Online photo editor with layers

What this browser photo editor can do

Photo Editor runs in your browser: nothing to download, no sign-up, and it works on phones as well as computers. The tools sit in the right-hand column (below the photo on a phone):

• Adjust: brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, sharpening, vignette (darker or lighter edges) and noise (film-like grain), plus levels (black point, white point, gamma) and curves (RGB or a single red, green or blue channel), for the whole picture or for one layer.
• Blur: blur everything, or choose "Part of it" and brush over only the areas you want soft, such as the background.
• Brush and eraser: size, hardness, opacity and colour, and they can paint on a mask instead.
• Clone stamp: set a source point, then drag to paint those pixels somewhere else. Handy for covering wires, spots or passers-by.
• Text and shapes: font, size, colour, outline and shadow; boxes, circles, lines and arrows with their own outline colour and width.
• Add image: bring in another picture, such as a logo, a cut-out portrait or a screenshot, as a new layer. Press Add image in the layer list, drop a picture onto the photo, or paste one with Ctrl+V (⌘+V on a Mac) on a computer; drag to move it and drag a corner to resize it in proportion (pinch with two fingers on a phone, or use the arrow keys and plus or minus), then press Done, or Cancel to leave it out.
• Crop: free, 1:1, 4:3, 16:9 or the original ratio, plus 90 degree turns, horizontal and vertical flips, and straightening.
• Undo and redo: up to 50 steps, with Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) + Z and Ctrl + Shift + Z.
• Download: PNG, JPG or WebP, with a quality setting for JPG and WebP, at the size of the photo you loaded.

Using layers and masks

Everything is a layer: the photo, what you paint with the brush, each piece of text and each shape. Layers stack from the bottom up, and the list lets you reorder them, change their opacity, hide them for a moment, duplicate or delete them.

Each layer also has a blend mode, which decides how it mixes with the layers below. Normal, the default, covers them as it is; Multiply only ever darkens (white disappears), Screen only ever lightens (black disappears), Overlay and Soft Light add contrast, and Colour uses the colours of this layer while keeping the brightness below. Once you pick one, a single line under the menu explains what it does.

A mask is a greyscale picture attached to a layer that decides where the layer shows: white shows it, black hides it. Choose "Add mask: all shown" or "Add mask: all hidden" in the layer list, then paint over the photo. With "Show" picked, the layer appears where you paint; with "Hide" picked, it disappears there. An all-shown mask starts with "Hide" picked and an all-hidden one with "Show", so your first stroke makes a visible difference. The layer’s own pixels never change, so you can always paint it back. Untick "Mask on" to show the whole layer as usual. To paint it again later, select the layer and press "Paint the mask" in the layer list.

Your first stroke adds a layer called "Local blur 1" above the photo (another one would be "Local blur 2"): a blurred copy with a fully hidden mask, so the blur only shows where you paint. The red is just a guide while you paint and never appears in the download. Next time, open Blur and choose "Part of it": your local blurs are listed, and "Keep painting" changes one instead of adding another layer.

Cover up wires, spots or people: the clone stamp

With "Aligned" on, the source point moves along with your strokes, which suits patching one area stroke by stroke; with it off, every stroke starts again from the same source point, which suits copying one thing to several places. The clone stamp paints on the current layer (a photo or brush layer). To keep the original photo untouched, add a brush layer first, set Sample to "All visible layers" and paint on the new layer. Parts of the source that fall outside the photo are not painted.

Blur here is for looks, not for hiding details

The blur in this editor is there to make pictures look good: a softer background, a sense of depth. Its strength scales with the photo, but it is not guaranteed to make anything unreadable, and large text may still be readable. To hide faces, plates, phone or ID numbers, use Blur, pixelate or add text instead: it replaces the pixels in the area and also offers solid black.

The download is one flat picture of all the visible layers combined. Hidden layers are not in the file, and the file has no layers to take apart.

On a phone: size and layer limits

Every layer lives in your device’s memory, and more layers or bigger photos use more of it. Phones and tablets get lower limits so editing stays smooth:

A larger photo is scaled down in proportion before editing starts, and the download panel shows its original size. An added image is scaled to the same long-side limit, and at the layer limit you need to delete a layer before you can add one. The undo history has a memory limit too: after many large brush strokes, the oldest steps may be dropped first.

Is my photo uploaded

Not by default. Reading, adjusting, blurring, combining layers and writing the file all happen in your browser. Only when you sign in with Google and press "Save here" is that editing project uploaded to our cloud storage, so you can open it on another device and carry on.

• Unless you save to the cloud, the photo, any added images and your edits stay in this tab’s memory only. They are not written into browser storage, and closing or reloading the tab discards them.
• Cloud projects: up to 3 per account and 50 MB each, readable only by you when signed in. They are deleted after 180 days without use, and you can delete one project or your whole account at any time.
• The download is redrawn from scratch and carries none of the original capture data (EXIF), such as the timestamp or GPS location; cloud projects do not store it either.
• Usage analytics record only the output format you chose and how often you sign in, save, open or delete, never file names, sizes, text or the number of layers.

How photos and other data are handled is explained in full in the privacy notice.

Frequently asked questions