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