18 Free and Paid Online Photo Editor Tools for Gorgeous DIY Product Photography
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Good product photography
enhances the perceived value of your products and increases the
credibility of your store.
That’s why Shopify has put together not only key
tools and resources for beautiful DIY product photography, but also
a step-by-step guide to every aspect of the shoot.
This post focuses on one more crucial aspect of product photography:
image editing. Because no matter how well you shoot your photos, there
are always little things to fix and retouch afterwards.
Here are free and paid tools – including software, services, and apps
– that you can use to make your pictures the most compelling that they
can be.
Paid Photo Editing Tools
The Photoshop suite is the ultimate in image editing. Elements offers
every editing tool you need and then some. This is top-of-the-line
software – which means that it’s not the cheapest item here.
Note: Consider also
Photoshop CC, the latest edition of Photoshop that costs $9.99 every month.
Elements offers huge functionality in editing individual pictures.
Lightroom focuses on editing in batches. So it retains many of the
features you’d find in Elements, but is especially powerful at
organizing and editing pictures at a large scale.
Touch is a $4.99 app for editing on your phone, available on both
Android and iTunes. It offers a variety of features that include
layering, filtering, and all sorts of adjusting.
Camera+ is an app that significantly enhances the capabilities of
shooting pictures on your phone. You can change shooting modes, adjust
touch exposure, and set up a grid to guide your shots. And, it’s only
$1.99.
Fiverr is a remarkably simple service: Anyone can list a project he’s
willing to do, every single one of which costs $5. There are a lot of
people who offer to edit photos, all with their own specialities. Too
many people to look through? Rank them by “Recommended,” “High Rating,”
and “Express Gigs.”
Okay, maybe you’re willing to spend more than $5, and on more
professional agents. Well head over to the Shopify Experts page. There
are dozens of photography experts you can reach out to for photography
services.
If you don’t want to spend time hunting down the right person to send
photos to, consider Tucia, an agency that has edited over 3.7 million
photos. There are three tiers of services for different features. One
cool service it offers for every tier: Unlimited free revisions.
If your products involve human models, take a look at Portrait
Professionals. It’s a software tool that’s optimized for airbrushing
portraits to fix blemishes and reshape the face.
For $1.45 per image, Remove the Background uses proprietary software
to strip your images of their backgrounds so that you can substitute
something in its place (for example, pure white, or the right shade of
blue). It promises a 24-hour turnaround.
Mister Clipping makes paths by hand, not software, to remove the
backgrounds of your photos. Its prices range from $0.95 to $9.95 per
image, and offers a free trial.
KeyShot is an image rendering piece of software that can create
high-definition visuals and models. They can be made so high-def that
they look like real photographs. In the right hands, KeyShot can do
wonders, and is used sometimes by big companies to create their
marketing materials. At $995, it’s the priciest item on this list, but
there is a 14-day free trial for you to see if you could use it.
We’ve given you some pretty sophisticated software tools for editing
photos. We wanted to include Digital Tutors because it’s one of the best
learning resources online. It has lessons on many aspects of using
Photoshop, KeyShot, and design more generally.
Free Photo Editing Tools
Okay, those paid tools are great, but if you happen to be on a budget
or don't want to invest a lot of money, no worries. Take a look at the
tools below. They may just get you to where you need to be.
GIMP is the most sophisticated free image-editing tool. You can use
it to retouch, edit, and draw. Just download the software and you’re
ready to start editing.
Want to edit online, directly on your browser? Take a look at Fotor.
It offers editing and beauty retouching. Most cool is its High Dynamic
Range feature: you can take three photos with different exposures to
combine them into a single image, with the best light and tone from each
of the separate photos.
PicMonkey is another great online photo editor with a very cool feature:
Collage. You can take various photos and arrange them together. If you
have lots of products, you can collage them together as perhaps a banner
image for your store or in an email newsletter.
VSCO is a highly rated iPhone camera app with a cool minimalist interface and a social twist. In addition to giving users extensive manual controls, the app allows them to also explore and find curated photographic content from a vibrant international community. More VSCO features are available via an in-app purchase.
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