Free Online Photo Editor

Photo Filters starts from named looks — Vivid, Warm, Noir, Sepia — and is the quicker route to a finished photo. The Photo Editor has no looks at all; it gives you the controls a photographer reaches for, including exposure, highlights and shadows, white balance on both axes, clarity and a live histogram. Auto-enhance is the one shortcut, and even that just moves the sliders, so you can argue with the result. Both tools use the same underlying image engine, so a given brightness or contrast means exactly the same thing in each.

Brightness scales the values as they are stored, which is quick but tends to wash a photo out as it climbs. Exposure first converts each pixel back to linear light — the amount of light that actually hit the sensor — multiplies there, then converts back, which is what a stop of exposure on a camera does. On an underexposed photo exposure will usually look right where brightness looks flat. Both are there because each is better at something: exposure to fix how the shot was taken, brightness to taste afterwards.

They only move one end of the range each. Pulling Highlights down darkens the brightest parts and leaves the midtones alone, which brings detail back into a sky that has gone near-white — though not if it was fully clipped to pure white, because there is genuinely nothing left there to recover. Pushing Shadows up opens dark corners and backlit faces without flattening the whole photo the way lifting brightness would.

They are the same kind of operation at two very different scales. Sharpness works between neighbouring pixels, so it crisps individual edges. Clarity spreads the same maths much wider, so instead of edges it raises contrast across whole regions — haze off a landscape, texture into stone or fabric. Clarity at a moderate setting often does what people reach for sharpness to do, and without the halos.

Because turning a photo by a few degrees leaves four empty triangles at the corners, and the tool crops inwards past them rather than handing you a picture with transparent wedges in it. The crop keeps your photo's original proportions exactly — a 4:3 photo stays 4:3 — so what you lose is pixels, not shape: about 10% off each edge at 5°, and around 18% at 10°. The saved size under the preview updates as you drag, so you can see the cost. Rotating by 90° is different: nothing is cropped there, the width and height simply swap, which is why a landscape photo becomes a portrait one.

Your edit, updating as you drag. Read it left to right as shadows, midtones and highlights: a bar stacked hard against the left edge means shadows are crushed to black, and against the right means highlights are clipped to white. Both are losses no later adjustment can undo, which is exactly what makes it worth watching while you work.

Yes, two ways. Drop a batch into 'Apply to more photos' and every one comes back in a ZIP with the current settings applied. Or copy the settings code and paste it in later — on another photo, another day, or to someone else — to put every slider back exactly where it was. Batch photos are processed in your browser like everything else; nothing is uploaded.

It raises the contrast along edges, using a convolution kernel applied to the pixel data. Worth being precise about what that does and doesn't do: sharpening cannot recover detail your camera never captured — it makes existing edges read as crisper, and pushed too far it produces visible halos and clips highlights and shadows. Use it to counter the softness of a resize or a slightly missed focus, not to rescue a blurred shot.

Yes — the preview, the download and every photo in a batch all go through one piece of code, so there is no second path that could drift. The preview is a reduced copy of your photo, so anything measured in pixels — sharpness, clarity, the size of the film grain — would otherwise come out finer in the saved file than it looked on screen; each of those is scaled by the same factor the photo was reduced by, including when you set a smaller longest edge on export. Every adjustment is worked out pixel by pixel rather than handed to the browser's canvas filters, which older versions of Safari ignore silently, so the sliders behave the same everywhere.

Hue rotation shifts every colour around the colour wheel while leaving greys and brightness alone. A 180° shift moves each colour to its opposite (red becomes cyan, blue becomes orange); smaller shifts of 10–30° are the useful range for warming or cooling a photo without touching anything else.

No — everything happens in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server.