Compared to photo enlarger, photo enhancer can enhance your images in an all-round way. Normally, photo enlarger is applied to scale up a photo with or without losing quality. While photo enhancer is more focused on enhancing a photo by applying effects, filter, text, and fine-tuning color, contrast, light, and many more.
Therefore, the products we list in this article are more all-propose. Instead of focusing on one specific function, we care about the overall effect more. More features, more fabulous. If you only want to scale up your image without losing quality or improve blurry and out-of-focus images, we recommend you Top 10 AI Image Enlargers 2020.
Top 10 Photo Enhancers 2020
In this article, I’d like to introduce ten photo enhancers to help you edit & enhance the image in a quick and easy way. This post covers app, software and online websites. Choose the one you need.
Generally speaking, a photo enhancer should have the following features:
- Being easy to use
- Basic tools to edit photos, like crop, rotate, effects, filters, text, color & saturation & light & contrast adjustment
- Wide range of filters and effects
- A fine selection of options, like resolution, stock images, formats to export
- Better with automatic adjustment
- Better with layers
1. Fotophire（Software）
Price: $49.99/year, $79.99/Lifetime
Compatibility: Windows
This photo enhancer provides many tools to help you enhance the image. Crop, flip, tint, saturate the image with full manipulation. Add filter, frame, blur, vignette to your image. 200+ photos effects make it even more appealing.
After you enhance the image, this tool allows you to view the result in four styles, including side-by-side, split view, horizontal, and vertical.
Pros:
- Easy to use
- A trial version is available
- 20+ blend modes
- Batch processing
- Support jpeg, TIFF (8-bit or 16-bit), PNG, BMP, Jxr or Jiff
Cons:
- Only Windows available
- All features are sold together
2. Adobe Photoshop CC (Software)
Price: Subscription plans start from $9.99 per month
Compatibility: Mac, Windows
Adobe Photoshop is quite a versatile and professional photo-editing tool. With this software, you can edit your photos in almost all possible ways. Still, it is constantly improving itself by adding more advanced features.
Add filters, use artist-designed templates, create layers, apply effects, and enhance pictures. With a wide set of tools, it can help you enhance an image in more ways than any other photo enhancer in the market.
Pros:
- Quite powerful & useful once you get a hang of it
- The output quality is quite good
- Quick processing speed
Cons:
- Has a requirement for your hard disk space
- Quite complicated for beginners
- No lifetime license
3. GIMP (Software)
Price: Free
Compatibility: Windows, macOS, Linux
GIMP is an open-source free photo enhancer and features layers, masks, curves, and levels. It is integrated with many features that rival some excellent paid products. Easily eliminate flaws with the clone stamp and healing tools. Create custom brushes. Apply changes to isolated areas with smart selection tools.
This photo enhancer is professional enough for a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist to get their job done.
Pros:
- Completely free to use with no ads & limitations
- A lot of advanced options with many added regularly
- 40+ export formats
Cons:
- Steep learning curve
4. Photo Pos Pro (Software)
Price: Free & Paid ($29.90/lifetime)
Compatibility: Windows
This one is another excellent photo enhancer. Easily remove unwanted objects, erase and replace backgrounds, apply effects, frames, text and many more. Its interface is intuitive and accessible. There is also an optional novice layout. The expert layout has layers and layer masks for advanced editing.
The free version only allows exporting your image at a maximum of 1,024 x 1,024 pixels. If you need a higher quality of the output, you have to upgrade.
For more software products, please visit the Image Upscalers Review.
Pros:
- Easy to use
- 15+ export formats
- Beginner and advanced modes
Cons:
- Not cross-platform
- Limited file export resolution
5. Canva (Online & Mobile Phone)
Price: Free & Paid ($12.95/month)
Compatibility: Windows, macOS, Linux (in browser); Android, iOS, iPadOS (mobile app)
If you’re an enthusiast of social media, you’ll find Canva quite useful. It is perfect for turning your favorite snaps into cards, posters, invitations, and social media posts. Besides, it can be used to apply tints, vignette effects, sharpening, adjusting brightness, saturation and contrast. No advanced tools like clone brushes and smart selectors.
The free version includes 8,000+ templates, a lot of photos and graphics, 100+ design types for social media posts, presentations, letters, and more. The free level is enough for home users.
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Free cloud storage
- Wide compatibility
Cons:
- Limited export formats (JPG, PNG, PDF)
- No fine manual editing tools
6. Fotor (Online)
Price: Free & Paid ($8.99/month $39.99/year)
Compatibility: Windows, macOS, Linux (in browser)
Fotor is not as professional as Photoshop or GIMP. But if your needs are simple, this free online photo enhancer is quite enough. Though there is no clone brush or healing tool, many editing tools are available, like applying filters and text, adjusting saturation, color, contrast, and light, sharpening pictures, and more.
You can manually adjust the image or choose One-tap Enhance to automatically improve. The tilt-shift tool has been highly praised as one of its best features.
Pros：
- Easy to use
- Batch processing
- Premium-level filters
Cons:
- Limited export formats (JPG, PNG, PDF)
7. Let’s enhance (Online)
Price: $6.99/month; $51.99/year
Compatibility: Windows, macOS, Linux (in browser)
This photo enhancer applies AI technology to automatically enhance any flaw in your image. Improve colors, remove compression and upscale your image up to 16x. This online tool can detect an image with .jpg or .jpeg extension and automatically apply noise reduction system. Enhance your images to a high-quality that can be used in print.
But it has no other editing tools. You can’t apply any effect on your images or manually edit your images. That’s why we put it in this position.
Pros:
- Good output quality powered by AI
- Automatically enhance
Cons:
- Can’t manually edit the photo or apply any effect
- Not many features
8. PiZap (Online)
Price: $5.99/month; $35.88/year
Compatibility: Windows, macOS, Linux (in browser)
This online photo enhancer has both HTML5 and Flash editions. Then it can be used on more devices. It allows you to upload a photo from both your hard drive and social media accounts. It also provides a lot of images for you to choose, while some of them are only available to premium subscribers.
Pros:
- Both HTML5 & Flash versions
- Templates for social media
Cons:
- Bothering ads
- Limited export formats (JPG, PNG)
9. Pixlr (Online & Mobile Phone)
Price: Free & Paid (#3.99/month)
Compatibility: Windows, macOS, Linux (in browser) & Android & iOS
This tool helps you make fine changes to colors and saturation, sharpen blurry images, and apply vignette effects and frames. You can delete a selected part of the image, or move it to a different layer. With an array of tools for painting and drawing, Pixlr can help you deal with many problems with editing photos.
It has three online products, Pixlr E, Pixlr X, and Pixlr Express. Pixlr X is more basic and Pixlr E more advanced. Pixlr Express is an online photo editor tool that needs Flash player to run.
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Well-designed interface
- Get bugs fixed swiftly
Cons:
- Limited export formats (JPG, PNG)
10. Lumii (Mobile Phone)
Price: Free
Compatibility: iOS, Android
Lumii provides preset photo filters and photo effects for users to edit and enhance photos. Preset templates for Instagram. Create trendy double exposure effects for pictures. Basic tools to edit pictures, like cropping, adding text, and adjusting color, brightness, contrast, highlights, warmth, shadows, sharpness, exposure, etc.
Pros:
- Easy to use
Cons:
- Some details need to be improved
- Not too many features and tools
Summary
If you are looking for good software to enhance photos, we recommend Fotophire and Photoshop (challenge to beginners). If you need a free one and don’t want to spend much time learning how to use, we recommend GIMP.
When you prefer an online product, Canva and Fotor will be better. Online products are more convenient and time-saving. When it comes to mobile phone apps, we recommend Pixlr for both apple and android users.
If you are not a frequent user about photo editing tools, a free version is enough for you.
If you’re an anime fan and looking for a tool specially designed to enhance anime images, then we recommend you Anime Image Enlargers Review.