5 Powerful Tools for Photo-Editing

Photo editing to be so important if you want your blog or website to look more professional and attractive, and will help your words deliver more impact. We edit every pic we publish, so we thought we’d share our tips, tricks and apps with you.

First of all, how about some stats from good ol’ Jeff Bullas – king of the infographic:

?  Articles with images get 94% more total views.
?  Including a photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45%.
?  60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in local search results.
?  In an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product.
?  In an online store, customers think that the quality of a products image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%)
?  Engagement rate on Facebook for photos averages 0.37% where text only is 0.27% (this translates to a 37% higher level of engagement for photos over text).

Thank you, Mr Bullas. And if you’d like to see Jeff’s impressive infographic on the subject, check out the rest of his post here.

So how can you get your photos looking their best before you pop them into a post? Well, here are our top 5 image editing apps and programs that help you make the most of the images you’ve created:

Snapseed

Although this is only a mobile app, it’s still incredibly powerful. We use this one for pretty much every single pic we publish on Instagram, which will then go on our Instagram Diary series on the blog.

But if you’ve got a photo on your phone that you want to use, some of the editing features here are better than the ones you can find on desktop apps like Picmonkey.

My favourite features:

?  The ‘ambience’ feature gives that extra bit of life to your photos.
?  The tiltshift feature is heaps better here than on IG.
?  The selective tuning feature is incredible.

Picmonkey

This is a great free online program that lets you edit pretty much everything on your image. You can use it to put text on the shot and you can even use your own fonts.

The collage feature is great too, and the overlay option – if you have a watermark saved as a .png file – is great for popping your logo in your image.

I still only use the free option because I’m thrifty [cheap] but it’s pretty good. The paid version has lots more features.

My favourite features:

?  The auto-adjust exposure feature is almost always on the button, which makes editing super quick.
?  Got to love the text over image. Simple, quick and effective.

Polyvore

This program is usually used for creating flatlay displays of fashion and stuff like that. But I’ve found it handy for putting together collages of gift idea posts, wine collections or collages that I can then go on and label in Picmonkey.

I cheat a bit with this program – rather than saving my collections and importing them, I screenshot what I’ve done then crop and edit it elsewhere.

How to take a screenshot: press ‘prt sc’ button on PCs or ‘Command’ + ‘Shift’ + ‘3’ for the whole page or ‘4’ to select an area on a Mac.

I use Internet Explorer to collect the images because Polyvore doesn’t play well with Google Chrome for some reason.

My favourite features:

?  The resizing of images is great on Polyvore – it doesn’t distort or pixilate.
?  The transparent option works very well for fitting multiple images close together.

Photoshop

If you want to really get technical, this is the program for you. You can do pretty much anything on Photoshop… if you know how. And if you want to spend a lot of money. This puppy is expensive!

Mrs R is a bit of a wiz at Photoshop, but I stick to my lowly Picmonkey.

My favourite features:

?  The flexibility of Photoshop.
?  You can create .png files here.
?  Actions that make editing colour, size and exposure at the touch of a button.

iPhoto

This Apple app lets you do quite sophisticated edits if you don’t want to use Photoshop. Its app for iPad is good so you can edit easily on the go.

It’s also good for transferring pics across devices. We’ve found Airdrop to be… clumsy. Whereas connecting your Mac, iPhone and iPad up and using iPhoto is very quick and easy.

My favourite features:

?  I love you use your finger to ‘paint’ the effect onto the parts of the image you want to change.
?  This is yet another cleverly designed intuitive product from the eggheads at Apple.

Obviously there are hundreds of other image editing suites up for grabs, so if there are others we haven’t mentioned here, tell us in the comments. We’re always eager to try new ones!

What’s your favourite image editing program?

Images by Mrs Romance.