Cheap (and even free) alternatives to Photoshop

Adobe products are wonderful, but tend to be cost prohibitive for the typical end user if they don't have access to some sort of discount program. That means that an incredibly useful and widely liked program like Photoshop is out of reach for many people, especially cost-conscious educators. A mentor of mine used to always say "Never accept no. There's always a back door." Luckily, there are many "back doors" to getting extremely capable photo editing software on the cheap.

With the improvement of cameras in mobile devices, most of us have extremely powerful cameras at our disposal constantly. There are lots and lots of options built in  to our camera apps and devices that help us take amazing photographs before we even need to edit them. For instance, the iPhone has "portrait mode" built in which does a wonderful job of balancing both light and color to produce great pictures. There are, nevertheless, many free Adobe Photoshop apps for iOS and Android OS devices available to download and use for taking those pictures to the next level. Three of our favorites are:

Photoshop Express offers 45 different effects, called "looks." Each "look" is editable via a slider. You can convert your pic to black and white, "pop colors" and other neat options. You can also add borders and frames to your pictures. In addition, you can also crop, straighten and rotate you pictures in addition to controlling things like contrast, saturation, etc.

Photoshop Mix creates simple layered images by allowing you to "stack" one part of a photo over another. Adobe has just updated this app with the ability to add text layers as well. In addition, sharing with friends or to social media is extremely easy via this app.

Photoshop Fix advertises their features as "healing tools." This app gives you the ability to edit facial features such as smiles and slimmed down cheeks as well as the ability to "patch" and "smooth" which works to erase blemishes with surrounding colors.

If you need a more robust editing solution more akin to the full photoshop and have access to a computer, GIMP is a wonderful full featured and open-source program that will more than likely exceed your needs. GIMP , which stands for "General Image Manipulation Program," has been around for almost 25 years, and has been regularly updated. The most recent version came out this past August. It's available on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. To download  your copy of GIMP, visit https://www.gimp.org/ and select the download link.