It shouldn’t come as an unexpected that photograph and picture editing apps are the absolute most search out in both iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store. As smartphone technology enhanced throughout the years, the area that saw greatest development was the camera department, where we now have even mid-rangers that can create remarkably great photos in ideal lighting conditions. Moreover, when you have your camera with you all the time, you’re sure to take more photos.
[ad type=”banner”]Nowadays the larger number of photo editors that populate both major app stores, you get a huge variety of photo editors. There are those that offer professional level of control over what you want to do, and boast power matching that of full-blown desktop photo editors not including Photoshop. At that point, there are those that boast filters as their strength, allowing quick and magical one-tap solutions to transform photos. Still others might focus collages, text overlays, stickers, even images there’s so much that editing a photo.
After compiling this list of best photo editors for Android, our goal has been to assemble every one of those candidates that cover all the different areas of photo editing.
1. Snapseed
Google-owned Snapseed is one of the best photo editors for Android. This free app has advanced throughout the years into something attractive, intuitive and hugely powerful, capable of handling large images with relative ease. Snapseed has full RAW support, offers a variety of options to fine tune images with all the regular brightness, contrast, saturation, highlights, shadows, luminance, sharpness etc. and now offers a number of beautiful filters and effects as well. You may rotate, resize and change perspective on your images as well.
Additionally, Snapseed offers interface, without showing advertisements or making you go through in-app purchases. It’s capable, and does that actually for free.
Specialty: General-purpose photo editor
Price: Free
Compatibility: Android 4.1 and later
Availability: Snapseed
2. VSCO
VSCO or Visual Supply CO may appear like a strange choice for this list. After all, the developers market themselves as a photo shooting, sharing and editing solution like Instagram. But, in case you haven’t tried VSCO yet, we strongly need you to do that, because this app has one of the most powerful editing tools you’ll find on Android, and their filters and effects are absolutely beautiful. VSCO gives a good bunch of filters for free, while others can be unlocked through in-app purchases. VSCO also features a Grid a showcase of great photos from the app’s users all over the world, so you’re never wont for inspiration.
Another unique feature of VSCO is manual camera controls if you use this app to take photos. VSCO fully supports Android Lollipop’s camera API, and if you have a smartphone that can make use of this, you won’t need another manual camera app if you’re rocking this one. VSCO comes with a learning curve and controls might be a little tricky to figure out. Once you have a handle on things, however, there’s so much that you can create with VSCO.
Specialty: Filters, Manual Camera Controls
Price: Free, wth in-app purchases
Compatibility: Android 4.0 and later
Availability: VSCO
3. Fotor
Fotor is also one of those apps that do so much more than simple photo editing. Fotor’s take is a little different. This app releases a series of missions from time to time challenging photographers to submit photos that follow to a particular theme, and these competitions have proper winners as well. The social aspect aside, within photo editing expertise we get three main options such as take a photo right within Fotor, pick one from the gallery or make a collage. Editing options include one-touch enhance, scene presets, effects, adjustments, resize/realign, frames and the like.
Additionally, Fotor allows to play with focus and apply background-defocus effects. It is also one of those rare Android photo editors that allow to pixelate images. It is useful if we need to share something online and want to hide something from being seen. Fotor is cross-platform, and its Android version requirements differ from device to device. Likewise, some of its more advanced features will only be available on high-end, powerful devices.
Specialty: Social Sharing, General Purpose Editing
Price: Free, with in-app purchases
Compatibility: Varies with device
Availability: Fotor
4. Handy Photo
Handy Photo is one of the most powerful photo editors that we will find not simply on Android, but rather even on iOS, both of where it has a massive following. The app is hugely powerful, capable of dealing with photos up to 36 megapixels in size on newer smartphones. The app features adjustments that offer a finer control than what you’d fine in competitors, and offers partial filter and effect application. You can “uncrop” images, making them larger through intelligent stitching and regeneration algorithms. Handy Photo offers object movement and removal within photographs, and supports RAW files as well.
Specialty: Advanced Retouching Tools
Price: $2.99
Compatibility: Android 2.3 and above, varies with hardware
Availability: Handy Photo
5. Pixlr
Autodesk is no stranger to photo editing and manipulation, so when you get an offering from them, you know it means business. Pixlr is attractive and pleasure to use. It is a general purpose editor with a good number of tools and options on offer, including healing, tonal adjustments, sharpening softening and the like. A good number of filter and effects are there, and you may add frames to your images. Pixlr also brings to the table a collage maker and has color adjustments allowing to focus on one color and suppress others.
Specialty: General Purpose Editing, Social Sharing
Price: Free, with in-app purchases
Compatibility: Varies with device
Availability: Pixlr
6. Polarr
Polarr is a unique and it is a more powerful photo editor maybe even the best for JPEGs were it not for the way that you should only consider Polarr if you have a really powerful, high-end Android device. Polarr’s offering is hugely powerful, featuring the regular color and lighting adjustments, but then taking it several notches further with optics adjustments, advanced curve manipulation, layers, toning tools, effects, filters and gradients, and so forth.
Polarr is remarkable, and if you have a device with at least a hexa-core processor and 3 Gigs of RAM.
Specialty: Professional-grade Editing
Price: Free, with in-app purchases
Compatibility: Varies with device
Availability: Polarr
7. Photo Editor
Photo Editor has showed to be an amazing tool for photo editing. The number of features and editing tools that it packs in just under 5MB. The app has a really basics interface, which freely is far from neat and elegant, but it gets the job fine. Options include color adjustments, curves, drawing mode, perspective change, cropping, several export formats for edited images, screen recording and full webpage capture, and so much more. The app is also capable of handling large images.
The major disadvantage of Photo Editor is that it has advertisements in the main interface, which can be putting off for quite a few people, specifically when you have ad-free options available for no cost. Advertisements can be removed through in-app purchase.
Specialty: General Purpose Editor, Lightweight
Price: Free, with in-app purchases
Compatibility: Varies with device
Availability: Photo Editor
8. Aviary
The famous web-based photo editor was licensed for use in a number of photo editing apps back in the day, before getting a dedicated app of its own. For general editing, Aviary is a pretty solid app, offering color and saturation adjustments, blemish removal, cropping and resizing the usual works. Aviary features stickers, stamps, text overlays, borders and even meme creation. There are several other apps that utilize Aviary’s engine for their own editors in experience, the Aviary app works better, even though it might be a little lacking on features.
Specialty: General Purpose Editing
Price: Free, with in-app purchases
Compatibility: Android 4.1 and above
Availability: Photo Editor by Aviary
9. Bonfire Photo Editor Pro
Bonfire is all about filters and effects. Boasting a catalog of over 110 unique filters, this app will easily transform your photos into works of art. Bonfire also features a smart algorithm that focuses of delivering output that’s pleasing to the human eye, and not just boasting punchy colors that look good on a screen. The app also features skin tone adjustments and mark removal, making it ideal for editing selfies and representations if you’re into that. The app also has a number of settings and filters to turn your photos into digital works of art, copying the look and feel of pastel and water color, paint and coal renders etc.
Bonfire is a neat solution if digital art is your game, although it’s not really limited to that. The app may not work with most mid-range phones but works fine on more recent, higher end devices.
Specialty: Filters, Digital Paintings
Price: Free, with in-app purchases
Compatibility: Android 4.4. and above
Availability: Bonfire Photo Editor Pro
10 . AfterFocus
AfterFocus aims to release for most mobile photographers. There are several apps of this type out there, but AfterFocus is set on account to its creative algorithm for making foreground and background. You load an image that you need to process, and through simple markings, specify what is the object that should be in focus and which is the background. In many cases, the app is intelligent enough to auto-determine background and foreground by just a couple of swipes. Then, you can even decide how strong the effect should be, the nature of the blur, aperture shape, and even add a fading effect to the blurred background for a more realistic touch something that discover lacking in most other similar apps.
AfterFocus is available for free without in-app purchases. There is a paid version separately offers addit
ional features. The free version suffers from in-app advertisement, which can be a little irritating.
Specialty: DSLR-like Depth of Field
Price: Free; Paid version sold separately
Compatibility: Android 2.0 and later
Availability: AfterFocus | AfterFocus Pro
