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My Photo Editing Process // Best Free Online Editor

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When I was in Utah I met up with a few cute blogging ladies for a little photography roundtable (^^the irony of having poor photos from a photography roundtable…). I am by no means a professional, but after an hour and a half of chatting, I realized how much I have learned over the past 9 months. We talked about lighting, styling, camera settings, equipment, and a few other things I’ll cover in the BLOG IT series, but we also spent a bit of time on editing. Until last fall, I did all my editing in iPhoto. Occasionally, I’d an online editor for a special effect, but not usually. I invested in lightroom in October and it made a WOLRD of difference. That being said, I had no viable alternative for the ladies asking about editing on a budget – because there was no way a free online editor was going to have all the capabilities of two hundred dollar editing software – right?

Well, kind of. Meet FOTOR.COM :

My favorite free online editor:


I’ve used many different online editors and this is, hands down, the best one. There are only a few features I use in lightroom to edit my pictures and this editor has ALL OF THEM (and a few I don’t even know how to use).

If you’re looking for a budget (read: free) editing software for your pictures, start with FOTOR. The process is pretty self explanatory but for fun I’ll walk you through how I edited this picture Ben snapped of me and my sisters from Chirstmas in New England (and its the same thing I do in lightroom to 90% of the pictures on this blog).

Here’s the image I started with – straight from my camera:

shot with a Nikon d5200 with a 50mm 1.8 lens

Step 1: Enhance

Use the Fotor auto enhance button which does basic corrections for lighting. I always do this first, although sometimes if I don’t love the corrections, I’ll skip to step 2.

Step 2: Adjust lighting

Play around with the exposure, the highlights and shadow tools, and the sharpness. There are a million tools but generally, I tweak the exposure, decrease some of the highlights, increase some of the shadows (the auto enhance tends to take away more shadow than I like), and increase the sharpness.

 

 

Step 3: Adjust colors

Under the “color” tap, warm up the temperature a little. I almost always drag it two or three bits to the right to give my pictures a warmer, happier feel.

 

Can you see the huge difference from before and after? I know having a DSLR helps in taking great pictures, but editing is a huge part in having a great final image.

I think Fotor is perfect for the basic editing abilities, but it also has so many other functions. You can use it to add text, smooth your skin, make a collage, or add a special effect (almost all of which I can’t do in lightroom :/). It even has options to get cards or prints developed directly from the site.

One thing I LOVE about each effect is that you can choose the opacity, or the strength of the effect. They’re basically instagram filters for your pictures, but you can choose if you want the full effect, or say, only 37% of it. It allows you too add an interesting overlay to your picture without making it look too doctored. I played around with some of my favorites to give you a collage.

And so there you have it, the next best thing to lightroom, if you aren’t looking to spend a dime.

Use it and let me know what you think! 
What is your favorite feature? 
Have you found anything you like better? 

UPDATE: I still edit all my photos in lightroom but have been using the online photo editor + graphic design program Canva. It is incredibly user friendly and what I love most is you can pick between a host of templates to optimize your images for social meda!

Reader Interactions

Comments

  4. countrygirlcityfashion

    I'm going to have to check that out! Right now I use Picmonkey, which is great (have you tried it? if so, what are your thoughts, compared to others), but I'm always looking for ways to make my pictures better.

    Reply

  8. Clipping Path Service

    I agree! Editing the pictures you take does make a huge difference! Online software's can't give you much more options that Adobe Photoshop does. I like CC and Lightroom to edit my photos. By tht by nice post.

    Reply

  9. Marty

    I've not used Fotor.com so far, but seems like an awesome online photo editing tool. I really the result of your photography editing. Can't believe an online photo editing tool have such strong ability of photo editing. I'm looking forward to use it on my iPhone 6. Is it supports latest iOS version?

    Reply

  10. AppsBazaar Gurgaon

    Its a really Really Descriptive blog for the users who are come to know more about photo editor & right definition of image editing & collage making. Thank you so much for this interesting information. Till now i was working on online editor with very limited functions.

    Reply

  18. Georgia Brooks

    Hi,
    Special thanks to you for sharing such a superclass photo editing process. Wonderful explanation and I really appreciate. I will certainly dig it and personally suggest to my friends. I’m sure they’ll be benefited from this website.

    Reply

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