10 Best Photo Color Editors to Make Your Photos More Life-Like [Online & Offline]
Summary: Are you trying hard to find a photo color editor software to make you photos look more vivid and true to life? Now that you’re reading this article, you’re almost there, as this article talks about the 10 best photo color editor softwares as of mid-2024.
- • Enlarge photos up to 40x with more details added
- • Sharpen photos by reducing background/chroma/luminance blur
- • Make photos clearer by removing motion blur and out-of-focus blur
- • Suitable for both beginners and experts
When editing photos, changing its color is one of the most used techniques to make the photo look more attractive to the audience. There are quite many software tools capable of editing photo colors, for professionals or novices. Here is this article, we will show you the top 10 most popular photo color editors that allow you to freely change the color scheme of your photos. Hopefully, after reading this article, you will be able to pick one as your photo editing assistant. Without further ado, let’s move on to the details.
Content Quick Sneak
- Section 1. Understanding color itself
- Section 2. Top 6 best photo color editor tools
- Section 3. Top 4 best online photo color editors
- Section 4. Final Pick
Section 1. Understanding color itself
When speaking of colors, there are three basic conceptions coming into mind, brightness, saturation and contrast. Before we can step further into the notion of editing the color of a photo, it’s essential for us to have a general understanding of these basic things in the first place.
Brightness is the relative lightness or darkness of a particular color, from black (no brightness) to white (full brightness). Brightness is also called Lightness in some contexts, in particular in SQL queries. Saturation is the intensity of a hue from gray tone (no saturation) to pure, vivid color (high saturation). Color Contrast refers to the difference in luminance between two adjacent colors or overlaid colors (foreground/background).
1.2 What should a photo color editor be capable of
An improper setting of your camera might result in the color of your photo being oversaturated, which needs to be balanced-out at the post-editing stage. While if you go totally wrong with certain settings, then your photos may suffer from serious color issues that need to fixed or corrected. Hence, from a technical point of view, a photo color editor software should be capable of color correction and color grading to make a photo look more naturalistic to human eyes, and in some rare circumstances, be able to replace a photo’s background color or remove shadow from photo. The process of color correction makes sure photos look exactly the way that the human eyes see things as they are. While the color grading is where you create the actual aesthetic of your photos.
Section 2. Top 6 best photo color editor tools
Photo editor tools featuring above-mentioned functions are not hard to find on the internet. However, choosing the one that fits into your situation is the hard part. Depending on your actual need, you might find one is better than another (sometimes maybe the opposite is truth). So here we list out the top 5 best candidates for you to choose from.
Photo Enhancer AI is the latest offering from DVDFab Software which is an AI-powered photo enhancement solution package that contains three separate enhancement modules to improve your photos from different aspects.
The Enlarge module can be considered as an AI photo color editor and a photo upscaler combined that uses the most up-to-date machine learning technology to study every single pixel of you photo and its adjacent pixels, including the brightness, saturation and contrast ratio of the pixel’s color, and then intelligently create tons more pixels to exponentially increase the pixel intensity, thus achieving the goal of upscaling photos by up to 40 times their original resolution but at no cost of quality loss. During the upscaling process, the Enlarge module will also detect if there are incorrect colors and color grading problems in your photos, and apply color correction and color grading algorithms accordingly.
The other two modules are the Denoise module and the Sharpen module, which does the job of removing all types of noise from your photos and sharpen the photo edges to reveal more photo details, respectively. During the sharpening process, this photo color editor can also remove shadow from photo, especially those blurry shadows.
Tips: Compared to traditional non-AI photo color editor tool, Photo Enhancer AI does all the job automatically, so that you don’t need to be an expert on photo editing. This could be extremely convenient to beginners.
Photo Enhancer AI offers you 30 days of free evaluation time for you to fully experiment with all its functions, and if you are satisfied with the results, you can place an order for it anytime through the product page or DVDFab’s Online Store.
Availability: only on Windows at the time being
As the most famous and powerful photo editing software, there is almost nothing that Adobe Photoshop cannot do. The feature to edit photo color is made as easy as a breeze. Photoshop gives you two slightly differently ways to adjust photo color and tone, one is to use the adjustment layers, and the other is to edit in the Camera Raw. With adjustment layers, you apply edits on a separate layer in the image file, leaving the original image (background layer) intact. While Camera Raw is an extra plug-in for making color and tonal adjustments.
Aside from changing photo colors, making color corrections, or do color grading, Photoshop also allows you to freely edit a photo’s background color (call it a photo background editor if you would like to), and remove shadow from photo whenever needed.
Availability: on both Windows and macOS
You may think that DaVinci Resolve Studio is a video editor software, and that’s true to its earlier generations. After several generations’ evolution, DaVinci Resolve Studio now is really close to a photo and image editing and managing tool as well. The Media Page allows you to import thousands of photos to further polishing. Among many of its features, color grading is superb for dealing with tons of images.
Availability: on both Windows and macOS
We have to admit that Adobe is a huge family. Despite not being designed as a dedicated photo editing software as powerful as Photoshop in the first place, as a vector graphics application for creating and designing digital graphics, the Illustrator also gives you the options to modify your photos, such as changing the color, cropping the photo and adding special effects. The special effects offers the most options, such as making your photo look like a stamp or even a poster.
Availability: on both Windows and macOS
Speaking for photo color editor, there is one competent candidate hard to skip, the well-known free & open source image editor GIMP, which is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems. Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done, including freely changing the color of your photos the way you want. And its extensive customization options and 3rd party plugins can further enhance your productivity to the next level.
Availability: on Windows, macOS and Linux
Pixelmator Pro is a powerful professional image editing tools that is easy-to-use for everyone. It features an extensive collection of tools for editing and retouching photos, creating graphic designs, painting, drawing vector graphics, and adding stunning effects, among which, the nondestructive color adjustment options allow you to edit your photo colors in any way you want. Each adjustment has breathtaking color quality thanks to advanced image processing techniques that eliminate posterization artifacts and improve clarity.
Availability: only on macOS platform
Section 3. Top 4 best online photo color editors
Compared to desktop or laptop applications, there are also plentiful choices on online photo background editors that let you change the color scheme of your photos as you please. Generally, online photo editors of this type is much easier to use, and they don’t require you to be some kind of an expert on photo editing. And here we will show you the top 4 online photo editors that each has nurtured a large fan base of its own.
With IMGonline, you can quickly and easily replace a certain color in your photo to another specified color. Simply specify the photo on your computer or phone, select the colors you want to replace, click OK button, fingers crossed. Just a few seconds later, you will be able to download the recolored photo back.
LunaPic brings the customization to the next level. It simple allows you to choose a specific color value using its color palette or the color tint picker for a softer color, and then click on the color from your photo where you want to change. After that, you also have an extra option to adjust the color threshold before applying the final change.
Although Phixr is an online photo editor, it offers quite an extensive set of tools for you to edit your photos using the best of your imaginations. Among the many tools it offers, there are multiple allowing you to edit your photo color, including the Color Effects tool, the brightness/saturation/contrast/hue tool, and then the color balance/levels/channels/curves tool. Just take advantage of your creative minds.
This browser-based photo color editing utility replaces any color in a PNG photo with a new color. For example, you can quickly swap red with blue, or yellow with white. You can also match similar color tones. For example, you can match 10% green (such as sea green, jungle green, or forest green).
Eventually, we come to the time for our final pick. To be frank, there is no absolute winner of one over another, because everyone differs on demands, editing stills and past experience. And even to the same person, you may prefer one over another at different times or under different situations.
However, generally speaking, if you want something that does all the job for you automatically, then Photo Enhancer AI from DVDFab Software is your best shot; if you are a skilled veteran and want to make the best of your expertise and imagination, then Photoshop is what you should go with; but to most of the commoners out there, if your target is simply replacing a background color for your photo, then an online option such as Phixr can save you much of your valuable time.