Review: Fotor, powerful design and photo editing tool

Thursday 13 December 2018, 21:12 by Michelle Peeters | 8,200 views | 1 comment

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Fotor is a powerful yet easy-to-use tool for online photo editing and graphic design. It helps you edit photos, create collages and make social media images in just a few minutes.

Here are some of the main features:

• Powerful photo editing suite, extensive photo effects and filters, portrait retouching, HDR, et cetera;


• Professionally designed templates for social media images, cards, invitations, posters, flyers, banners and more;


• Hundreds of fonts, countless stickers and professional design tools to choose from;


• Several platforms available, Web, Windows, Mac and mobile apps.

On the Fotor website, you will find a version of Fotor that you can use for free and online, free but with limited premium features. You can find most of the other versions in your operating system's app store.

How does it work?

When you start Fotor, you see a window with four options: Edit, Collage, Design and Features. I will first look at the Edit module. Here you can open a photo, JPG only, no RAW!, after which it appears in the large preview window.

The following message appears at the bottom of the screen: Please use Chrome for the best experience with Fotor, you may encounter some problems with your current browser. I use Safari as my browser and would like to continue doing so because of other applications that do not work with Chrome.

A toolbar is visible on the far left of the screen, allowing you to apply a number of automatic effects, scenes, such as Effects, Beauty, Frames, Stickers, Text and Cloud.

To the right of the Basic menu is another menu with a number of main categories, including Tap-enhance, Magic clipper, Crop, Rotate, Basic, Fine-tune, Color, Vignette, Curves, Resize and HDR. Clicking the name of a main category displays its available options.

Collage

The second option you see when starting Fotor is Collage. In Collage, you can easily create collages from multiple images using templates. You can also add scenes, effects or frames to the results.

First, you upload the photos you want to include in your collage, which appear on the right of your screen. You choose the desired template and can then move the photos into the desired frame yourself, or have this done automatically.

You can then also add text, with various fonts available, and stickers.

Design

You can use Fotor to create a graphic design quite easily. There are plenty of preset templates, ranging from social media covers and posts to cards, banner adverts, posters and more.

I always make this type of poster in Photoshop, and it takes me half a day to create something like this. Fotor Design gives you quick inspiration through all the design examples it presents, which you can then fully customise. Very useful!

Features

And then there is the Features option, with another whole range of enhancement tools that you can use. Templates, Design, Basic edits, Effects, Beauty, Collage, HDR, Text, Clipart, Frames and Banner maker.

I have to say that many of them crashed, which will undoubtedly be related to my Safari browser.

Conclusion

Does Fotor Edit come close to being a Photoshop clone or a Photoshop wannabe? No, not really. However, it does include a few powerful tools that do their job very well for what the programme actually is, an image enhancer. Much better than all those iPhone apps that do roughly the same thing. And on top of that, it is almost free!

The main difference between Fotor Photo Editor and Photoshop, however, is that the latter uses a toolbar and layers approach, with tools that let you work directly on your photo.

For example, you can clone out a stray hair on your model's face or lighten a piece of clothing with the Dodge tool. With Fotor Photo Editor, you can only apply effects and edits to the entire image. There is not even a selection tool, and you can forget about things such as layers altogether.

However, do not think that Fotor Photo Editor is 'basic'. Click the Adjust icon and you will find curves and levels tools. Elsewhere, there are vertical and horizontal distortion tools that can also help to fix the perspective.

But there is no getting around the fact that Fotor Photo Editor takes most of its inspiration from apps such as Snapheal by Skylum. In other words, one-click filters and fixes are the order of the day.

This often produces quite attractive results, and they can certainly create striking images. However, it is less about subtle corrections and more about creating something stylish for your Facebook wall or Instagram feed.

Most, if not all, filters have just one adjustment slider for changing the intensity level. A handful of them did catch my attention, including Bokeh, which added subtle and attractive bokeh to the image.

However, several very useful features require you to upgrade to Fotor Pro. If you do not, a watermark will be placed over your image when you use the tool in question. Upgrading costs 17.50 euros per year, or 5.50 euros if you want to pay monthly.

Until you pay up, fairly useful tools such as noise reduction, lens correction, dehaze and HSL adjustment remain unavailable to you.

Whether you want to spend that much on an app like this is questionable, especially if you are looking for high-level image correction and editing. Although Pixelmator is almost three times as expensive, it still costs less than 30 euros, and that is a one-off payment, meaning you can use the app for life.

The programme does excel at simple edits. Many of them can be activated with just one click. The number of filters, frames, borders and text effects is almost overwhelming.

I think the target audience mainly consists of people who want to quickly post an optimised or enhanced photo on social media. For demanding users, the adjustments are a little too drastic.

The two remaining options, Collage and Design, are fun and useful tools that make it very easy to create attractive designs for all kinds of purposes. Think Christmas or creative postcards, posters, banners for Facebook or email, and even logos.

For people who do not want the steep learning curve of, for example, Photoshop, but who still want or need to design something now and then, this is definitely recommended!

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