Nine Free Photo Editing Tools to Help You Create Stunning Graphics for Your Online Store

A free photo editing tool can be an online store owner’s best friend.

Why?

When you’re selling online, you need your photos to tell a story. As we shared in how to write product descriptions that sell for you, photos are worth a million words.

Ultimately, you want your product photos to look visually appealing, showcase the best features of your products and, of course, do the selling for you.

There is Photoshop, but if you aren’t a full-blown designer, wrapping your head around Photoshop can be daunting. Plus, it’s expensive.

So, what do you do when you’re starting out and need to spruce up those images without investing money and your mind in Photoshop?

You go for the best free photo editing tool in the market.

To make this job easier for you, we’ve rounded up 9 of our top choices for the Free Photo Editing Tool award and you can take your pick.

The Ultimate Free Photo Editing Tool Roundup

 1. Picmonkey

Picmonkey is a favorite photo editing tool with many online store owners (and it's one of our favorites, too)! It’s your go-to for quick edits like cropping a photo, adding a filter to it, or even text and overlays.

Not only that, if you want to touch up models’ photos, Picmonkey has a great easy-to-use range of tools for that as well.

It has both free and pro versions and the free version can give you some great tools at your fingertips.

 2. GIMP

GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is an open-source image editor that has been around 20 years now. GIMP has several tools and can make editing photos almost as easy as it is with Photoshop, but it is slower. You can retouch, restore and even manipulate images with GIMP and also use it for basic graphic design needs.

If you want to create a transparent or white background for your images (which we recommend), check out this great tutorial on how to do so quickly and easily using Gimp.

 3. Pixlr

Pixlr is a web app free photo editing tool that gives you two easy options to choose from, depending on your needs. If you want to add a quick edit, like an overlay or border to your photos, the Pixlr Express is just fine.

The Pixlr Editor gives you more advanced editing and manipulation options like replacing color, transforming an image and more.

4. Ribbet

Ribbet is a photo editor that gives you great basic functionalities like cropping, rotating, sharpening or lightening colors and exposure, as well as adding stickers, text, and frames. Like PicMonkey, it comes with a free version and a pro version and some of the more fun overlays and features are premium. But for basic editing needs, this can definitely do the trick.

 5. BeFunky

This is a free web-based photo editing tool and, in many ways, feels a bit like Picmonkey, but with added superpowers. You can add layers, use a massive range of effects, overlays, textures, graphics and add text to images, too. It is very easy-to-use and quite fun, too.

What I really liked is the interactive help menu that pops up to give you tips when you try a new feature. You can disable the tips, too.

 6. Photovisi

This free online photo tool allows you to create collages of your products. It’s web-based, too, so you don't need to download anything.

 7. Canva

Canva is not so much an image editor as it is a image design tool, but I felt that many of us can use it to create social media images, blog post images, eBook covers, flyers, ad banners and more. I use Canva to create all of the images on this blog!

You can upload your own images too or choose from thousands of free and paid images in Canva itself. The images cost just a dollar and you have 24 hours to edit them as well.

Plus, there is a massive range of text and graphic overlays and a large number of preset image types to choose from as well.

If you want to save A LOT of time and money, I highly recommend Canva Pro. It provides you with branded templates for your own online store and you can also resize images for the different social media networks. For example, you can create an image for Pinterest and click the Magic Resize button and it automatically creates the same image (but in a different size) for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

 8. SumoPaint

SumoPaint, like Pixlr, has a Photoshop-py feel to it with a large number of tools and functionalities.

It is web-based, so you don’t need to download it to your system. The only thing with SumoPaint, like other advanced image editors, is that there is a bit of a learning curve and it isn't as fun and easy as say, PicMonkey, Canva or BeFunky.

However, once you learn your way around it, you can use it to edit images like a pro.

 9. iPiccy

This is an easy-to-use image editor that comes with a fair bit of functionality including, minor fixes, resizing, cropping and altering brightness, colors and sharpening the image.

So, which free photo editing tool will you play with first? Or have you tried some of these already? Share your feedback and experiences with us in the comments below.