I am pretty cheap and practical when it comes to a lot of things. For example, I don't own or use Photoshop or Lightroom software, and the only lens that I use to take my food photos costs only $100. I buy all my nice Nike running and work-out outfits (worth around $40 each) at about $2 or $1 each at nearby Goodwill stores. That's the cheap part of me.
The practical part of me knows that I simply don't have time to learn all the wonderful features of Adobe Photoshop, and I am not going to buy that expensive piece of software only to use a fraction of its capabilities to adjust my photos in a very minor way.
The lazy part of me does not want to deal with post-processing at all, I just want to shoot the photo and be done with it. So, the lazy part of me tries to get the shot right so as not to require any subsequent photo editing, and as a result I do not post-process most of my photos. However, there are a few instances here and there, when the light is wrong, or I screwed up the exposure, or the photo did not come out bright enough, and in these cases I found some pretty powerful photo editing software online. There are no downloads required, everything is done online, it's free. Interestingly, one of these resources is by Adobe.
So, here they are, my favorite free online photo editors:
My favorite free online photo editor for making collages:
And, by the way, I think Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom are both great, and eventually I do plan on purchasing them, but in foreseeable future I just don't see myself using either of those two often enough or using their capabilities enough to justify the expense.
I am also planning to write more posts about particular features I use with these free photo editors to edit and enhance the minority of my food photos.
Here I just want to give you a couple of examples of how I used these photo editors:
- The photo at the top of this post is an after/before image adjusted for brightness, saturation, and sharpness, using Pixlr.com.
- These 2 collages (one of them adores my Facebook account) were made with Picmonkey:
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