3 Free Alternatives To Adobe Photoshop Touch [Android]

There’s no denying the fact that Photoshop is the de-facto standard for image editing. It is the preferred program for all editing professionals, and plenty of amateurs seek to use it as well. And I don’t blame them – the software is absolutely packed with plenty of features that can probably do more than your imagination is even capable of.

However, in case you didn’t know, Adobe has also released a touch version made for both Android phones and tablets. If you know the price of Photoshop on a desktop, then it won’t surprise you to know that the phone version goes for $4.99 and the tablet version sells at $9.99. Shelling out that money for those apps maybe not be an ideal solution for your wallet, so it’d be great if there were some free alternatives to Photoshop, and thankfully there are.

Check out these tools to see if they could potentially fulfill your needs.

Adobe Photoshop Express

If you don’t want to spend money on the full version of these touch apps, Adobe also offers a more limited version at no cost. Named Adobe Photoshop Express, this app is still suitable for people with small needs. The Express app just includes capabilities to crop, rotate, adjust color, and add artistic effects to any images found on your device. These features are most suitable for pictures taken via the camera. This is in comparison to the full version of the touch app, which includes more features that are found in the desktop counterpart such as layers, selections, fill, and tools such as Refine Edge.

In order to know whether the Express app is right for you, you’ll need to determine whether simply tweaking images is enough, or if you need to do some more hard core editing such as extracting parts of an image out of the entire picture. I think it’s great that Adobe offers a free option of the full Photoshop offering, although it’s probably meant as a way of trying a limited set of features on the app before considering buying the full thing.

Snapseed

If you only need to tweak images, then you may wish to use something that can do a little more than Photoshop Express. While it doesn’t have the desktop-level features, Snapseed does offer a few more things to modify your images. It includes auto-correct, color correction, selective adjust, filters, borders, and sharing over any services for which you have the app installed. The fact that the sharing features are extensible is a great benefit to the app.

Don’t let the emphasis on Google+ sharing fool you. It is also quite snappy to use, which is something that Adobe’s products aren’t known for at all.

Photo Editor

Lastly, if you don’t like the suggestions above, you can try an app simply called Photo Editor. This app completely specializes in customizing pictures that you take on your device. It includes features you’d expect such as cropping, rotating, resizing, and adding effects. However, at the same time it does include a higher level of control, as you can add frames/borders, drawing on your images, and a curves-interface for adjusting the image’s colors.

You can also choose to save your finished images as either JPEG or PNG as well as add, edit, or remove EXIF data. Of course, the app also includes plenty of sharing features, so you can easily send it to your friends or post it to your favorite social networks.

Conclusion

These three options should take care of at least most of your needs. If you absolutely require the advanced features found in the full, paid version of Photoshop Touch, then I’m sorry to say that there’s nothing which can fully replace all of those features. But these tools should be plenty for most people. Worst case scenario, you can continue to place more of the heavy lifting on your computer with either Photoshop or a free alternative such as GIMP. However, if you just need to do something simple and quick on your Android device, then these tools should be more than enough to get the job done efficiently.

Have you been able to perform image editing on your mobile device(s), or have you even had the need to? If you’ve done editing, which apps do you use? What features would you like to see included in other free alternatives to Photoshop? Let us know in the comments!

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