Fotor

With the advent of digital photography, editing and retouching images at a professional level is no longer a task reserved for connoisseurs.

Fotor offers you a comprehensive set of utilities that allows both amateur and professional photo lovers produce high-quality digital photographs in a snap. Its retouching tools and creative effects will let you turn any image into a professional-looking shot in no time.

The program’s main menu includes four main options – a full-fledged Photo Editor, a collage maker, a retouching tool (new to this version), and a batch processing utility. The Photo Editor is clearly the program’s star utility, and there is where Fotor really shines. You will find here a nice combination of manual and one-click or automatic adjustment and enhancing features. You are offered a wide range of Scenes, Effects, Borders, and Textures which you can combine to produce stunning pro-looking pictures with just four clicks. In most cases, you’ll be presented with thumbnails showing what each effect and filter will look like when applied to the active image, which makes the entire process both intuitive and simple.

Here you can also crop your images easily and apply various distort features in the most straightforward way. The Focus feature will also allow you to mix clear focus and selective blurring to highlight a specific area or element in the picture in a professional way. Besides, you can also add a text or a signature to your best photos here, choosing from a long list of artistic and original fonts.

The Collage option offers you the possibility of arranging your favorite shots into printable pages easily. You can either use any of the more than 100 patterns provided or just arrange your pictures in whatever way you prefer using the Freestyle option. Touch Up, a new useful option comes with the latest retouching techniques so that you can remove wrinkles and all kinds of blemishes from portraits in no time and with incredible results. A red-eye effect remover, a teeth whitening brush, an eye and lip tint retoucher, and a photo reshaper top up the list of tools that you can use to embellish any portrait quickly and professionally.

Fotor comes in a dark-colored interface that is not only elegant, but also very convenient to appreciate your changes more clearly during the editing process and to make your pictures stand out. Fotor has a free Basic option, which includes most of the features reviewed here, and an add-free Pro version that, for an affordable monthly or annual fee, offers you HDR technology, advanced editing and retouching features, more photo effects, etc. There are also Basic and Pro editions that you can use online, which include the same features of their Windows siblings minus the support for batch processing.

Fotor is an excellent and affordable alternative to more expensive “professionals-only” tools. True pros may miss the odd feature, but will love its more efficient use of your system’s resources and its adjusted price tag.