10 Best Photo Editing Software for PC in 2024 (Tested Reviews)

10 Best Photo Editing Software for PC in 2024 (Tested Reviews)

Embarking on a visual journey through the digital landscape demands the perfect tools to transform ordinary photos into captivating masterpieces. As we enter 2024, the realm of PC photo editing software has evolved, offering many options for photographers, designers, and influencers.

In this article, we’ve meticulously tested and reviewed the ten best photo editing software options, unveiling a curated selection that promises to breathe life into your images. Whether you seek intricate details, seamless enhancements, or artistic flair, these cutting-edge tools are poised to redefine how you craft and refine your visual narratives.

Also Read: Get Everything about Remini Al photo enhancer.

A great solution to Ease your difficulty

If you like free software, GIMP is a great choice. It’s like a free version of Photoshop with cool features like layers and masks. You can add more cool stuff to it using plugins and scripts.

If you’re starting with photo editing and want something easy, you might like Corel PaintShop Pro or Affinity Photo. They’re simple to use and have all the essential tools you need.

1. Photoshop

Photoshop

Photoshop, a ubiquitous software in our fast-paced world, boasts an extensive toolkit that caters to individuals from diverse backgrounds. Widely employed by professional photographers, photo editors, and graphic designers, it has become synonymous with enhancing the aesthetic appeal of photographs.

Its versatility shines through its availability in multiple languages, including English, Chinese, Polish, Japanese, Dutch, and more. Beyond borders and language barriers, Photoshop is an indispensable tool, enabling users to unleash their creative potential and achieve visually stunning results. Its global popularity underscores its pivotal role in the realm of digital image editing and design.

Key Feature

  • Layering System: Manipulate images without altering pixels, enabling non-destructive editing and flexible arrangement.
  • Undo Options: Comprehensive history for easy reverting to previous states, ensuring a risk-free editing process.
  • Colour Adjustment Tools: Tools for precise colour, contrast, and brightness adjustments, including crop, healing brush, and colour balance features.
  • Hue and Saturation Tools: Fine-tune color intensity and richness for detailed adjustments.
  • Selection Tools: Various tools for isolating and manipulating specific elements within a scene.
  • Clone Stamp Tools: Duplicate pixels to cover imperfections or replicate details seamlessly.
  • Private Training: On-site training options allow beginners to navigate the software’s complexity effectively.

Price: The cost is $20.99 per month or $239.88 per year.

2. Paint.NET

Paint.NET

Paint.NET is an intuitive image editing software, designed for quick and easy learning. Its user-friendly interface incorporates a tabbed document system, allowing users to manage multiple images through corresponding tabs efficiently.

Drawing parallels with Photoshop, Paint.NET offers advanced features including drawing tools, layer functionality, an extensive version history, and a diverse range of special effects tailored for photo editing. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced user, the software balances accessibility and powerful editing capabilities, making it a valuable tool for those seeking versatility in image enhancement without the complexity of a steep learning curve.

Key Features

  • Users can efficiently handle multiple layers, with options to create, duplicate, merge, flip, rotate, and zoom.
  • Essential photo editing capabilities include noise reduction, distortion, 3D effects, sharpness enhancement, and red-eye removal.
  • Initially designed for drawing, it’s a favourite among professional artists due to its exceptional drawing features.
  • The software offers nearly 800 active plugins in the forum, adding tools such as transformative tools, pens, brushes, masks, and blend modes for magic editing.
  • Its interface is highly intuitive and easy to use, surpassing Photoshop’s user-friendliness.

Price: The usage is complimentary, but the most recent edition in the Windows Store requires a monthly payment of $8.99.

3. Canva

Canva

Canva, hailed as the epitome of user-friendly graphic design tools, offers an extensive repository of 600 thousands of pre-built templates and elements. Tailored for casual and professional users, Canva facilitates the creation of diverse content, spanning graphics, videos, infographics, presentations, GIFs, and more.

The tool’s unprecedented popularity is evidenced by a remarkable milestone, with 120 million monthly users recorded in September 2022. As a versatile and accessible platform, Canva empowers individuals worldwide to effortlessly unleash their creativity, setting a benchmark for intuitive design tools and revolutionizing how people approach graphic design.

Key Features

  • It offers 100 design types, over a hundred thousand stock photos, and 250,000 free templates.
  • The platform provides complimentary cloud storage for projects, accommodating designed images, videos, and presentations, with a cap of 5GB.
  • Users can effortlessly design logos, thumbnails, cover pages, posts, and social media videos at no cost, with customizable sizes.
  • Upload images for editing, resizing, collage creation, adding new elements, and removing existing components.
  • Particularly beneficial in education, Canva facilitates the creation of presentations with diverse slide designs, introducing an innovative automated approach.
  • Users can incorporate text into designs, with customization options for font styles, sizes, and effects.

Price: The cost is $14.99 monthly for a team comprising up to 5 individuals and $119.99 annually.

4. PhotoScape 

PhotoScape

PhotoScape, crafted by MOOII Korea, is a versatile photo editing software accessible across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Essential for photo enhancement, it offers a comprehensive range of filters and effects.

The toolkit includes features like cutting, resizing, printing, GIF animation, and color adjustments, providing users with robust capabilities. With its cross-platform compatibility, PhotoScape ensures a seamless editing experience for users across different operating systems, making it a reliable choice for diverse photo editing needs.

Key Features

  • It offers a variety of font styles, file formats, texture designs, animation effects, color effects, and templates.
  • The “page” feature lets you merge two photos into one, while the combine tool creates collages with multiple images.
  • Control tools like film effects, re-order, undo, auto level, and sharpening are conveniently located at the bottom of the window.
  • Built-in filters such as Vignette, Jitter, Cellophane, and Linear gradient are available for various editing needs.
  • Enhance images by adding frame icons, and adjusting colors, contrast, and brightness using this top-notch photo editing software for PC.

Price: It offers a complimentary version with numerous features and a professional version with advanced capabilities priced at $39.99 monthly.

5. GIMP

GIMP

GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is an open-source software available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It rivals Photoshop in its editing capabilities, offering users a versatile platform for image manipulation.

GIMP’s strength lies in its adaptability, as users can enhance its functionalities by integrating various plugins and extensions. This flexibility allows GIMP to efficiently handle a diverse array of tasks, making it a powerful and customizable choice for those seeking robust editing tools without the constraints of proprietary software.

Key Features

  • It’s free software that can do many things like show images, change image formats, process many images simultaneously, work as a simple paint program, and fix up photos.
  • The official website has more than 20 tutorials for both beginners and experts.
  • It has powerful painting tools like Clone, Pencil, Airbrush, and Brush.
  • The color menu lets you adjust brightness, color, temperature, exposure, shadows, curves, levels, and more in an image.
  • It can do magic on many image formats like PNG, TIFF, TGA, SVG, XPM, JPEG, BMP, PSD, PCX, MNG, and GIF.
  • You can change an image’s appearance by cropping, rotating, and transforming it. Also, you can change the image format.

Price: $19.99 per month

6. Capture One

Capture One

Capture One, akin to Photoshop, emerges as a robust tool for fine-tuning intricate details in images. Professional photographers praise it and hold the top in PC photo editing software reviews. Renowned for its speedy processing in retouching, enhancing, and organizing images, Capture One streamlines workflows for efficient editing.

Its capability to edit large batches swiftly allows photographers to create professional-grade photos precisely. Capture One is preferred, delivering advanced editing features and a seamless user experience for PC users.

Key Features

  • A cool thing about this software is Tethered shooting. It lets you connect your camera to a computer and make changes in real-time using powerful tools.
  • It works with cameras like Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Leica for Tethered shooting.
  • Capture One does many things, like editing layers similar to Photoshop, importing digital photos, adjusting images, and organizing them.
  • A color editing tool lets you tweak the saturation, hue, highlights, shadows, mid-tones, and brightness of any color in a picture without affecting other colors.
  • You get to work on a central dashboard for capturing, editing, sharing, printing, and converting RAW photos.

Price: $24 per month or $179per year

7. PicMonkey 

PicMonkey 

PicMonkey, a versatile photo editing tool, caters to beginners and professionals with its diverse editing tools, spanning basic cropping to graphic art. Boasting numerous templates, fonts, and add-on graphics, it has become a favoured choice. The user-friendly interface enhances its appeal, making it an accessible option.

PicMonkey’s powerful and easy-to-use editing tools ensure top-notch results, and its seamless integration with social media features adds an extra layer of convenience for users seeking a comprehensive and effective photo editing experience.

Key Features

  • After editing, you can share your creative work on Instagram easily.
  • Use the soft effect to blur the background around your main subject and give your photos a cool look.
  • Change colours in different parts of your photo with the colour changer tools.
  • Make small adjustments to your images using the eraser and paint brushes.
  • Create a pro look for your Instagram posts and logos with matching templates.
  • Quickly remove backgrounds with the pro background remover tool.
  • Give your portraits a polished look using the touch-up tool.
  • Make cool collages with different layout grids, mixing photos, stock pictures, videos, and colours.
  • Add a trendy vibe to your photos with frames and museum-quality effects.

Price: $7.99 per month

8. Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo is a graphic design tool for professionals, offering features like metadata editing, dynamic range merging, and copyright information addition. It supports both raster and vector images, allowing users to preview edits.

The tool stands out with its focus stacking functionality, enabling the seamless combination of multiple pictures. Affinity Photo provides a centralized and efficient platform for image editing, making it a preferred choice for graphic design professionals seeking advanced features and versatility.

Key Features

  • It has tools to remove blemishes or unwanted things from pictures using patch removal or inpainting brushes.
  • Speedy and powerful retouching tools like Dodge, Burn, Clone, Patch, and Blemish Removal are available.
  • You can quickly zoom in on a picture and make complex compositions and beautiful paintings with multiple layers.
  • Boost your creativity with features like batch processing, professional retouching, panorama stitching, 360-degree image editing, and PSD editing.
  • Use it instead of Adobe Photoshop to open and edit Photoshop files.
  • Make your photos attractive with features for reducing noise, creating shadows and highlights, and editing in black and white.
  • Easily adjust feathering, smoothing, and anti-aliasing.
  • The layer system gives you the flexibility to design and edit photos.

Price: $49.99 per month

9.PhotoPad

PhotoPad

PhotoPad, an award-winning photo editing software, excels in modifying various image formats. It consistently delivers stunning results with features ranging from basic tasks like cropping and rotating to advanced editing. Supporting multiple formats, including RAW, JPEG, TIFF, and PNG, PhotoPad ensures versatility.

Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible for users seeking effective and efficient photo enhancement. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced editor, PhotoPad remains a reliable choice, recognized for its ability to transform images and enhance their visual appeal.

Key Features

  • It has many cool photo effects like sepia, cartoons, oil paint, vignettes, and more.
  • You can do advanced things like removing red eyes and skin blemishes, just like Remini Photo Enhancer.
  • Like other photo tools, you can change contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, and more.
  • It can automatically add vibrant colors to black-and-white photos using smart technology.
  • Make photos better by reducing noise and blur.
  • There’s a library of clipart and tools to add text and captions to your images.
  • Create collages, mosaics, and panoramas with it.

Price: $19 per month

10. Corel PaintShop

Corel PaintShop

Corel PaintShop is a powerful photo editing software catering to both amateurs and professionals. Packed with numerous tools, it effortlessly enhances, edits, and manipulates digital images. Ideal for photographers and graphic designers, it enables the creation of stunning visual content.

Users can employ advanced techniques like layering, masking, and compositing for complex tasks while handling basic editing tasks such as cropping, resizing, and adjusting color and contrast. Corel PaintShop is a versatile solution, providing a user-friendly platform for diverse photo editing needs.

Key Features

  • Corel PaintShop supports raster and vector images (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, SVG).
  • Automation tools and batch processing save time and streamline workflows.
  • Customize palettes, and toolbars, and adjust icon/font appearance for increased productivity.
  • Updated features include improved performance, real-time blend mode preview, AfterShot Lab, and AI enhancements.
  • Advanced tools like AI Artifact Removal, Style Transfer, and Upsampling enhance digital photos.
  • Creative tools like brushes, drawing tools, colour palettes, and gradients elevate designs.

Price: $7.99 per month

FAQs

 It depends on your needs. Some popular ones include Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and Canva for different levels of editing.

A powerful computer with a good processor, ample RAM, and a high-resolution display is ideal for photo editing. Computers from brands like Apple (MacBook Pro) or Dell (XPS series) are often recommended.

Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom are popular apps for photo editing on PC. Other good options include Canva and GIMP, which offer a mix of powerful features and user-friendly interfaces.

Yes, there are free options like GIMP, Canva, and Shotcut for photo editing, while DaVinci Resolve and Shotcut are good choices for free video editing on PC.

Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom are compatible with Windows 10 and are often recommended. Other good choices for Windows 10 include Canva and GIMP, which provide powerful editing tools.

Final Verdict

Navigating the myriad options for photo editing software in 2024 demands careful consideration of features and user experiences. Our tested reviews unveil the top 10 contenders, each offering a unique blend of tools to cater to various needs.

Whether you’re a seasoned photographer, designer, or a casual user, these software options provide the means to transform ordinary photos into extraordinary creations.

With power, accessibility, and versatility, these tools empower users to unleash their creativity and achieve stunning results. The dynamic landscape of photo editing is at your fingertips, ready to shape and enhance your visual narratives.

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