More than merely a kind of art, picture editing allows you to create striking, impactful photographs that truly showcase your photographic abilities. You will be able to capture ideas and images that were previously unattainable if you can become proficient in photo editing. You could even use your photos to tell stories.

Consider yourself an amateur photographer if you have a new, trendy phone with a good camera. Since smartphones and social media sites like Instagram have become so popular, it seems like everyone is a photographer. Every year, new iPhones and comparable brands hit the market with professional-grade camera functions, resulting in a world full of talented or, let’s say, visually appealing photographers. By the way, you are more obsessed with your cat than with photography if you are always taking photos of them!

Now, understanding how to edit your images is a talent in and of itself if you’re interested in photography. In order to turn their attractive images into visually stunning works of art, people have found new professional photo editing services.

Let’s first examine what photo editing services are. Software that includes a variety of methods and resources for enhancing, modifying, and improving digital photos—such as the ones on your smartphone—is known as photo editing services. Professional photographers and amateur users who wish to enhance their images for private or business purposes need these services.

Enhancing an image’s visual attractiveness is the main objective of picture editing, which makes it more captivating and appropriate for a variety of uses, including social media, marketing, and personal mementos. If you’re interested in photography, you should think about using Depositphotos’ AI image generator tools, which can automate the creation of visually striking images and expand your creative possibilities for both personal and commercial projects. This is because people need to edit pictures more often than ever before due to the rise of social media.

As a photographer or influencer, you should look into these ten of the best picture editing services. Understanding the value of professional picture editing to improve their visual appeal is essential, regardless of whether you’re a business that needs product shots edited or a novice in wedding photography. A key competency in photography is editing, which includes a variety of methods to produce the desired effect in images.

1. FixThePhoto

FixThePhoto is one of the best photo editing services in the market today. Founded in 2003, it does photo retouches, making it an excellent option for editing beauty photos and other portraits. The company can remove, enlarge, airbrush, and retouch skin to provide the neatest and most natural portraits.

Their rates range from $0.25 to $6 an image, depending on the type of photo. FixThePhoto also provides photo restoration work. 

2. Perfect Retouching

Perfect Retouching is another photo service that you can check out. They offer beauty and headshot retouching services. They remove stray hairs, airbrush texture, and color correction. Apart from that, they also do product and jewelry editing. 

Perfect Retouching doesn’t have a set price per photo, but users can request a quote on their site. Cost can vary depending on your desired delivery time and the number of images to be edited. 

3. ePhotoVN

ePhotoVN is one of the most reliable photo editing services online. This is great for people who want quick and neat photo editing services. Like most services, they work on beauty, portraits, jewelry, and product retouching. 

The company applies strict rules on quality and lets users request changes to the edits. Their photo services are anywhere from $0.5 to $8, depending on the type of edit you need. Finally, all their photo services are turned over in 24 hours, perfect when you’re in a pinch. 

4. Offshore Clipping Path

Meanwhile, check out Offshore Clipping Path if you want an all-in-one photo editing service. Because of this, this company is excellent for online brands, agencies, and small enterprises who want their product shots displayed professionally and cleanly.

Finally, as their name suggests, they also clip paths, swiftly cutting elements from the background for your branding needs. Their basic plan is $1.49 per image for up to 100 images. Users can also expect a bulk discount for big orders. 

5. FixiPixi

Next, FixiPixi is another photo editing service that provides clipping path, retouching, and ghost mannequin services. It’s a one-stop-shop platform that is best for brands and online retailers. 

Unlike other services, FixiPixi has a faster delivery time of just 12 hours. Apart from that, they also have free revisions to make sure you get the best value for your buck.  

6. Retouchup.com

Apart from retouching services, Retouchup.com also caters to clipping paths, photo restorations, and color-correcting solutions. However, unlike other services online, they provide tiered plans for their services. 

The basic packages involve stray hair removal, fixing skin blemishes, and removing facial glare. However, their Complete Plus package removes things like glasses glare, and braces. This option is best when you want to fix family portraits. It’s also great for bulk photo editing.

7. Wedding Retouching

Is wedding season getting tough? Here’s a great way to lift some stress off your shoulders. Wedding Retouching offers quick and simple editing solutions for photographers. You can ask them to change colors and do natural touch-ups.

Besides this, they can also remove pesky details that your clients don’t want to see. Finally, you can even ask this service to edit your photos in your desired style and vibe. This is the perfect tool for people who need more leisure to edit their photos during the busy season. 

8. WeEdit.Photos

Looking for a reliable photo editing service? WeEdit.Photos edit over 30,000 photos every day. They focus on retouching portraits and editing wedding albums. In fact, they only charge $0.25 for wedding photo editing. Meanwhile, it’s another $0.25 for color correcting.

Plus, they also do removal services for pesky details. Because of these prices, this option is best for a wedding photographer. Finally, this company typically takes 48 hours for you to receive your edited photos.  

9. Clipping Path Studio

Meanwhile, Clipping Path Studio is another option you can check out. This option has a team of experts who can edit your photos in as fast as 6 hours. Aside from editing photos, they also remove details, add shadows, and do clipping path services. 

Their focus is removing photos from their backgrounds, making this an ideal option for ad agencies and online sellers. 

10. PicsMatic

PicMatic is a photo editing company with 20+ years of industry experience. Its goal is to empower professional photographers, businesses, and photo studios worldwide. With over 150 skilled retouchers, the company ensures high-quality outputs with a fast turnaround time of 12 to 24 hours. 

The company offers a comprehensive range of photo editing services to clients in the USA, UK, Australia, Sweden, France, Germany, and other countries. 

• Real estate editing
• Photo enhancement
• Jewelry retouching
• Fashion photo editing
• Portrait enhancement
• Background removal
• 3rd product modeling

Fiverr freelancers

Apart from these agencies, you can outsource photo editing services to Fiverr freelancers. A good chunk of people is willing to sell their services on a short-term or long-term basis. Here, you’re going to meet people who charge per hour, per photo, or even per project. 

Read Also: Top 5 Image Editing Trends for 2024-2028

Whatever the case, it’s definitely going to be different than browsing photo services online. Because, for the most part, these people are their own bosses. So that means you’ll have more leeway to negotiate your way into the services and price points you want.

Basic Photo Editing Techniques

Describe photo editing and all of its fundamental methods. We’ll go over the fundamental photo editing methods used by pros in the sections that follow. Without understanding these, it is impossible to properly understand the fundamentals of image manipulation.

White Balance

White balance is the technique of eliminating unnatural color casts from photographs so that items that are white in reality also appear white in your photograph. Human eyes are quite excellent at detecting what is pure white under varying light conditions, but digital cameras struggle with auto white balance.

Photographs end up having unattractive blue, orange, or even green color casts. Changing the white balance throughout the editing process can help you remove these color casts, allowing you to improve your images in a broader range of lighting situations.

Exposure

The overall brightness of an image (the level of light in the shot) is known as exposure. A photograph with an exposure that is too low will appear too dark, whereas one with an exposure that is too high will appear too bright.

If your images aren’t correctly exposed, one approach to improve their appearance is by using the exposure slider to add more light or subtract some of the present light. This is a common photo editing method.

Contrast

The intensity of difference between the tones and colors in a photograph is called contrast. You may think of it as the tonal ratio or the proportion of light vs dark in an image.

High, medium, and low contrast all make varied impacts on viewers and alter the mood of your photographs. If this tonal difference doesn’t come out naturally in photographs, you can control this in editing.

Clarity

Clarity is a denoising contrast boost that concentrates on the image’s mid-tones. It varies from sharpness; sharpness improves contrast between dark and light tones, whereas clarity raises contrast between the image’s mid-tones. Clarity also emphasizes textures a little more.

Furthermore, digital noise isn’t as visible while increasing clarity (as it tends to be while increasing sharpness). This is one of the main reasons why clarity is done in post-production as opposed to only changing the sharpness and contrast.

Saturation

The intensity of a color is referred to as saturation. The more saturated a hue is, the more vibrant it is. The lower a color’s saturation, the closer it is to grayscale.

Lowering the saturation of a photo might have a “mellow” or “muting” impression, whilst raising it can give the image a much more colorful feel. It’s crucial not to over-saturate a photograph because this might result in an unrealistic over-colored look.

Sharpening

Any current camera’s RAW data is almost always somewhat unsharp. Blur is introduced at every stage of the image capture process. Some definition is lost when the light goes through the lens elements, no matter how finely crafted they are. That is where sharpening is done.

Sharpening is a method of enhancing an image’s perceived sharpness. It helps minimize blurring caused by camera equipment, bring attention to certain regions, and to improve visibility.

Individual leaves stand out; faces become more distinct, the text becomes easier to read. Sharpening a photograph in the photo editing process allows you to notice such essential features more clearly.

Noise Reduction

The process of removing undesirable noise in digital photos captured in low light circumstances is known as noise reduction. The goal behind noise reduction is to selectively filter pictures to minimize noise and avoid making noise worse while making other edits like contrast changes.

Brush tool

The Brush tool, similar to a real paintbrush, allows you to paint on any photo. You’ll also have a variety of options to pick from, allowing you to tailor it to your own needs.

Other applications, such as Erasing and Spot Healing, can be done with the brush tool.

Lens Corrections

Because of the manufacturing process, each lens has its own optical properties. These properties do affect the photos, and sometimes negatively. These effects include vignetting, distortion, and chromatic aberration.

Lens corrections assist in compensating for such flaws in almost every shot. Dimming around the frame’s corners, straight lines seeming curled, or color fringes near edges – are all solved with lens correction. Even though these effects aren’t always visible in the original shot, the benefits of removing them are always visible.

However, if not done correctly, lens corrections can make photographs worse. And sometimes, photographic defects may actually be good!

Perspective Correction

Perspective correction is typically applied to photographs with ‘converging verticals’. This occurs when you have to angle the camera upwards to fit the entire subject into the frame.

Wide Angle lenses make it worse because you’re closer to your subject and have to adjust the camera more. Such lenses also overstate the scale of items in the front (a building’s foundation) in comparison to those farther away (the top of the building).

Strong converging lines can sometimes be an intentional feature of a composition, but they must appear intentional. Otherwise, it can appear to be a careless technique. That’s where perspective correction is needed.

Grain

Grain is a term used in cinematography to express how finely a picture or piece of paper can capture detail. In modern pictures, detail and resolution is typically the focus – not grain.

However, grain can be added in photo editing to add a nostalgic and retro feel. Softwares typically emulate the film grain found in wet film chemistry. This can help fix the focus in some cases but is done mostly as an artistic choice.

Vignette

A vignette effect is a dramatic darkening of a photograph’s corners in comparison to its center. In portrait or product photography, photographers frequently employ it as a stylistic effect to attract the viewer’s attention straight to the subject.

Certain filters may be used to generate vignettes, or photographers can utilize post-processing software like Photoshop to do so.

Radial Filter Tool

To emphasize certain sections of an image, you can use the Radial Filter tool to produce several off-center and/or vignetted regions.

It allows you to create an elliptical region around the subject and lower the exposure, saturation, and sharpness of the areas outside the specified mask.

Graduated Filter Tool

The Graduated Filter is a useful tool for making local tweaks to your images. Graduated filters are not the same as global modifications like the Exposure or Contrast settings, which affect the whole shot equally.

Instead, you may use the Graduated Filter to carefully apply these adjustments using a gradient that smoothly flows between the corrected and uncorrected areas.

This allows you to apply changes to a single region of a photograph without leaving a visible line separating the corrected and uncorrected portions. For darkening the sky or lightening foregrounds, this effect is great.

HSL

HSL is an acronym for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. Color is always made up of these three values.

Every color you can think of has a hue value, a saturation value, and a luminance value. Photo editing software includes panels for individually modifying these values, allowing you to generate or adjust any color in the most accurate way possible. This gives the editor complete creative control over the colors in an image.