Best Photo Editing Software of 2026

Whether you’re a corporate organization or a media house, you will need to work with pictures and graphics. This may be in the form of magazine photos, digital images, or social media posts. You rely on these images for marketing purposes, user experience, or product representations.

However, producing or editing these images can take up a substantial amount of time when handled manually. Moreover, if the images aren’t edited professionally or if they are low quality, it can have an adverse effect on your brand image.

This is where photo editing software comes in handy. The tool helps you process images faster with the help of features such as pre-built templates and batch processing. Moreover, it also allows you to produce high-quality images by letting you adjust the lighting, color schemes, and background.

In this buyers guide, we will learn more about image editing software and its features and benefits.

Here's what we'll cover:

• What is photo editing software?

• Common features of photo editing software

• What type of buyer are you?

• Benefits of photo editing software

• Market trends to understand

What is photo editing software?

Photo editing software is a software tool that helps you create and edit photos. It offers features such as real-time editing, image libraries, image import and export, pre-built templates, and watermarking. These features help businesses and media houses save the time and effort involved in processing and publishing images. The tool also allows for batch processing of images which helps in the generation of forms, templates, and graphics that need to be produced in bulk.

A view of the photo editing effects in Affinity Photo (Source)

Common features of photo editing software

To select an online photo editor tool that’s right for your business, it’s essential to learn about its common features. So let’s look at some common features of an image editing tool.

What type of buyer are you?

These are the two common buyer categories for online photo editor tools:

• Buyers looking for a professional-grade tool: These buyers include photographers, art directors, graphic designers, working for businesses, newspapers, and magazines. They look for a tool that allows them to airbrush the subject or remove errors from images. Graphic designers working for businesses may want to create graphics for corporate websites or social media platforms, at scale. They need a tool that offers features such as batch processing, watermarking, and pre-built templates.

• Buyers looking for a tool suited to beginners: These buyers are amateurs or novices in the field of photo editing. They generally require a tool for basic editing and slight modifications such as adjusting the lighting, cropping, and adding frames to the pictures. They may go for a free photo editing software tool that offers an easy-to-use user interface, a free version that allows basic adjustments to play around with, or tutorial videos.

Benefits of photo editing software

There are many benefits to choosing a photo editing app including:

• Reduced time: The tools can help reduce the time it takes to edit and create images. Using pre-built templates, simplified watermarking, easy import and export, you can save the time involved in doing all this manually. The batch processing feature also allows you to process multiple images simultaneously, thereby drastically reducing the time involved with processing each image individually.

• Better branding: Using the tool, you can make your brand stand out by applying your selected color scheme as well as creating and saving templates that align with your brand guidelines for future use. You can also use your own logos or watermarks to help reinforce your branding and to make your content easily noticeable.

Market trends to understand

Here’s a market trend that’s impacting the photo editing app industry:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) for picture enhancements: AI-driven photo editing apps are becoming mainstream and help edit photos and make improvements beyond merely adding stylistic photo effects and filters or adjusting the lighting. The technology uses neural networks to study the image, identify people present in them, and modifies the underlying pixels to render an artistic style to them.

If you still have trouble finding a software tool, we can help you find the right software for your needs and budget in 15 minutes or less, for free. Schedule a call or click here to chat with a software advisor now.

Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.