PicMonkey Graphics tool and Photo Editor

PicMonkey is an online graphic designing tool and a great photo editor. It’s also a great logo maker. You can use PicMonkey to create beautiful photos, social media graphics, YouTube videos, sweet graphics, Facebook covers, and high-impact images to promote your personal or business brand.

Its photo editing capabilities allow you to do fun little things with the images, including advanced editing, effects and filters, and making collages. As a result, marketers and small businesses, and entrepreneurs can design impactful visuals to inform their users about their brand.

Easy to Use

PicMonkey has a simple and easy-to-navigate user interface. It will also walk you through the basic features and offer tips when trying to use them. There are also numerous video tutorials on the official YouTube channel that are really helpful for new users.

The user interface is also very beginner-friendly as you can access most of its functions just by using the toolbar on the far left. PicMonkey also treats objects as separate layers which many non-designers will surely appreciate. Additionally, every object can be rotated, scaled, and flipped with only a single click.

Great Alternative to Canva

Canva is great. However, when it comes to PicMonkey, there’s a lot that it offers. PicMonkey has an extensive array of effects and filters, the ability to add multiple effects to a photo, and nearly unlimited tweaking capabilities.

You can also copy the look by applying the same effects from one photo to another. On the other hand, Canva and its photo editing capabilities are completely basic. There are many helpful features that will make you feel like a Canva user, probably better.

PicMonkey has a lot of templates that give resemblance to Canva. You can select one and create banners, brochures, various logos, plan various design projects and accelerate your design vision. The templates are completely customizable.

You can write anything in place of an existing text element, or change the provided image or video. Consider creating a collage, if it doesn’t work for you. With around 60 different collage templates, you’ll surely find one.

The animation support helps you to upload .mp4 videos and animated .GIF images. Once you upload them you can use the Play button to see how the results will turn out once exported. You can even crop or trim the video.

For a more consistent design focused around a certain subject, PicMonkey offers amazing themes that are a collection of visual elements such as textures, graphics, and fonts.

Online Photo Editor

The main features involve edits, touch-ups, and effects. The edits include adjusting the color balance changes, contrast setting, and brightness. Touch Up involves beauty effects made to make the human face more appealing.

In other words, you can use the combination of this tool and gives retouches to skin, mouth, eyes and help to whiten the teeth, tint the lips, smooth the skin, and remove the red-eye effect. As a result, you can do well-thought-out portrait editing.

Paid Standard Effects

There is a large number of effects both paid and free. The effects are customizable. The effects can be viewed in three different ways. The bloom, brightness, and fade. The effect tool also offers a wide range of photo effects to age a picture, make it black and white, pixelated, mosaic, and much more.

Customizable Overlays, Frames and Textures

It’s amazing that you get a huge overlays menu. You will see the overlays grouped in the ‘Add graphics’ tab. It also includes stickers of small animals, stars, fog, hearts, line, labels, and banners.

It’s amazing that graphic overlays can be changed. The editing includes changing transparency, and color. These are the best if you design thumbnails. These overlays are also for free use.

Similarly, you can add frames and textures to the background. However, the frames aren’t well developed as you can not increase them to fit the photo. You can do them only if you have their subscription.

The texture tool also lags. Because there is no slider, you can not regulate the sharpness, color, or transparency of the texture.

100% free stock photos

PicMonkey offers more than 1 million unique, authentic, gorgeous photos from Unsplash—and 100% of them are free with your Basic subscription. You can also access over 6 million photos from iStock with a Pro subscription and, again, once you’ve chosen your subscription level there are no upcharges. On the other hand, Canva has up charges for individual photos and sometimes charges for using them more than once.

3 Ways to Edit

The canvas edits allow you to resize, crop, and display photos. This is helpful where you want to create a custom design. Then the basic edits allow you to make a basic retouch using the exposure, color, and sharpen settings. In the same way, you can perform advanced edits. This offers several brushes to duplicate a selected object, select or delete it. Additionally, the ‘levels’ tab performs minor color correction so that everything is nice and sharp.

Text Editor

Text Editor has hundreds of fonts and styles available and complete freedom to change the color of the text, align it, make it bigger or smaller or place it behind or front of the image. You can also curve the text in one click, create and fine-tune drop shadows, and upload as many fonts as you want.

The amazing part is that you can make a photo show through the letters of your text. The feature also allows you to select a color by typing or inserting its color code which is helpful if you want a custom color. In addition to it, you can apply effects to the text which are free. These are small tricks often lack in Canva.

Deep Tool Adjustment Feature

This photo editing feature helps to change the exposure of the photo. This further has settings that can allow you to adjust brightness, highlights, shadows, and contrasts. It’s better that you do not increase the value of each more than 5-10%.

Design Amazing Logos

You can design a super stunning logo by using editable logo templates and some tools to make your brand look striking. These are helpful if you are a beginner or you don’t know where to start. Not bad?

Built-In Cloud Storage

The Hub tab allows you to store your sketches, photos, and design projects where you can also share and upload them to a social network, or give access to friends to view the album.

PicMonkey Price

PicMonkey photo editor is not available as a separate PC software, it is an online photo editor with a free trial period. After a quick registration, you get access to all the functionality for 7 days.

When the trial period ends, you can purchase one of the available plans.

• PicMonkey Basic – $7.99/month
• The Pro – $22.99/month
• PicMonkey Team – $33.99/month

PicMonkey Alternatives

Canva is one of the options. Plenty of other choices are also available.

Pixelied, a tough competitor to Canva and DesignWizard  is a graphic design tool that makes it possible to create stunning designs, illustrations, eCommerce product images, brand designs, logos, blog posts and other super amazing content in just a few clicks.

It is a comprehensive design suite with a growing library of stunning templates, post graphics, high-quality thumbnails, header images, and more that makes it super easy to market channels, social media and brands.

Stencil is also another great option for creating engaging visuals for small business owners, bloggers, social media marketers, and more. It level-ups the quality of social media graphics and gives you the courage to create social media graphics, compelling ads, stunning blog headers & much more!

My favorite one is Crello. It is an online graphic designing tool for creating all kinds of visual marketing materials, both digital (social, web, ads) and physical (brochures, labels, posters, etc).

It’s a great design automation platform aimed at marketers, social media specialists, entrepreneurs, bloggers, graphic designers, and helps to create social media posts, blogs, presentations, advertisements, and videos.

Conclusion

As a Canva alternative, PicMonkey offers great value to its users. First of all, it’s a great photo editor that bloggers, Instagram photographers, and social media influencers can use to uplift their work and make changes to their image using the editing and touch-up tools.

Similarly, you can do the designing part for collages, business cards, or personal projects. I like the fact that this online logo maker is easy to manage, has cloud storage, works pretty good with text, and above all it’s free. However, do remember that there is no batch photo editing option. Hence, you need to do things individually.

All in all, this online graphic designing tool is an excellent choice for new users who don’t have hands-on experience with other professional tools like CorelDraw Graphics Suite.  Apart from ads that cause interference during work, PicMonkey I believe is a nice helpful, time-saving graphic designing tool and a key resource for anyone who wants to level up their game.