Taking pictures is not just a hobby for some people. It’s a profession, and there are many apps out there to help you capture the perfect shot and make it even better.
We’ve done the legwork for you and come up with this list of the best photo editing apps available right now, so you can get right down to business and produce your best work yet.
Some of these apps are free, while others cost money. Some are designed specifically to enhance your photo editing skills on your phone, while others are professional-grade software that you download onto your computer. Read on to learn more about each app’s features and find the one that’s right for you!
Best Apps For Pic Editing
I have to admit, I’m a fan of having a big screen when it comes to using photo editing software. But there are times when you want to clean up a picture while you’re on the go, and there are people who simply can’t be bothered with powering up large hardware only to make a compelling Instagram post. You may be surprised at just how much you can do with photos on a mobile app. Even advanced functions such as masking, tone curve adjustments, overlays, blemish fixing, HSL color correction, and gradients are no longer the sole province of desktop photo programs.
For this roundup, we’re sticking with Android apps and iPhone apps that do full standard photo editing. Some also add tools for organizing, cloud storage, and even social photo spaces of their own. We’re not including any gimmicky one-trick apps that only do things like face beautifying or collage creation. Please feel free to weigh in on any app listed here you think we’re wrong about—or any you think we should add—in the comments section at the bottom.
Adobe Lightroom Mobile Image
Adobe Lightroom Mobile
3.5
$9.99 Per Month at Adobe
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Lightroom Mobile is a great photo app even if you don’t use the desktop version of Lightroom, Adobe’s category-leading photo workflow software. The mobile app offers deep post-shot editing, as well as a camera feature that lets you shoot in raw format on the iPhone—Android can do that with its native camera—which gives you more leeway in correcting exposure, white balance, and other aspects of your images. You can even shoot with filters like black and white enabled. Free users get a decent selection of editing tools and even filters, and paid users get cloud storage for photos and a lot more effects, such as masking, healing, and suggested presets. The app is full of help and tips for producing great photos. Lightroom Mobile even lets you submit your work to a community of photographers who may try their hand at editing your shot. You can subscribe to the mobile-only apps for $4.99 per month or use a limited feature set for free. A standard Lightroom or Photography Creative Cloud Plan ($9.99 per month) gets you full use of the apps.
Price: Free; $4.99 per month for full feature set and cloud storage
Platforms: Android, iOS, web
Adobe Lightroom Mobile (for iPhone) Review
Adobe Photoshop Express Image
Adobe Photoshop Express
3.5
$0.00 at Adobe
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Another winner from Adobe is this simplified version of the company’s flagship Photoshop application. Like Lightroom Mobile, Photoshop Express is a freemium deal, but its paid plan is less expensive than Lightroom’s, at $2.99 a month or $34.99 a year. As with the related desktop application, Photoshop Express is typically used more for collages, blemish removal, text overlays, masks, and compositing than photo correction and enhancement. You do get all those tools in the app, however, and, like Lightroom Mobile and Snapseed, Photoshop Express supports raw camera files. A plentiful selection of filters rounds out the feature set.
Price: Free; $2.99 per month or $34.99 per year for full feature set
Platforms: Android, iOS, web
Adobe Photoshop Express Review
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Afterlight Image
Afterlight
2.5
This impressively powerful and tool-rich iPhone app is nevertheless easy to use. You can get a good number of basic editing features in Afterlight’s free version—exposure, contrast, cropping, saturation, and so on—but many of its best tools are only available in the paid version. It costs a reasonable $2.99 per month, $17.99 per year, or $35.99 for eternity. The paid perks include tone curve editing, gradients, material and text overlays, sharpness, and advanced filters for hue, saturation, and lightness (HSL). Note that the Android version is free but lacks most of Afterlight’s unique features.
Price: Free; subscription for full feature set: $2.99 per month, $17.99 per year, or $35.99 perpetual
Platforms: Android (limited feature set), iOS
Afterlight (for iPhone) Review
Apple Photos Image
Apple Photos
4.0
The Apples Photos app is only available on Apple devices. It comes preinstalled on iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers (the desktop version is slightly more advanced). The mobile version of Apple Photos lets you make especially cool edits with photos shot on iPhones and iPads, such as Long Exposure and balance effects for Live Photos. If you have a newer iPhone Pro, you can shoot in Apple’s ProRaw, a format that combines the advantages of raw camera formats with Apple’s computational photography wizardry. This gives you more editing possibilities, like lifting shadows and changing white balance. The apps’s interface is slick, as you expect from any Apple product, and you get all the standard exposure and color adjustments you could want.
Price: Included with Apple devices
Platforms: iOS
Apple Photos Review
Google Photos Image
Google Photos
4.0
$0.00 at Google Photos
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Google Photos is a service that’s mostly advertised as letting you store your photos in the cloud, but the mobile app also offers a good helping of both traditional and innovative photo editing tools. Those who sign up to the company’s Google One subscription storage pricing get more features in Google Photos than free users, including several particularly effective filters such as Dynamic, HDR, Luminous, Radiant, and Airy. Free users still get a full set of editing tools for adjusting the exposure, contrast, cropping, as well as adding text and drawing overlays. If that’s not enough, one menu lets you send an image to another photo app like PicsArt, if you have it installed. Note that the Google Photos mobile apps don’t support editing raw camera files, however.
Price: Included with Google account; enhanced tools added with storage upgrade
Platforms: Android, iOS, web
Google Photos Review
InShot Polish Image
InShot Polish
$7.99/Per Year at Google Play
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Coming from the maker of the excellent InShot video mobile editor, Polish is a freemium app with impressive photo editing chops. It has Photoshop-like editing tools such as masking, as well as Prisma-type options, such as the ability to transform your photo with AI-powered art style transfers. You can do plenty for free, but the most dazzling effects and tools cost a reasonable $7.99 per year for continuous feature updates or $14.99 for a one-time purchase. Both paid versions remove the plentiful ads and give you the current crop of features.
Price: Free; premium version $14.99 one-time fee or $7.99 per year
Platforms: Android, iOS
PicsArt Image
PicsArt
4.0
$0.00 at Google Play
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Piscsart has long taken positioned itself as the do-everything photo app. It has a seemingly endless assortment of editing and enhancement tools, but on top of that it also includes a social element of photo sharing. Members can participate in challenges and follow hashtags and creators. You can instantly remove backgrounds from portraits and replace them with textures and whatever you like. Unfortunately, to do most of the fun things you’ll need a paid account, which starts at $8.99 per month—though it drops to $4.66 with an annual commitment.
Price: Free; $8.99 per month or $55.99 per year for full feature set
Platforms: Android, iOS, web
PicsArt Photo Studio (for Android) Review
Pixlr Image
Pixlr
Pixlr has been in the free photo app game for many years, having started in 2008. It’s also well known as a free web-based photo editor. Strong points include Canva-style templates, colorful overlays, and a good selection of collage layouts. You get all the standard photo adjustment tools as well. A reasonable annual fee of $7.99 removes the ads and lets you access even more effects and templates.
Price: Free; $7.99 per year for full feature set
Platforms: Android, iOS, web
Polarr Image
Polarr
$3.99/Per Month at Polarr
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Like Lightroom and PicsArt, Polarr aims to provide a community of photo editors as well as a tools for editing and embellishing photos. It’s available on all the major desktop and mobile platforms, as well as via the web. In addition to the standard brightness, contrast, shadows, and so on, it offers a wealth of gradients, overlays, and retouching and transformation tools. You even get tone curve editing, as well as LUT and raw camera file support. The cropping tool is strong, but there’s no auto-leveling. One noteworthy innovation is the app’s ability to share or consume presets via QR codes. A paid subscription gets you new content and styles weekly as well as the company’s video-filter app, 24FPS.
Price: Free; $3.99 per month or $19.99 per year for full feature set
Platforms: Android, iOS, web
Snapseed Image
Snapseed
One of the original innovators among mobile photo editing apps, Snapseed became part of Google’s portfolio in 2012. The app uses a unique interface in which you swipe your finger left or right to make an adjustment, or up and down to choose which adjustment you’re making. It lets you edit raw camera files (but only in DNG format) as well as JPGs. Editing tools include Healing Brush, Structure (sharpness), HDR, and Perspective. One big plus is that the app is completely free with no upsells.
Price: Free
Platforms: Android, iOS
VSCO Image
VSCO
3.5
$0.00 at Apple.com
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VSCO is a longtime maker of professional filters for professional photographers, but this app not only filtering but also all the standard correction and editing functions. Furthermore, like some other apps here, it offers a community of photographers. The app experienced a moment of notoriety several years back with what was known as the VSCO girl movement. The interface is modern and clear, but editing in it seems to take a backseat to the sharing social aspect. That said, it does support raw camera files and offers advanced tools such as Split tone and HSL editing. A good number of the tools are behind the premium paywall, however.
Price: Free; premium for $19.99 per year
Platforms: Android, iOS
VSCO Review
8 best android apps for photo editing
These are the Best Photo Editor Apps for Android: Snapseed, PicsArt, Lightroom, and more!
Clicking photos is something we all do on a regular basis using our smartphones. Every smartphone processes images differently and produces photos that may not appeal to everyone. For example, some phones may capture photos with higher saturation levels, while some may capture warmer tones compared to what the scene actually looked like. This is where editing the photos you make comes in handy. Regardless of whether you have the best flagship smartphone or an affordable phone, editing photos to the way you like them is important. Especially if you plan on posting your photos on social media platforms, as it’s vital to give them a good look in order to make them attractive. To do so, you’ll need a good photo editor and we’re here to help you with just that. Here are some of the best photo editor apps for Android to help you make your photos look the way you want them to.
The Best Photo Editor Apps for Android:
Snapseed
PicsArt
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Photoshop Express
VSCO
Photo Editor Pro
Canva
Fotor
Pixlr
The Play Store is flooded with multiple photo editor apps, but not all of them are good or offer sufficient features and options to achieve a good edit. So we have zeroed in on the best apps that you can find to edit your photos, and ones that offer a good set of features and multiple editing options in the same app, like creating a collage, making graphic templates for YouTube thumbnails or Instagram stories, etc. Each app has its own set of use-cases and advantages so you can pick the one best suited to your needs or you can even download multiple apps based on your requirements.
Snapseed
Snapseed Photo Editor for Android
While Snapseed is not the most feature-rich photo editor app, it’s simple to use and is quite straightforward. It’s developed by Google and offers a user-friendly UI. You just have to choose the image you want to edit and you can see a host of different options to tinker around with.
If you want a simple edit with filters, you can do that, or you can even use some tools that are really handy like the Healing tool to remove unwanted elements from an image which is similar to the new Magic Eraser feature on the Pixel 6 series. or even Head Pose to change the look of someone’s head in a portrait shot. It’s free to use, doesn’t have any ads, and is a great photo editor app for beginners.
Snapseed
Download
QR-Code
Snapseed
Developer: Google LLC
Price: Free
PicsArt
PicsArt photo editor for Android
PicsArt is one of the most popular photo editor apps on Android and for good reason. It has probably every single tool you would need for basic and advanced photo editing, from different crop tools to background removal and even the ability to add text and multiple image layers just like more advanced programs like Photoshop. You can even create collages and banners for your social media using PicsArt.
The basic version is free but contains a good number of ads which may be annoying. You can get rid of them and unlock some advanced features by purchasing a PicsArt Gold membership plan.
Picsart Photo & Video Editor
Download
QR-Code
Picsart Photo & Video Editor
Developer: PicsArt, Inc.
Price: Free+
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom mobile
Adobe is known for its suite of photo and video editing apps for Windows and Mac and Lightroom is essentially one of those apps that’s very well-renowned among professional photo editors and so has been made available on Android as well.
Like the name would suggest, Lightroom is a photo editor for Android that lets you play around with light and colors in a photo. You can meddle around with the exposure levels, highlight, shadows, and mainly color tones in an image. If you want to color grade your photos, Lightroom is a great place to start with. You can also get Lightroom presets from all over the internet that can change the color scheme of your photos if you don’t want to edit them manually.
The basic version is free but if you want more features, you’ll have to subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud platform.
Lightroom: Photo Editor
Download
QR-Code
Lightroom: Photo Editor
Developer: Adobe
Price: Free+
Adobe Photoshop Express
Photoshop Express for Android
Just like Lightroom, Photoshop is also a part of Adobe’s suite of apps and is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, photo editor apps on Windows and Mac. If you’re wondering what’s different between Lightroom and Photoshop Express, Lightroom as stated earlier is more for color grading and tweaking the elements in a photo, like contrast and saturation. Whereas Photoshop deals with adding or removing extra elements in the photo, like additional image layers, stickers, or changing perspectives and adding text. You can first use Lightroom to tweak the colors in a photo and then import it into Photoshop to add extra elements if you want to.
Just like Lightroom, the basic version is free but you’ll have to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud to unlock advanced features.
Photoshop Express Photo Editor
Download
QR-Code
Photoshop Express Photo Editor
Developer: Adobe
Price: Free+
VSCO
VSCO photo editor for Android
VSCO is essentially like a social media app but just for photos. It’s a little like Pinterest in the sense that users can post their photographs for other VSCO users to take a look at and appreciate. Apart from being a platform to share your images, VSCO has an in-built photo editor that works great for basic edits in terms of lighting and colors, just like Lightroom. You can modify the brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue levels of an image along with sharpening it or adding some grain.
Most tools are accessible free of charge on VSCO while some features like HSL tuning require you to become a member. VSCO is a good photo editor to have especially for its in-built filters.
VSCO: Photo & Video Editor
Download
QR-Code
VSCO: Photo & Video Editor
Developer: VSCO
Price: Free+
Photo Editor Pro
Polish Photo Editor Pro
Photo Editor Pro is a photo editor app for Android developed by InShot which is popular for its video editing app. If you’re looking for a photo editor that’s a Swiss Army knife of sorts, in the sense that it has almost every feature you would need to edit a photo, then this app is for you, even though it has a fairly generic branding and name.
From basic edits like filters and crops to adding neon effects and multiple overlays, this app can do it all. It even has a beautification feature that removes blemishes from photos. It can also be used to create collages.
While the app is full of features, it does have some annoying ads that you’ll see from time to time and you’ll have to purchase the Pro version to get rid of them.
Photo Editor Pro
Download
QR-Code
Photo Editor Pro
Developer: InShot Inc.
Price: Free+
Canva
Canva photo editor for Android
If you’re a graphic designer or you use templates to make cover photos for social media or anything of that sort, chances are you’ve heard of Canva. It’s a popular website that can be used to edit photos and is also available as an app on Android.
Canva offers a lot of templates for multiples use-cases like Instagram posts, stories, YouTube thumbnails, posters, flyers, invitation cards, etc., and is very handy to create an attractive image using the existing templates. You can also choose to create your own image completely from scratch if you want to be more creative. If you want to design or edit photos for specific templates and purposes, look no further.
Canva: Design, Photo & Video
Download
QR-Code
Canva: Design, Photo & Video
Developer: Canva
Price: Free+
Fotor
Fotor app for Android
Fotor is very similar to PicsArt in terms of the features you get. Along with basic editing, you can add effects and blur out certain parts of an image or even shift focus to a smaller region. You can also add text, stickers, and frames to your images.
There’s one interesting feature in Fotor called Recipe which is like a preset you can create. You can create multiple recipes so that whenever you want to apply the same kind of edit to different images, you can just select from one of the recipes and it’ll apply all of those edits to that image. This can be really handy if you have multiple images to edit. Fotor can also help you make collages and design posters.
Fotor Photo Editor – Design Maker & Photo Collage
Download
QR-Code
Fotor Photo Editor – Design Maker & Photo Collage
Developer: Everimaging Ltd.
Price: Free+
Pixlr
Pixlr photo editor
Pixlr offers a very no-frills experience in the sense you don’t have to log in or register before you can start editing your photos. The UI is simplistic and looks beautiful with a new scenic background every time you open the app.
The options are straightforward – you can edit an image, create a collage, or choose to edit based on a pre-existing template. In terms of features, you get everything you would expect from a photo editing app and nothing is hidden behind a paywall. There’s a premium version but that’s only to get rid of ads. This is a nice photo editor app for Android that would get the job done for most people looking to edit their photos.
Pixlr – Free Photo Editor
Download
QR-Code
Pixlr – Free Photo Editor
Developer: Inmagine Lab
Price: Free+
These are some of the best photo editor apps for Android that can help you improve the look of your photos before you share them with your friends or upload them onto social media platforms. You can even use these apps to create thumbnails for YouTube videos or create posters for your projects or exhibitions. In fact, we often use apps like Canva and PicsArt to create featured images for articles on XDA, so there’s another use-case right there.
We personally recommend having a few of these apps installed on your phone to help you with editing photos in different scenarios. Snapseed, Lightroom, and Pixlr are some good options that have you covered across all requirements.
Conclusion
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