GLOBAL – We all have tons of great photos on our phones, but no matter how good a photographer you are, most photos could do with a bit of a tweak to make them even a better. Some of the photo editing packages you may have heard of can cost as much as a new computer, but luckily, there are lots of free options available. Let’s take a look!

Picnik (picnik.com) is a completely free online photo editing service. It is also built into Flickr – click ‘Edit photo’ when you’ve uploaded a photo to Flickr, and you’ll be using Picnik. It’s great for simple edits of photos, like a cheeky crop, making your photos black and white, or perhaps rotating it to straighten the horizon.

If uploading your photos to edit them isn’t your thing, have a look at Picasa. It is a piece of software you can download to your computer. It’s fast, it’s free, and it comes with a lot of lovely tools for keeping your photos organised. You don’t get that much more functionality than if you were using Picnik, but it’s all on your local computer.

If want to keep your money in your pocket but still want the ability to do some more powerful image editing, take a look at The Gimp (gimp.org) or Pixlr (pixlr.com). The former is a software package you download to your computer (like Picasa), and the latter is a remarkably powerful image editor you can use on-line, right in your web browser. The two latter photo editing solutions have a slightly steeper learning curve, but if you want to get all fancy and advanced, they’re a great way to go!