sent over email/text, saved to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, or opened in another app that accepts files.

VSCO

What We Like

• Best for users who want a simple app with basic features.

• Robust social community.

• Lots of advanced presets.

What We Don't Like

• No private setting for photos.

• Not suitable for young teens.

• Intrusive advertising.

VSCO is a much simpler app than most of the others on this list. There are several image effects, of which you can apply one, as well as all the basic color and size manipulation tools, such as a contrast and saturation adjuster.

You can also apply a colored tint to shadows and highlights.

VSCO keeps all your edited images together in the app so you can easily view them again without having to search through the other photos on your device.

When you're finished using VSCO, you can save your image to your camera roll, send it over email, or share it on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus.

If you need to edit or manipulate a photo or other image, in all likelihood you've considered using Adobe Photoshop to do so. First released almost thirty years ago, this powerful editing software is preferred by some of the world's top designers and can be utilized to create almost anything the imagination can conjure up. Many graphics-intensive movies and video games, as well as stunning works of art, have come to fruition with the help of Photoshop at some point along the way during the creative process.

Although you can pay monthly as opposed to a one-time fee, the price of running Photoshop can prove to be prohibitive. Hope is not lost, however, as there are several alternatives available which offer some of Photoshop's features and will not cost you a penny to use. Each of these free applications offers their own unique functionality, and some may be better suited than others when it comes to meeting your specific needs.​

For example, not all free Photoshop alternatives support the Adobe application's default PSD format. Others, meanwhile, will not be able to recognize some multi-layered Photoshop files. Limitations aside, one of the free options listed below (or a combination of several) may be exactly what you are looking for to create or modify an image.

GIMP

What We Like

• Constantly updated with new features.

• Highly customizable and extensible.

What We Don't Like

• Limited support for layers, macros, and custom shapes.

• Cluttered UI with annoying floating windows.

One of the most full-featured Photoshop alternatives, GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) offers such a large set of features that even the most complex tasks can be achieved without any strain on your budget. They say that you get what you pay for, but in GIMP's case, that idiom doesn't necessarily ring true. With a very active developer community that has historically listened to user requests and feedback, this free option continues to grow as raster editor technology expands.

While not always as intuitive as Photoshop in terms of functionality and design, GIMP makes up for some of its perceived clumsiness with several in-depth tutorials for both beginning and advanced users that help you use the majority of its components with little or no pre-existing knowledge of the open source application. With that said, if you're only looking for the very basics in a raster-based graphics editor then GIMP may actually be a little too much and you may benefit from one of the simpler alternatives on our list.

Available in almost twenty languages for Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms, GIMP recognizes almost all file formats that you'd expect from a paid editor like Photoshop including GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF among others, as well as partial support for PSD files (not all layers may be readable).

Also similar to Photoshop, a large number of third-party plugins are available that enhance GIMP's functionality further. Unfortunately, the main repository that houses them is outdated and hosted on an insecure site, so we cannot recommend utilizing registry.gimp.org at this time. However, you can also find some GIMP plug-ins hosted on GitHub. As always, download at your own risk when dealing with unverified third-party repositories.

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

Pixlr

What We Like

• Extensive layer support with multiple blending modes.

• Includes built-in filters and adjustment tools.

What We Don't Like

• No social media integration.

• Layer masks tool is cumbersome to use at first.

A browser-based alternative to Photoshop, Pixlr is owned by well-known software developers Autodesk and is quite robust when it comes to available features and allows for progressive editing and enhancing as well as original image design.

The Pixlr Express and Pixlr Editor web apps will run in most modern browsers as long as you have Flash 10 or above installed and offer a significant number of integrated filters along with limited layer support. Pixlr recognizes the main culprits when it comes to graphical file formats such as JPEG, GIF, and PNG and also allows you to view some PSD files, although those larger in size or complex in nature may not open.

The web-based Pixlr even has a handy Webcam feature built right into its dashboard that lets you capture and manipulate photos on-the-fly.

In addition to the browser version, Pixlr also has free apps for both Android and iOS devices that let you perform a number of editing features from your smartphone or tablet. The Android app is so popular, in fact, that it has been installed on well over 50 million devices.

• Chrome OS
• Linux
• macOS
• Windows
• Android
• iOS

Paint.NET

What We Like

• Streamlined interface is a breeze to navigate.

• Helpful keyboard shortcuts.

What We Don't Like

• UI lacks a tool for managing plug-ins.

• Text can't be edited after it's deselected.

A free Photoshop alternative strictly for Windows versions 7 through 10, the Paint.NET interface is reminiscent of the operating system's Paint application; the traditional image editing tool for PC users worldwide. The similarities are no coincidence, as the original developer's intent was to replace MS Paint with something a little better.

That was a long time ago, and Paint.NET has since grown by leaps and bounds to the point where it's comparable in some ways to the more advanced editing software on the market, both free and paid. This includes the ability to use multiple layers and blending, all the while maintaining a fairly simple interface that lends itself to even the most novice user. If you do get stuck, the Paint.NET forums are an invaluable source for assistance where inquiries are sometimes answered in mere minutes. Couple that with the tutorials found on the same website and this Windows-only graphics editor offers a user-friendly experience.

Although Paint.NET does not provide some of the higher-end functionality of Photoshop or even GIMP, its feature set can be expanded upon through the use of third-party plugins. For example, the application does not natively support PSD files but can open Photoshop Documents once the PSD plugin is installed.

The self-proclaimed fastest image editor available, Paint.NET can run in almost two dozen languages and is free to use for both business and commercial use with no restrictions.

• Windows 7 or higher

PicMonkey

What We Like

• Supports cloud storage integration.

• You can make custom collages without signing up.

What We Don't Like

• No layer support.

• Free version is rather limited.

Another platform-independent, web-based design and editing tool with a lot to offer is PicMonkey, which was seemingly designed with the neophyte user in mind but also packs a punch for those looking for more state-of-the-art features. As long as you have a browser running Flash, PicMonkey is accessible on virtually any platform and lets you start your creation from scratch or begin editing an existing image file in under a minute.

PicMonkey will not replace Photoshop's more advanced functionality and you won't have much luck with PSD files, but it is ideal for working with filters and even creating collages from within your favorite browser. The free version offers quite a bit in terms of features, but you'll need to pony up some cash if you want access to some of the app's exclusive effects, fonts, and tools as well as an advertisement-free experience.

The premium adaptation of PicMonkey features a 7-day free trial that can be activated by providing your email address and payment information. If you want to continue using its advanced functionality long-term, though, a monthly fee of $7.99 or $47.88 for an annual membership is required.

With an oft-updated blog featuring a bevy of tips and tutorials, you should be able to figure out whether or not PicMonkey is the right option to suit your needs within the week-long trial period.

Smartphone and tablet users may also want to try the free PicMonkey Photo Editor app, available for both Android and iOS platforms.

• Chrome OS
• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

SumoPaint

What We Like

• Great layer support.

• Affordable pro package.

One of our personal favorites, SumoPaint's interface will look very familiar if you have past Photoshop experience. The similarities are more than just skin deep, too, as its layering functionality and fairly wide range of editing tools, including several brushes and wand types, make it a formidable alternative.

The free version of SumoPaint runs in most Flash-enabled browsers and is mainly supported by on-page ads. There is also a Chrome Web App available for Chromebooks as well as users running Google's browser on other desktop operating systems.

More intricate projects may not be suitable for SumoPaint, and its file support is somewhat limited and does not include Photoshop's default PSD format. You can open files with traditional image extensions such as GIF, JPEG, and PNG while edits can be saved in the app's native SUMO format as well as JPEG or PNG.

If you try the free version and feel that SumoPaint is what you've been looking for, then you may want to give Sumo Pro a whirl. The paid version allows for an ad-free experience as well as access to additional features and tools for about $4 per month if you pay for a year in advance. Sumo Pro also offers a downloadable version of its software that can be used while offline, as well as access to a dedicated technical support team and cloud storage.

• Chrome OS
• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

Krita

What We Like

• Customizable interface.

• Brush tools feature detailed previews.

What We Don't Like

• Updates are often unstable.

• Consumes a lot of CPU resources.

An interesting editing and painting tool, Krita is an open source application that has seen its feature set expand significantly in recent years. With a nifty palette and a seemingly endless amount of brush customizations which can be stabilized to smooth out even the most unsteady hand, this Photoshop alternative supports most PSD files and offers advanced layer management.

Free to download, the regularly updated desktop application also utilizes OpenGL and allows you to author and manipulate HDR images among many other benefits. Available for Linux, Mac, ​and Windows, Krita boasts a fairly active forum containing sample artwork created by members of its user community.​

There is another version of Krita optimized for ultrabooks and other touchscreen PCs, named Gemini, available from Valve's Steam platform.

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

Adobe Photoshop Express

What We Like

• No registration required.

• Excellent white balance adjustment with numerous presets.

What We Don't Like

• Requires an internet connection to use.

• Only edits JPEG files.

While Adobe charges a fee to use its main Photoshop software, the company does offer free image editing tools in the form of the Photoshop Express application. Available for Android, iOS and Windows tablets and phones, this surprisingly capable app allows you to enhance and tweak your photos in a number of ways.

In addition to correcting issues such as red eye with just a tap of the finger, Photoshop Express also makes it easy to apply unique effects and incorporate custom frames and borders before sharing your pictures on social media or elsewhere from right within the app itself.

• Windows 8.1 or higher (desktop or tablet)
• Windows Phone 8.1 or higher
• Windows 10 Mobile