Joe Hindy / Android Authority
Photo editors are an exceptionally competitive space when it comes to mobile apps. There are simple editors that add filters and effects along with more complex editors that let you deal with RAW images. There are others still that let you do wacky stuff like remove things from images without ruining the image. We will try our best to include a good selection of every type. Here are the best photo editor apps for Android.
Please note, none of these have the power that a serious desktop editor has. You’ll still need a PC if you want the very best photo in photo editing. We’d also like to give an honorable mention to Snapseed (Google Play). It’s good and reliable but doesn’t really get software updates anymore and that makes it hard to recommend. Also, many phones come with basic editors that can do stuff like cropping with no problem.
Adobe apps
Price: Free / Up to $52.99 per month
Adobe has released a plethora of editing tools over the last couple of years. Included are some of the best photo editor apps available. Some of the options include Adobe Photoshop Express, Adobe Photoshop Mix, and Adobe Lightroom. Each one has a variety of features to help you do things. You’ll be able to do simple stuff like removing red eye to editing RAW files taken by your smartphone or DSLR camera. Adobe Lightroom especially gets updated rather frequently with new features. The only potential caveat is that some of them require an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription in order to use all of the features. Those who already use Adobe CC should definitely just get these since they’re included with a CC subscription anyway.
AirBrush
Price: Free / $3.99 per month / $19.99 per year
AirBrush is an excellent option for editing photos of people. It features a lot of people-focused features such as pimple removal, skin smoothing, red-eye removal, and a teeth and eye brightener function. There is also a bokeh mode to turn any photo into one with a blurry background. In addition, the app comes with a separate camera function that lets you edit the photo before you take it. Thus, you can get your selfie framed up in the camera and then apply edits before taking the final product. There is a subscription for some of the more advanced features, but you do get a 7-day free trial to try it before you spend anything.
Bazaart
Price: Free trial / $5.99 per month
Bazaart is a fairly popular photo editor on iOS and the Android version isn’t far behind. The app boasts a bunch of features, including a background eraser tool and a variety of adjustments like saturation, exposure, contrast, tint, and others. Additionally, you get the usual mobile photo editor stuff like filters, text, backgrounds, stickers, and other stuff. The big draw here is the background tool where you can add a different background to an existing photo. The app offers a free trial, but after that it’s $5.99 per month, making it one of the most expensive options on the list.
InShot Photo Editor Pro
Price: Free / $7.99 per year
InShot Photo Editor Pro is a fairly decent editor. This is a new style editor with tons of things like filters, stickers, and other such effects. The app houses all of these effects in a store-style layout and you can pick and choose the ones you want to download. Of course, some of them are only available on the pro subscription so prepare for that. In any case, it does actually edit some photos. You can do things like retouch photos, cut things out of the image, and it covers the other basics like cropping and such. We think the $7.99 per year subscription is relatively reasonable as long as you use the app consistently. Plus, the developer has a bunch of other photo and video editor apps in the Play Store.
LightX Photo Editor
Price: Free / $2.99 per month / $14.99 per year / $40.00 once
LightX is one of the upcoming photo editor apps. It had rousing success on iOS. There are quite a few decent features as well. It has a background changer tool, color splash effects, and a range of slider tools like color balance, levels, and curve. You can even merge photos together. There are also blur features, photo collages, shape manipulation, and stickers. It’s still in beta. That means there are bugs. However, it should eventually be among the top five or so photo editors out there.
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Motionleap
Price: Free / $3.99 per month / $59.99 once
Motionleap (formerly Enlight Pixaloop) is a neat photography app with some pretty cool tricks. It turns static photos into GIF-style images with some simple swipes and taps. The effect works best with things like water or clouds, but there are plenty of other examples of use as well. Some other features include adding elements that weren’t there before and overlays that can add to the ambiance of a photo. This won’t get the red-eye out or crop your photo. However, the ability to add some extra effects is kind of neat. The only real downside is Motionleap goes for $3.99 per month and many of its most desirable features require the premium version.
PhotoDirector Photo Editor
Price: Free / $2.99 per month / $17.99
PhotoDirector is a newer entrant (comparatively speaking) into the photo editing space on Android and this one is pretty good. Like Fotor, this one focuses a lot more on manual enhancements rather than filters and you have access to HSL sliders, RGB color channels, white balance, and more to properly edit your photos. There are also sliders for tone, brightness, darkness, exposure, and contrast for more in-depth editing. It’s more powerful than most and should be good for those who want something other than filters.
Photo Editor by dev.macgyver
Price: Free / $3.49
Photo Editor by dev.macgyver is a surprisingly decent photo editor. It has the usual simple stuff like crop, flip, etc. However, it also boasts fine color controls, including levels and curves. You also get gamma correction, auto contrast, auto tone, blur, sharpen, and other editing tools as well. It works with JPEG, PNG, GIF, Webp, and PDF. There are also batch options available. It doesn’t have the glitz and glam of some of the more expensive photo editors, but this is right up there with Snapseed in terms of simple, but powerful functionality. Plus, it’s only $3.49 for the pro version and it’s free on Google Play Pass.
Photo Effects Pro
Price: Free
Photo Effects Pro is definitely an editor for those who like to play with filters, effects, stickers, and things like that. It boasts more than 40 filters and effects as well as the ability to add text, stickers, and frames as well. The editing features are actually pretty basic. However, the developers recently redid the application and with it came the removal of a few beloved filters and features. Hopefully the developers add those back in soon.
Photo Lab Picture Editor
Price: Free / $9.99
Photo Lab isn’t among the most popular photo editor apps. The app manages to do quite well, though. It boasts over 640 filters, frames, and effects for you to play with which makes it among the largest collections available to consumers. With this one, you can create montages, lightly edit photos, stitch together effects to create some unique photos to share with friends. There is a free version with advertising and watermarks. You can try the free one first before purchasing the pro version.
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Photo Mate R3
Price: Free trial / $7.49
Photo Mate R3 is the spiritual successor to Photo Mate R2 which was one of the best photo editors on the list. It’s still rather new so do expect it to evolve and get better over time. For now, you’ll have access to a fairly strong suite of editing tools, including all of the basics. It also has native support for RAW files which is great for photographers. The app also comes with a Lens Collection so you can fix lens issues including vignetting, distortion, and chromatic aberration. This is about as pro as it gets on Android. The only downside is that other photo editors are getting similar features.
PicsArt
Price: Free / $5.99
PicsArt has been around for a very long time and has accumulated over 250 million downloads to date. Thankfully, the developers have done a decent job updating the app to keep it modern. You’ll find a lot of the usual stuff including the light editing tools as well as filters, text, stickers, and collages. It boasts over 100 editing tools as well as a community of creative people to share stuff with. You can also use this app to generate animated gifs and even draw stuff on your photos. It’s a strong option with a lot of features. There are also plenty of other photo tools by PicsArt.
Pixlr
Price: Free / $1.99
Pixlr by AutoDesk, also known as Pixlr Express, is a powerful photo editor and one that our readers have recommended to us time and time again. It has one of the best one-touch enhance tools that we’ve seen and it also includes a ton of other features and tools that you can use. There are also filters, although it cleverly disguises them as “overlays” and also includes cosmetic editing tools like blemish removers and teeth whiteners. It one of the better photo editor apps with a little something for everybody.
TouchRetouch
Price: $1.99
TouchRetouch is one of the more unique photo editor apps. It doesn’t do the usual stuff like smooth your skin or remove redeye. Instead, it removes other stuff from the photo. You can do things like remove unsightly power lines from your shot, small objects that you don’t want there, and in some cases, you can even remove people. The app either works insanely well or not at all. We don’t recommend that you expect miracles, but it does do a fairly decent job most of the time. It runs for a single $1.99 purchase, so be sure to test it before the refund phase runs out. You can also use it for free with Google Play Pass if you have it.
Vimage
Price: Free / $1.99 per month / $11.99 per year / $24.99 once
Vimage is a newer photo editor app with some decent features. It’s very similar to the LG V40’s cinemagraph feature. You can take photos with no moving elements and add moving elements to them. You can do basic editing like brightness, blur, crop, rotate, saturation, and other stuff. Then, you can add any one of a number of pre-made animations to the photo to give it life. During our testing, I added steam to a food item and falling flower petals to a selfie (don’t judge). This creates some unique animated photos that you simply don’t see every day. The app has a couple of subscription options or a single purchase price if you don’t mind the cost.
