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Polarr Photo Editor: Best free mobile photo editor in 2021!? // Alternative to Lightroom & Snapseed
Polar Photo Editor is a great, free, alternative to Adobe Lightroom Mobile and Snapseed. The free version of this photo editing software offer plenty of features, including some AI selection, face retouching tools, dehaze, vibrance, noise reduction and most of the basic tools you would expect from a good photo editing software. In this video I will answer if it is the best free photo editor in 2021!
🔗 Download Polarr Photo Editor https://www.polarr.com/
🔗 BUY the Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
✨ WATCH NEXT ✨
- Two BEST TOOLS in Lightroom Mobile https://youtu.be/452YOZEhPYI
- 64 MB photos edit https://youtu.be/60iktXOvAsw
- Snapseed Sunset Edit https://youtu.be/VxHsi19V2BA
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Intro & first thoughts of Polarr Photo Editor
00:31 - Opening a RAW photo
00:53 - Styles
01:08 - Transform tools
01:50 - Add a border
02:30 - Basic tools
02:59 - Colors tools
03:38 - HSL
04:11 - Split toning
04:57 - Effects, fringing & details
06:20 - Denoise, tone curve & vignette
07:28 - Face retouching
09:45 - AI Selections
11:42 - Exporting
12;32 - Should you upgrade?
13:20 - Why I still use Lightroom
13:58 - Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
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- 0:00 Intro & first thoughts of Polarr Photo Editor
- 0:31 Opening a RAW photo
- 0:53 Styles
- 1:08 Transform tools
- 1:50 Add a border
- 2:30 Basic tools
- 2:59 Colors tools
- 3:38 HSL
- 4:11 Split toning
- 4:57 Effects, fringing & details
- 6:20 Denoise, tone curve & vignette
- 7:28 Face retouching
- 9:45 AI Selections
- 11:42 Exporting
- 13:20 Why I still use Lightroom
- 13:58 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
would you believe me if i told you that there's an editing app that has more features than lightroom and snapseed combined and is completely free i hope the answer was yes because that's what we're talking about in this video for those of you who are new to this channel i'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this art i've been using Polarr Photo Editor for the last few years on my mac but recently downloaded on my google pixel 4 my first reaction when i opened yet i was like what they support this feature they also have this and even have this ai feature that can do this let's get right into it okay so the first step is to open a photo so for here i'm actually gonna go inside of a folder i have instead of google photos to open the picture so if we go right inside of here we're gonna have the first photo i want to edit it's a little bit slow to open but this is just a small disadvantage because it's opening a raw file which is pretty good so we're just gonna wait for it to uh open okay so the file just opened and like on most app you can actually go inside of the styles here and choose different styles if you want to apply them automatically uh they have a few that are free but they also have some that are paid and you can create your own but i won't talk too much about that we're gonna go right away inside of transform here and i think this is very important like i talked about in video is making sure that you are level and i must say here this is a very cool mechanism it's very smooth uh making your level perfect and then like most app you have options here to rotate the picture i rotate it around if you want to you can also crop it so you have all different options here which is pretty cool here is that you have options for instagram uh youtube and things like that with different sizes here so for example if i wanted to have it on a vertical orientation for instagram we could select that right away i'm gonna leave it on an original here because we won't be cropping this picture but what is even cooler is if we come here we have our perspective tools but we also have an option to go and add a border so this is very useful if you have like a panorama or something like that or you want to create an instagram story and you want to add a border around it so you can come here in the aspect you can select let's say a vertical shot for an instagram story and then you can add a border around here and you're gonna suggest a few colors that match your image here so if we take a blue like this we can quickly get a pretty nice image that we could post in a story on instagram so this is pretty nice uh i'm actually not to do this i'm just going to leave the picture as it was might just level it a little bit inside of crop here but that seems to be pretty good now we're going to move inside of the second tab here and this is all our normal adjustment features so if we go on the exposure we can actually bring up the exposure a little bit and we actually have exposure and brightness then we have our contrast setting i'm going to bring up the contrast highlight and here everything works just as expected i want to bring up the shadows quite a lot instead of this shot i bring up the whites a little bit bring down the blacks um but we adjust a little bit the exposure but as you saw pretty much what we would expect now if we go inside of color here we're going to have our temperature tint and vibrates and saturation and this is pretty nice because a lot of the apps that are free on the store don't have an option for vibrance so i really like using vibrance because it does a better effect than a saturation on the pictures because it's not as intense on how it adjusts the colors so it's going to add a little bit of vibrance and saturation here and we might play um with the color saturation you can see this really changes how the picture looks so i want to go something a little bit more like this to get something i like a little bit more so right away here this is one unique feature of the polar photo bank having a vibrance as an option now we've moved on a little bit more advanced features here we start right away to have more advanced features so we have the hsl tab just like inside of lightroom which is really great so we can come here in orange if we wanted to make the orange a little bit more vibrant and we can bring it up and we can see that the oranges are brought up in the picture same thing if we go on the blue here we can actually adjust a little bit more how do our blues look so put them a little bit more on the teal side and this works really like inside of lightroom uh the only thing that we don't have inside of here is clicking on the image and then making the adjustments but that's not a big deal in my case then if we want to come inside of toning here we can actually adjust the highlights in the shadow and do some split toning so if you wanted to to play with our shadows here we could go and make them let's see more yellow and then we could adjust them a little bit more on the red side bring them up and as you can see we can play with them same thing with the highlights if you wanted to make them more blue more orange whatever but i actually want to go back in this another nice little feature here is super easy to go back inside of your edits you can just click the button here and go back anywhere uh where we were so i want to remove the shadow uh hue aqua hue so we're gonna go back back and we're gonna go to the here aqua hue then we're done and we're back to our edit i went then loaded another image for the next part which is the effects tab so if you come in the effects tab there is a dehaze setting and to my knowledge it's one of the only apps that has a free dehaze option other than lightroom and i really think that lightroom is a paid feature but dehaze allows to remove some haze if we want to get less haze in the background or add some more on the other side which is pretty useful when you want to get a little bit more atmospheric pictures uh landscape photos then there's also more advanced uh features here so we can add a zoom blur and if you want it so this adds a zoom uh blur on the side we can also change the zoom center blur centers we can put it here you also have a radial blur if you wanted i'm not sure if i would ever use these but they're an option if we want so i'm just going to go back remove the blur here um because i don't actually want it then if you go on the next tab here there's also fringing another feature i'm not sure i would ever use uh but this is what fringing does on your picture it has these different layers of colors but that's another feature i personally wouldn't use now if we move on to the detail tab we actually have more features that are similar to lightroom so we have our clarity side lighter right here and this is one of the only free apps that actually seems to have a clarity slider i don't use it a lot but it's still one that a lot of people are going to be really happy to see inside of this app then we have the sharpen here so this works just as expected but what i'm really happy to see and one feature that was missing inside of snapseed is the denoise settings here so you can denoise your shot by just moving the slider here and it seems to be working pretty well then like i talked inside of some of my other videos uh toned curves are really important so just like you would expect inside the app they actually have a tone curve right here so they really have like most of the features you need to have inside of an app now if you go on the next tab here on vignette they actually have a lot more options for your vignette than lightroom has so they have options here for the feather uh as expected but then they also have an option here for the roundness so you can make it more around last round so this is a welcome addition to get a vignette that really looks like you want again i don't really use vignettes that much but it's an option you have right inside of here now if you go inside of green uh you can add green if you want to make it a little bit more like an old picture and i actually think that the green inside this app looks a lot better than the grain inside of lightroom but that's just personal taste but it's a nice little hop option to have here then you have lots if you wanted to use them but i don't have any and i'm not going to go into details about water lots inside of this video now i loaded another picture to talk about the next feature uh so if we look at the tabs at the bottom here our next tab is overlays i'm not going to go into overlays but they basically allowed to add more skies uh clouds or things like that but it's not like luminary ai where it's going to use ai to separate your limits so i don't find them to be that useful but if it's something you're interested in it's an option here where i want to go in isn't to retouch i don't usually touch faces but you're going to see it's a pretty powerful feature inside of here so the bottom here you have liquify and you also have the face detected inside of the shot so we're going to click on my face um so then you have your normal options here so if you want to have skin smoothing and you can use that i never use that and all your other options uh for the face we want to make it more or less saturated you can change all of that here then if you go in your face options you can make it wider smaller uh you can change the height but i just want to show you how well it works so if you look at the chin lift here and we can actually see that my mouse stays in place but everything around changes perfectly then if you go in the eyes again we have all of the settings we would expect for eyes so we can actually change the size of the eyes change the brightness change the clarity and everything uh same thing with the nose you can change the nose width um but again i usually don't use that too much there's also options for the mouth so you'd expect these features here and you can change the smile if you want to make it a little bit more you can change the brightness of the lips and then you can also widen the teeth and i what i like here inside of the teeth whitening it doesn't make them completely white it actually just makes them a little bit more white than they are which is a lot more natural and this feature might not seem like a lot but these are features that you usually found inside of lightroom so it's very impressive that inside of this app they all do that automatically using ai and that you can just quickly play with the face if you need to retouch something really quickly what is even more advanced is the liquify tab here so i'm gonna go crazy and not do at all what people would usually do just make my face ugly and really big um but liquify is what most people use inside a photoshop to do very advanced edits on uh pictures so uh this is a nice welcome feature that they have inside of the shot so i'm gonna cancel my changes here and we're gonna talk about the next feature i wanna show i open another photo for the next feature and when you pin some of your raw files you're gonna be very dark but don't stress that's normal you still have all the information inside of the shot so i'm just going to quickly edit it and then we're going to go talk about the next feature i quickly edited this photo and we can see that the sky is a little bit too bright inside of the picture so now if we go in the selection here this is where it becomes really interesting and you can use ai features to detect some parts of the picture so they automatically have some options here to select the sky or different colors inside of the shot or just apply a linear filter so we're gonna actually select the sky here and you can see they do a really good job of selecting the sky and now we can adjust the sky and just bring down the exposure of the sky here add some contrast maybe i want to add a little bit more um of the whites inside of the sky then go on a color tab here and this is we're going to hit a limitation so inside of the free version uh all these other tabs inside of here are paid features so you actually cannot go and use them but you still have access to most of your basic settings when you're adding a selection on the photo but this is a little bit more advanced so if you're just starting out to edit your photos it's still perfectly fine that you don't have access to these features okay so now if we want to come here and adjust our mask we're gonna see that actually included the tree inside of the mask of the sky we can actually go on the eraser here or on our brush then change our brush size right here if we go inside of property brush size we're going to make it about like this and now we can simply paint out the tree of our mask and that's how easy it is to do it so this is very powerful because you can actually really precisely make changes to your picture if you want to it was a little bit fast on this one but you get the idea that you can really get into the fine details and adjust your mask as you wish inside of this app which is again really powerful once you're happy with your edit the only step that is left is actually to export the shot so if you come inside of the menu here to export again they have a lot of options so you can simply save as a new photo but if we go inside of the init settings right here we can actually save in different files type so you can go in jpeg or png then you can select your qualities you can select at best you can also resize the shot if you want to resize it to another size which is pretty useful when you have pretty big files and you can decide if you preserve your data inside of your shots or not which is pretty useful for me when i don't want to publish my location data or information like that inside of the shop so this is very useful when you want to be exporting a photo so if you want to finish it we can just come inside of here click save new photo and it's going to save the photo to our footer roll now let's talk about why you might want to pay to upgrade the app so if you go inside of selection here like we saw the main reason why i would pay is actually to be able to have access to the other options inside of the selection here there's also an option to batch it export multiple files at the same time which can be pretty useful um but if you look at the upgrade option it's actually pretty cheap and i'm not paid to say anything i don't have anything to do with polar photo editor but it's just to let you know that it's actually pretty cheap compared to lightroom if you want to upgrade to it another thing i forgot to say at the beginning of this video is actually that it works on all platforms so it works on your cell phone it works on your mac it works on your windows device it works on your ios device so it really works everywhere which is really great because you can use the same software on all your devices now let's talk about the reason why i won't be using it and this is simply because there's no option to manage my files so because i take so many files it's really important for me to have something that allows me to manage all my files so this is one problem i have inside of this app is that i actually cannot manage my file directly inside of this app and this is why lightroom is still more interesting for me one thing that is important to note is actually that they still save the settings that you change inside of the picture so you can actually export it and uh i did another shot come back and you're still gonna have your settings for this shot so you don't lose your settings each time you export a photo like you do with snapseed so that's another pretty neat feature inside of this app since i started making youtube videos i've been getting a lot of questions about what is the best free photo editor app and now my answer is going to be polar photo editor if you enjoyed this video please let me know by hitting the like button below and also consider subscribing i'm usually in the outdoors making some videos but it was a little bit too cold today to film a video outside see you in the next one bye
Video Links
- 🔗 Download Polarr Photo Editor
- 🔗 BUY the Google Pixel 4a
- Two BEST TOOLS in Lightroom Mobile
- 64 MB photos edit
- Snapseed Sunset Edit
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
When I first opened Polarr Photo Editor on my Google Pixel 4, my immediate reaction was disbelief. This free app has so many features that I honestly thought it must be missing something. Spoiler: it's not. Over the last few years I've used it on my Mac, and now testing it on mobile, I wanted to dig into whether this really is the best free photo editor available in 2021.
The app handles RAW files smoothly and gives you immediate access to a full suite of tools. Starting with the transform tab, you get precise leveling controls, crop options with presets for Instagram and YouTube, and an interesting border feature that's genuinely useful for stories and panoramas. The basic adjustment panel offers exposure, contrast, highlights, and shadows—all the fundamentals you'd expect.
Where things get interesting is the advanced section. There's a proper HSL panel like Lightroom's, where you can adjust hue, saturation, and luminance for specific colors. Split toning is here too, so you can add different colors to your shadows and highlights. The dehaze slider is something I rarely see in free apps—usually that's locked behind Lightroom's paywall. You also get clarity, denoise, tone curves, and vignette controls with more customization than Lightroom offers.
The face retouching surprised me. Using AI detection, it automatically identifies faces and lets you adjust skin smoothing, eye size and brightness, nose width, smile intensity, and teeth whitening. Unlike heavy-handed mobile retouching, the teeth whitening stays natural. There's even a liquify tool for more advanced edits—something you'd normally need Photoshop for.
AI selections are powerful too. You can select the sky or other elements, then adjust only that area. In the free version, you're limited to basic adjustments on your selection, but in the paid version you unlock color grading and more. Even so, the masking and eraser tools let you refine selections with precision.
Export is straightforward. You can save as JPEG or PNG, adjust quality, resize if needed, and strip metadata for privacy. The app works across platforms—phone, tablet, Mac, Windows—so your edits follow you everywhere.
The main reason I'd still reach for Lightroom? File management. When you're shooting hundreds of photos, having a proper library system matters to me in a way it might not for everyone else. That said, Polarr saves all your edit settings to the file, so unlike Snapseed, your adjustments persist if you export and come back later.
If you're asking whether this is the best free photo editor in 2021, my answer is yes—especially if you care more about editing power than library organization. The feature set is genuinely impressive for a free app, and the paid upgrade is cheap compared to subscription alternatives.