Nearly everything associated with your small business online presence — and some offline tasks — requires having top-notch images.
These images have proven to be vital for social media updates and to make your website look a little better. Quality images can also spruce up presentations and more. But getting these high-quality images typically requires the use of a photo editing app.
In lieu of plunking down close to a grand for a top-of-the-line program, Windows 10 offers some good — and affordable — alternatives.
Here’s a list of photo apps for Windows 10 you can use to spruce up your images.
Windows 10 Photos App
If you don’t want to bother with other applications, the pre-installed Photos app has been upgraded to let users share their images, and perform basic editing suitable enough for posting on your website or other channels.
Edit and Enhance provide five features that let you quickly edit your images with minimal effort. They are basic fixes, filters, light, color and effects. Basic fixes has auto-enhance, rotation, cropping, straightening, red-eye correction and retouching options. These are adjustments you can make without going into great detail, but getting good enough results to improve your images for posting.
Again the effects and filters don’t let you drill down to completely deconstruct your image like Photoshop, but that is not the objective. You can adjust brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows or use the black and white option. You can also use the vignette effect. For a quick touch up of your images, it is effective.
AutoDesk Pixlr
AutoDesk is known for the design software it provides. With Pixlr, the company has introduced an imaging app that delivers on usability with tons of features. The app has more than 100 effects, 340 overlays and 200 borders.
Using the combinations of these features, the company claims you can access more than 2 million possible effects.
You can make general fixes with crop, straighten, resize and other tools or use the automatic features to balance color or lighting conditions with a single click. You can turn your photos into a work of art with paint effects, easily add text and merge two images together, all of which are options you can use to make your image shine.
GIMP
As an open-source solution, GIMP or GNU or General Image Manipulation Program was created to simplify the photo editing features of Photoshop for free. And to a large extent, it has done a great job in delivering many similar features.
The platform lets you customize the layout so you can have tools you use all the time readily available. This includes single click retouching to quickly enhance your images. Other great features of this platform are the many plugins, support for multiple devices and file formats, and a large open source community to answer all your question.
Some of the image editing tools include, the clone tool, healing brush, perspective clone, blur and sharpen, smudge and dodge and burn.
Fhotoroom
Fhotoroom started out as a Windows Phone photo editor and it is now available for Windows 10. Since it was a phone app, it has many features for sharing your images, however that doesn’t mean its editing capabilities are weak.
One of its best features is the ability to support many file formats. As a matter of fact, it supports 650 RAW file formats plus, JPG, JXR, WDP, PNG and TIFF. And these files can be as large as 41 MP.
It also has professional grade capabilities such as, interactive editing for more control and accuracy, HDR filter, lens correction, panorama rotate and others.
Adobe Photoshop Express
Adobe Photoshop Express is a Flash-based image editing Web and mobile application. It brings the experience of Adobe and many of its professional image manipulation technologies in an easy to use application.
It has the same basic editing features as other apps, along with Auto-Fix, a one-touch effect that adjusts brightness, exposure and shadows. This one-touch feature also extends to filters. More than 15 filters are available, which include Looks Pack and Noise Reduction Pack. For example, the Reduction Pack reduces unwanted grain and speckling in your images to quickly eliminate flaws for a more professional look.
PicsArt
This app was also created for mobile platforms, but is now available for Windows 10.
It has hundreds of tools and effects that deliver professional results. For small businesses looking to give their images more pizzaz, PicsArt delivers. It provides customizable filters and effects along with text, sticker, and image overlays which can be applied for promotional flyers, ads on a website and social media postings.
If you want to make an image look like it was painted, the drawing and painting tools with layers have advanced artistic brushes.
The photo editor has many different enhancement, including layer editing, photo filters, camera layer, and customizable brush filters, masks, shape masks and more.
Fotor
This particular app wants to give you everything you need to edit your images with an all-in-one solution.
Fotor contains basic editing tools, visual effects, frames, texts, raw converter and more. The effects and frames have more than 60 different options that have been created with inputs from experienced graphic designers and photographers. Some of the categories include, Classic, Lomo, Black-and-White, Art, Lens, Flare, and Vignettes.
The RAW converter supports more than 100 camera RAW formats so you can import images without having to worry about compatibility issues when you need to quickly edit an image.
SumoPaint
SumoPaint is an online editor with very powerful features. At first glance, it looks like Photoshop, and it provides almost as many tools and effects to edit your image. It has filters with 3D, fractals, blur, texture and more.
You can adjust brightness and contrast, color balance, and hue and saturation to edit your image. And if you want colors, it has a color picker that lets you choose from thousands of possibilities so you can apply them to your image. You can use the brushes to paint over your images or create original works.
Font Candy
For small businesses, being able to quickly add fonts to an image is very important, but it is more complicated than it has to be. Font Candy has been designed with a singular purpose, to add fonts to your images.
You can now add captions to any image. The app lets you add multiple captions and lets you control each one to adjust type, color, size and more.
Although not a full-fledged photo editor, the way this app has simplified the process of inserting fonts into images needs to be recognized. That’s because this feature alone makes it a hugely valuable tool for small businesses.
Being able to edit an image is becoming just as important as using other business applications. And for small businesses with limited resource, it is a must. Fortunately, there are many choices, and most if not all of them have free options, which makes them even better.
Images: Microsoft Store, GIMP.org