Free Web Photo Editors

Photofinish.ca readers may be familiar with the previous coverage of DirtyDog Images in 2013. But the problem persists. So this review will feature 3 no or low cost plugins that can help web designers easily fix their DirtyDogs and hopefully improve their website ratings and readership.

We feature two  photo editors familiar to PhotoFinish readers, Photoscape and Pixlr, plus a new one PhotoPea. Both Pixlr and Photoscape have seen a stream of improvements this past year worthy of note. All three photo editors are full feature  with premium editions removing ad banners and adding some  special features.

Pixlr

Pixlr has seen fast development over the past two years and now delivers 2 online editions – Pixlr/x for fast editing with a left column of edit icons for key picture corrections – crop, resize, straighten, and full range of color edits. It is an easy to use approach to photo fixes:

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The screenshot shows the help tips available for just about every edit function. Note the right sidebar is devoted to a navigation image and layers which are remarkably robust. For $60US/year gets no ads, access to both Pixlr/x and Pixlr/e plus gobs of extra features.

Pixlr/e is the “old edition” of Pixlr. But it hardly can be considered old because Pixlr/e has seen a number of revisions and new features. The interface looks a lot like super Photoshop with 27 left sidebar editing functions, a right side bar with Navigation Window, Layers, and Hitory List. But the topbar with 9 menucommands with extensive options confirms that Pixlr/e is a worthy rival to Photoshop or PaintShop Pro given that it is online, fast and nearly free:

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It is hard to get lost using Pixlr/e given the popup tips for every left sidebar edit function. Key feature, now that WordPress 5.8 supports Webp super compact images, take advantage of it in both Pixlr/x and Pixlr/e for free. Also checkout the Help | Keyboard shortcuts and Help | YouTube tutorials. Also like Pixlr/x, for $60US/year gets you no ads, access to both Pixlr/x and Pixlr/e plus gobs of extra features.

PhotoPea

This is the new kid among online photo editors and Photopea is packed with features. First, it resembles Pixlr/e with left sidebar of edit functions, right sidebar of history and layer area, and a top menu bar full of extra commands just like Pixlr/e. But the real kicker  is that Photopea supports PSD, AI, XD, PDF, XCF, Sketch, RAW plus JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, and SVG among others- so it is very versatile in image editing formats supported:

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Be sure to go to the Filter| Gallery command to see some of the nifty gallery effects you can create. And More | Shortcuts like Pixlr/e gives complete list of Photopea keyboard shortcuts. Icing on the cake? WebP is a save file format available with user customized compression levels.

Photoscape

Photoscape Online is just an affiliate use of PhotoPea and has nothing to do with Photoscape.org. But there is no online app  edition of Photoscape but free Windows and Mac versions are available And as our previous reviews of Photoscape noted , Photoscape is the Swiss Army Knife of Photo Editing. Photoscape has a viewer, multi-feature editor, and a collage creation tool:

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As you can see there many design for collages from 2 thru image cells with user customization of the size of the cells and the color and size of the grating.

Next consider the Cutout tool which allows users to cutout colors and replace them with other colors, gradients or patterns:

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This turs out to be a very useful tool when combined with the accompanying Photoscape editor.

Finally, the Photoscape Grid Combiner allows designers to create grids of images again with user chosen color or grdient or pattern columns between the images. The Grid Combiner is so fast I have used it for many story telling images like a frozen GIF animation. For $52.99US/year user can get the pro edition [but only for Windows]that is crammed with special graphics features.

Bottom Line

There are other online graphic tools but these cost about $60US/year or more to get ad free and enough premium features to be really useful. Try BeFunky, Canva, or PicMonkey and see which interface and feature set meets your needs. But any of these tools should eliminate any of your Dirty Dog images.

Now stay tuned for our next update review which shows what AI has done for Web Photo Editing in 2023-20224