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V

A route

I want to edit a photo.

Cut out, retouch, fix colour and tone, without uploading the photo anywhere. 15 guides, about 50 minutes in total, in the order that gets you there.

The route, in order

  1. The five fixes, in order, that make most photos look finished.Make a photo look professional in five movesIn this order: 1. Level and crop: straight horizons and verticals, and a tighter crop than you think. 2. Set the ends with Levels: drag the darkest point to where the shadows start and the brightest to where the highlights end, so the photo has a real black and a real white. 3. Fix the colour temperature with Temperature, so whites look white. 4. Add colour with Vibrance, not Saturation, which pushes skin and bright colours too far. 5. Remove distractions with Spot heal: specks, stray hairs, a sign in the corner. Sharpen last, lightly, at the output size.Beginner2 minEditor
  2. The most common photo job, done by a model that runs in your browser.Remove a background on your deviceCut a person or product out of a photo with a model that runs in your browser, then refine the edge and export a transparent PNG.Beginner4 minEditor
  3. Hair, halos and colour fringes: the last ten per cent of a cutout.Fix the edge of a cutout: hair, fur and halosFirst, look at the edge against black and against white: a halo that hides on one shows on the other. Then fix in this order. Missed or extra areas: paint the layer mask, Brush to reveal and Eraser to hide. Hair and fur: open Select and mask… (Ctrl+Alt+R) and paint the Refine edge brush over the hair so the edge is worked out from the colours around it. A light or dark halo: in the same workspace, move Shift edge into the negative to pull the edge in. A coloured fringe from the old background: tick Clean up colour fringes. Send the result to a Layer mask so it stays editable.Intermediate2 minEditor
  4. One click for the subject, or a box for the object.Select a subject automaticallySelect, Subject finds the main subject of everything visible and turns it into a selection in one click; it is best on people. Object select (W) finds the object inside a box you drag, which is better when there are several things or the subject is not a person. Hold Shift as you drag to add, Alt to subtract. Then use the selection: a mask, a masked adjustment, a copy on its own layer (Ctrl+J), or Select and mask… for hair and soft edges. Both run on your device; the first use downloads a model once.Beginner2 minEditor
  5. Make a photo wider or taller, on your device.Expand an image with AI fill (on your device)Choose Image, Expand with AI fill…. The canvas size window opens at 125 per cent with Fill the new area with AI ticked. Set the new size and the anchor (where the current photo sits), then Apply. A model on your device paints the new area to continue the picture, on its own layer, called AI fill, at the bottom of the stack, so you can hide it or paint on it. The first use downloads the model once (about 208 MB). It works best on backgrounds (sky, wall, grass, sea) and in small steps.Beginner2 minEditor
  6. Curves, levels and colour fixes you can change or switch off later.Change colour and tone with adjustment layersCurves, levels, hue and saturation, exposure and the other adjustments, added as layers you can change or remove at any time without touching your pixels.Intermediate7 minEditor
  7. Heal, clone and brush on a separate layer so the original survives.Retouch photos with the brush, heal and clone toolsPaint, erase, spot heal, clone and dodge or burn, with brush size, hardness, opacity, flow, smoothing and pen pressure explained.Intermediate5 minEditor
  8. A portrait taken through the whole process.Retouch a portrait without destroying the originalClean up skin, soften it with restraint, shape light with masked Curves and grade the colour, all on layers you can switch off, so the untouched photo is always one click away.Intermediate5 minWorkflows
  9. Crop, resize, rotate and flip, and what each does to the pixels.Crop, resize, rotate and flipCrop with fixed ratios, change the canvas size without scaling, resize the whole image with resolution, and rotate or flip the canvas or a single layer.Beginner4 minEditor
  10. Which blur can be fixed, which cannot, and what sharpening really does.How to fix a blurry image, and when you cannotIt depends which blur you have. Slightly soft (focus a touch off, or a small photo shown a bit too big): sharpening helps, and a Sharpen filter at a low amount is the fix. Compressed (blocky edges, smeared colour from a screenshot or a messaged JPG): a little sharpening plus a little noise hides it, but the detail is gone. Too few pixels (a 400 px image on a 1080 px post): nothing recovers it. Upscaling makes it bigger, not sharper; it invents pixels by blending the ones next to them. The real fix is the original file at its full size, so ask for it before you spend time on the copy.Beginner2 minEditor
  11. Shrink freely, enlarge as little as possible, resize once.Resize an image without losing quality: what is possibleSmaller is always safe: shrinking throws away pixels you did not need, and the result looks as sharp or sharper. Bigger never adds detail: enlarging invents pixels by blending the ones next to them, so it looks softer, and no tool changes that. So: work from the original file, resize once to the final size, keep text and logos as text and shapes (they redraw sharp at any size), and enlarge photos as little as you can get away with. In the Voidcanvas Editor, resizing a photo layer with the Move tool's handles or the W and H boxes keeps its original pixels, so you can try sizes and go back without loss.Beginner2 minEditor
  12. No background and the right file type, from a photo, a logo or a design.Make a transparent PNGTwo things make a PNG transparent: nothing behind the subject in the design, and PNG or WebP as the export type (JPG cannot be transparent). For a photo, Layer, Remove background hides the background with a mask, on your device. For a logo on white, the Magic wand (Shift+W, then click the white) plus Mask hiding the selection does it in two clicks. For a design that has a background colour, press Ctrl+E, choose PNG and tick Leave out the background colour. The checkerboard on the canvas means transparent; white means a layer or a colour is still there.Beginner2 minEditor
  13. Ellipse select, a mask, trim, export.Crop an image into a circle (transparent PNG)Open the image, press Shift+M for Ellipse select, hold Shift and drag a circle over the part you want, then click Mask from selection in Properties. Choose Image, Trim transparent edges to cut the canvas to the circle, press Ctrl+E, choose PNG and download. The corners are transparent. Nothing is uploaded.Beginner2 minEditor
  14. PNG, JPG or WebP, and which to pick for what.Export for screens: PNG, JPG and WebPPick the right file type and size for web and social, keep or drop transparency, and copy an image straight to your clipboard.Beginner3 minEditor
  15. How to check that an online editor is not sending your photos anywhere.Photo editors that do not upload your photos: how to tell"Online photo editor" says where the app came from, not where your photo goes. Most web editors send the image to their servers to process it; a few do the work inside your browser and send nothing. You can tell in two minutes: open the browser's developer tools on the Network tab, load a photo into the editor and apply an edit, and look for a request roughly the size of your photo leaving the page. Then switch the browser to offline and try the same edit. A tool that keeps working offline and sends nothing the size of your image is processing on your device. Voidcanvas is built that way, and the exact list of what it does send is below.Beginner6 minHelp and privacy

Questions people ask

Is my photo uploaded when I remove the background?

No. The background model is downloaded to your browser the first time and runs there. See the privacy guide for exactly what is and is not sent.