Tricks for Photo Editing without Photoshop or Other Paid Software

Are you believe that You can do photo editing without Photoshop? Yes It can.If you don’t have photoshop still you can edit your images using GIMP.

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed software for various tasks such as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

In this article, you’ll find simple but effective photo enhancing tricks.

1. Enhance and Touch Up Photos with Color Correction and More – GIMP have most of the tools available in Photoshop. In Photoshop we have advanced histogram but in GIMP we have colors menu for color balances, Levels and curves tools in the toolbar.

“Auto Tone” feature of Photoshop is replaced by White Balance tool under Colors > Auto in GIMP. You’ll also find Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tool in GIMP’s toolbox.

 2. Remove Red Eye – This is a most common problem with digital snapshots. Most of us are aware of Photoshop Red eye removal tool similarly in GIMP we can do so.. the only thing we have to do in GIMP is to change the layer’s blending mode, just click the “Mode” dropdown at the top of the “Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo” toolbar

3. Whiten Teeth-  In GIMP create a new layer and make saturation changes to that layer,select the required opacity  and choose a proper size brush with a soft edge(fuzzy circle). While doing so make sure your foreground is set to black or white. 

4. Remove Blemishes – If you want to remove few blemishes from your photos you can do so by using a combination of three tools namely the Clone Stamp, Healing Brush tool and Resynthesizer plugin. 

5. Brighten Up a Specific Part of an Image – You just need the information about where the tools mainly the Levels, Curves, and other color adjustment tools.

6. Create Easy Reflections of Any Image - You can flip an image in the GIMP from the Image > Transform menu. You may find all your eraser options in the Toolbox.

7. Extract Your Subject and Put Them on a New Background – You can select areas in with the regular lasso tool. Instead of clicking and dragging, just click on different areas to get a polygonal selection. In GIMP, you can mix freehand and polygonal segments in one go by hitting the “F” key. Instead of Background Eraser,  here you have the Brush tool, set the mode to Color Erase, and set the foreground color to the color you want to erase.

8. Fix Distorted Images - You can fix your distorted images by selecting Filters > Distorts > Iwarp. Although fixing your images require little practice.

9. Change a Specific Color -In Photoshop we have a color replacement tool but in GIMP we haven’t any such tool. Just like we can use the regular Lasso as a Polygonal Lasso, and all the other tools are available in GIMP right from the menus. The only thing we have to do in GIMP is to change the layer’s blending mode, just click the “Mode” dropdown at the top of the “Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo” toolbar.

10. Create Instagram-Like Effects - These effects are not as easy as its in Photoshop. GIMP plugins like Lomo plugin or vintage plugin are helpful to stimulate such effects. Manually doing this task requires certain amount of time and in the end you get a better image.