Most of today's smartphones also include a high-powered digital camera capable of taking absolutely stunning photographs. Unfortunately, no matter how advanced your camera may be, there are any number of situations, events or circumstances that can turn a precious memory into an eyesore. From red-eye to photobombers to sun flares, all manner of imperfections may show up in your photos that you may not even notice at the time. In many cases, we are too busy having fun to stop and evaluate every pixel of a photo once it is taken. Thankfully, what we also have in addition to high-powered digital cameras is a wide range of editing tools that can help you make the most of your photos in spite of any imperfections. With today's editing tools, you can correct a wide range of mistakes and turn your oops into a picture of perfection.

How To Edit Photos

Depending on what the issue is, there are a number of different ways to edit your photos to perfection. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to edit photos is to simply crop out what you don't want in the photo. One issue with cropping, however, is that it will generally make everything that's left in the photo larger. This is not an issue if the photo is of an extremely high resolution, but if it is a low-resolution photo or is already somewhat grainy, it will end up looking fuzzy or pixelated. Another way to eliminate elements of a photo you don't want is with a stamping tool. A stamping tool will take pixels from another part of the photo and "stamp" them over what you don't want. For instance, if you take a photo of a pair of friends on a beach, but there is an ugly trash can in view, you can copy a sandy area and "stamp" it over the trash can. Another common tool for photos is red-eye reduction or getting rid of white spots in your photos known as sun flares. While there are several ways to do this manually, there are also a number of apps and programs that will do it for you automatically.

Popular Apps

Needless to say, most camera apps have some editing features built in, but for more powerful editing features, there are a wide range of apps available. Photoshop is by far one of the most popular editing programs and they have a number of apps that offer many of the same features. Photoshop Express, Photoshop Mix and Photoshop Fix are just a few of the apps you can use to perform various editing tasks. For more full-featured editing, Enlight is a full featured and reasonably priced app. With Enlight you can add effects, crop, rotate, straighten or correct perspective; apply filters, two-tone gradients, light leaks or vignettes, control exposure and add text, borders and frames all for just a few dollars. Snapseed is a free app that offers many of the same features but also offers a healing tool, lens blur, vignette and double exposure effects.

Popular Online Photo Editors

While apps allow you to make a number of edits on the fly, none will come close to giving you the level of results that online desktop programs will. Photoshop is far and away one of the most popular online photo editors and with good reason. There are few other photo editors that offer the wide range of tools and features that Photoshop does. In addition, photoshop is compatible with an entire suite of tools including Lightroom, InDesign and XD. If you just want to work with Photoshop by itself, it comes with a fairly low monthly subscription price but access to the entire suite starts to get hefty. For a perfectly decent set of tools without the subscription price, Fotor is a free photo editor that gives you many of the same tools as a basic Photoshop subscription. In Fotor, you can edit photos, add effects and even have access to some powerful retouching tools. Pixlr is another popular tool that offers both a free version as well as several paid upgrades. Whatever your needs, from professional to basic, there are a range of tools for you to use.