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8 Photo Editing Tips When You’re On a Tight Budget

Published

3 years ago

06/22/2022

Kossi Adzo

Photo editing used to be complex for the average person to master and it could often be expensive.

The good news is, these days, you can use a free online photo editing tool to achieve virtually any type of edit that you need to make to your images.

So, if you need to edit photographs and you are on a tight budget, you will want to check out the following eight helpful tips.

Table of Contents

1. Effectively Use a Cropping Tool

When you use a free online photo editing tool that has all of the best features available, it becomes easy to edit your photos and create a more polished and professional look.

One feature that always comes in very handy is a cropping tool.

To use a cropping tool in the best way, crop images so that they cut out details that interfere with the story you are telling.

For example, if you run a pet website and you have a photo of a dog with a food truck in the background, crop the image to focus solely on the dog.

You can also use a cropping tool to center the most important objects in your photos, although you should also try cropping pictures where the main image is not centered.

For portraits, it is a good idea to crop at eye level, but when cropping faces, it is best to leave some breathing room so that the face does not take up the whole frame.

Also, when cropping pictures of people, make sure you do not cut off limbs.

2. Utilize the Power of a Background Remover

Following on from the last point, you can easily get rid of that food truck in the background and leave only the dog showing, for example, by using a background removal tool.

There are lots of software that can help you remove image backgrounds like Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop allows you to easily remove backgrounds and unwanted objects from your photo using the Content-Aware Fill tool. Using this tool, you can easily create a transparent background with a single click and replace the background with a color or another image.

By using a background remover, you can craft beautiful-looking imagery that is sure to engage.

3. Resize Your Photos

When posting photographs on the web, you need to ensure they are sized correctly.

The best photo editing software makes it easy to resize images. You can resize photos manually or use presets. And you can easily resize photos via pixel dimensions or scale by percentages while maintaining the aspect ratio.

That means you can still maintain high resolution after resizing your images.

4. Add Effects

The best online photo editing software comes with multiple effects that you can use on your photographs to enhance and customize them.

For instance, you could turn your photo into an image that looks like a watercolor painting or an oil painting.

You could even use a cartoon effect on portraits and other images, which would be suitable if you are posting the images on a trendy pop culture website, for instance.

5. Try Different Lighting and Contrast

Adjusting the lighting and contrast of your photos can turn an okay image into a professional-looking and more engaging image.

With a photo editing tool, you can adjust things like brightness, highlights, shadows, and contrast to bring out the best qualities of your photos.

You can even enhance the colors of your photos by increasing the saturation and vibrancy.

6. Make Good Use of the Sharpening Tool

When photographs are even only slightly out of focus, it can make the pictures look far less professional.

Indeed, if you use such photos on your website and social media channels, they can actually put off the people that you want to engage.

Thankfully, you need never have another out-of-focus image. Simply use the sharpening tool of an online photo editor.

In fact, even images that are not blurry at all can benefit from being sharpened. You can define lines and make images pop when you use a sharpening tool, and you have the option of adding either a low or high level of sharpness.

7. Create Beautiful Photo Collages

Photo collages make excellent backgrounds for websites, but they can be used in numerous other ways too.

When you use the best editing software, it becomes easy to make professional and beautiful-looking collages.

You can either drop multiple photos into a collage template and create an automated collage with a single click or you can play around by manually adding images to a photo collage creator.

8. Replace Colors

You can also replace colors in images with the best editing tools. That can be very handy for all kinds of purposes, but it is especially useful when creating photos of products or professional-looking graphic designs for your branding.

All it takes is a couple of clicks to replace one color with another.