AI Photo Editor

A complete photo editor, powered by on-device AI

Last reviewed: 17 October 2026

Most "free AI photo editors" upload your pictures to a server, process them there and send the result back. This one doesn't. The AI models download to your browser the first time you use them and then run on your own phone or computer using WebAssembly, so your photos — family pictures, ID documents, unreleased products — never leave your device. There's no account, no watermark and no daily limit.

What you can do

• Move & free transform: drag, scale and rotate any layer with handles, type exact X/Y, scale and angle, flip, centre or fit it to the canvas, and nudge with the arrow keys.
• Layers: stack photos, text and cut-outs as separate layers with visibility, opacity and 16 blend modes (Multiply, Screen, Overlay and more); duplicate, reorder, merge and flatten. Add any image as a new layer to build composites.
• Lasso & Marquee selection: freehand, polygonal, rectangle and ellipse selections with add/subtract, marching ants and refine edge — then content-aware fill, copy or cut to a new layer, fill, blur or crop to the selection.
• Curves, Levels & Clone Stamp: histogram-based tone control per colour channel, and a clone stamp with hardness, opacity and aligned sampling.
• Healing Brush & Spot Healing: paint over a blemish and on-device AI fills it in, or Alt-click a source and the healing brush blends its texture into the spot's own colour and lighting, like Photoshop.
• Patch Tool & Content-Aware Fill: draw around a flaw and drag it onto a clean area; it's replaced and blended in seamlessly (Poisson blending). Or select anything with the lasso, marquee or Select Object, choose Edit › Content-Aware Fill… (or Shift+F5 › Content-Aware), and AI fills it in, onto the same layer or a new one.
• Brush with blend modes: soft, hard and airbrush brushes with size, hardness, opacity, flow, smoothing and pen pressure, painting in Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft light, Color, Luminosity and more, plus Behind and Clear. Presets for dodge, burn, glow and colour tint; Alt-click picks a colour.
• Gradient & Paint Bucket: drag linear, radial, angle, reflected or diamond gradients from presets or your own colours, with blend modes, opacity and dithering; or click to fill similar colours with adjustable tolerance, contiguous or global. Both respect the current selection.
• Dodge, Burn & Sponge: brush light onto faces and skies or darken distractions, targeting shadows, midtones or highlights with Protect Tones to keep colours true; the sponge saturates or desaturates by brush, with Vibrance to protect skin and already-vivid colours.
• Blur, Sharpen & Smudge: brush softness onto skin or busy backgrounds, crisp up eyes and hair (Protect Detail sharpens brightness only, so there are no colour fringes or halos), or smudge colour along a stroke like a finger in wet paint, with optional finger painting.
• Eyedropper & History Brush: pick colours with point or averaged sampling (3×3 to 31×31) and copy them as HEX, RGB, HSL or CMYK; paint back any earlier history step, for example restoring sharp eyes after smoothing a whole portrait.
• Pen & Shapes: draw precise Bézier paths (click for corners, drag for curves, edit points and handles) and turn them into a selection, a fill or a stroke; or draw rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses, polygons, stars, lines, arrows, hearts and speech bubbles with fill, stroke, dashes and drop shadow. Each shape stays editable until you commit it to its own layer.
• Warp Text & Layer Styles: bend titles into arcs, bulges, flags, waves and more; then give any layer Photoshop-style effects — drop shadow, outer and inner glow, inner shadow, bevel & emboss, stroke, colour and gradient overlay — with quick styles like Sticker, Neon and Gold. Styles stay live and editable, and can be copied between layers.
• Adjustment Layers & Layer Masks: add non-destructive Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Curves, Exposure, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Black & White, Photo Filter, Gradient Map, Invert, Posterize or Threshold layers that you can re-edit, hide or fade at any time. Every layer can have a mask, made from a selection or painted with any brush, gradient or fill: black hides, white reveals.
• Smart Objects & Filter Gallery: convert a layer to a smart object and scale, rotate or crop it as often as you like without losing quality; filters on it become smart filters you can re-edit, hide or delete later. The Filter Gallery previews 40 filters (watercolour, cutout, oil paint, charcoal, halftone, stained glass, glass, ripple, motion and spin blur, high pass and more) and can stack several at once.
• Liquify, Sky Replacement & Camera Raw: push, bloat, pucker and twirl pixels with Liquify, or reshape eyes, smile, nose, jaw and face width with Face-Aware sliders driven by on-device face landmarks. Sky Replacement uses an AI depth model to find the sky, swaps in a new one and relights the photo to match, as separate masked layers. The Camera Raw filter adds pro develop controls: white balance, exposure, highlights and shadows, texture, clarity, dehaze, an 8-colour HSL mixer, colour grading, sharpening, noise reduction, vignette and grain.
• Selections, Generative Expand & Warp: select with the Magic Wand, a Quick Selection brush that snaps to edges, Color Range (sampled colours, skin tones, highlights and more) or one click with AI Select Subject and Select Sky; selections stay visible whichever tool you use. Generative Expand makes the canvas bigger and lets on-device AI paint in what lies beyond the frame, or extends it with mirrored edges, a colour or transparency. Warp bends a layer with Photoshop-style mesh presets, and Perspective and Distort fit it onto screens, signs and book covers.
• Projects, Actions & Batch: save your work as a .nextg project that keeps every layer, mask, style, smart object and adjustment layer editable, with automatic recovery if the tab closes. Record your edits as an Action, replay it with one click, or batch-process a whole set of photos (resize, Camera Raw looks, filters, background removal, AI colorize, generative expand) and download them as a ZIP.
• Content-Aware Scale, Image Size & Red Eye: change the width or height while people and objects keep their shape (protect a subject with AI, a selection or skin tones); resize precisely with high-quality resampling; and fix red eyes with a click or automatically for every face.
• Editable Text, Puppet Warp & Lens Correction: text layers stay editable (move them, change the words, font or warp any time); Puppet Warp bends a layer naturally around pins you place; Lens Correction removes barrel and pincushion distortion, colour fringes and dark corners, and straightens converging verticals.
• Merge to HDR, Focus Stacking & Match Color: combine bracketed exposures into one balanced HDR photo, or several shots focused at different distances into one that's sharp throughout, with automatic alignment for handheld shots. Match Color makes a layer's colours and brightness match another photo or the scene below it, so composites blend in.
• Pro layers & workspace: clip a layer to the one below it (a photo inside text or a shape), lock transparent pixels or a whole layer, and keep shapes editable like text. Turn on rulers, drag out guides, show a grid, and snap moves, shapes and selections to guides, the grid, the edges and the centre.
• Export As & Photomerge: export several sizes and formats at once (PNG, JPEG, WebP and AVIF where supported), every layer as its own file, or your layers as an animated GIF. Photomerge stitches overlapping photos into a seamless panorama with automatic matching, exposure blending, auto-crop or AI-filled edges.
• Groups, Info & brush engine: organise layers into groups (nestable, with group opacity, blend mode, visibility and masks; adjustments inside a group only affect that group); see a live histogram with clipping warnings, a navigator, pixel values in RGB, HSB and CMYK, single-channel views and saved selections; and paint with chalk, spray, leaf, star and calligraphy tips with scatter, jitter, hue variation and paper texture.
• Perspective Crop & Content-Aware Move: drag four corners onto a document, sign or screen photographed at an angle and it comes out straight and flat; or lasso an object, drag it somewhere else and AI fills in the spot it left.
• Blur Gallery & Color Lookup: Iris, Tilt-Shift and Field blur with handles on the photo and glowing bokeh highlights, for shallow focus or a miniature effect; and Color Lookup adjustment layers with twelve film and cinema looks, plus loading and exporting .cube LUTs from Premiere, DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut.
• Fill, patterns & Color panel: Edit › Fill… fills a selection or layer with a colour, pattern, history state or content-aware AI in any blend mode; save part of a photo as your own pattern and use it with the Paint Bucket or a Pattern Overlay style. The Color panel has an HSB picker, hex and RGB entry, colour harmonies, saved swatches and recent colours.
• Timeline animation: turn layers into animation frames, set each frame's timing, add cross-fade tweens, preview it playing, and export an animated GIF, a video (MP4 or WebM) or numbered PNG frames.
• Shadows/Highlights, HDR Toning & colour mixing: open up dark shadows and recover bright skies based on each area's surroundings, or give a photo a detailed HDR look; Selective Color and Channel Mixer adjustment layers fine-tune individual colour ranges or remix the red, green and blue channels (great for black & white with a red or green filter, or an infrared look).
• Lighting Effects, Lens Flare & Clouds: light a scene with up to four spot, point or directional lights that you place and aim on the photo, with gloss and surface texture; add a sun flare from four lens types; or render clouds in your colours.
• Gradient Editor & Layer Comps: build gradients with as many colour and opacity stops as you like and save them as presets; save several versions of a design (which layers show, their opacity, blend modes and styles) as layer comps, flip between them and export them all at once. Layer comps and animation frames are kept in saved projects.
• Image Trace to SVG: turn a logo, drawing or photo into scalable vector shapes (colour, greyscale or black & white, with presets for logos, posters and line art), then download the SVG or add the traced artwork as a layer.
• Smart Sharpen & Distort filters: Smart Sharpen reverses slight blur or camera shake by deconvolution, for crisper detail without the halos of ordinary sharpening; plus Spherize, Pinch, Polar Coordinates, Wave and ZigZag.
• Ruler, Rotate & Stroke: measure distances and angles (in pixels or real-world units once you set a scale), straighten a photo along any line you draw, rotate by an exact angle, and outline a selection or layer with Edit › Stroke.
• Stack modes & Auto-Align: load a burst of photos as layers, line them up automatically, then use Median to make people and cars walking through the scene disappear, Mean to remove noise, or Maximum for light and star trails.
• Frequency Separation & Mixer Brush: one command splits a portrait into colour/tone and texture layers for professional skin retouching (with Photoshop's Linear Light, Vivid Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Subtract, Divide and other extra blend modes); the Mixer Brush paints like wet paint, picking up and blending the colours underneath.
• Print proofing & selection tools: preview how your image will print in CMYK and grey out colours a printer can't reproduce; and expand, contract, border, smooth, feather, grow or select similar colours with Select › Modify.
• Quick Mask & your own shortcuts: press Shift+Q and paint a selection with any brush through a red overlay; and give any menu command your own keyboard shortcut (Edit › Keyboard Shortcuts, with import and export).
• Print, LUT export & AI corners: print at an exact size or resolution with margins and crop marks (or save a print-ready PDF), export your adjustment layers as a .cube LUT for video editors, and let AI fill the empty corners when you straighten or rotate a photo.
• Color Replacement & Background Eraser: paint a new colour over a shirt, car or flower while its shading stays, or erase a sky or backdrop right up to hair and fine edges — both affect only colours like the one under the brush centre.
• Art History Brush, Pattern Stamp, Focus Area & Notes: repaint a photo in painterly strokes, paint with patterns, select whatever is in focus in one step, and pin sticky notes with feedback to spots on the image (saved with the project, never exported).
• Generative Fill (AI): select an area, type what you want — “a sailboat”, “a hot air balloon”, “snow-capped mountains” — and AI paints it in to match the light and colours around it, with several variations to choose from. It runs on your own graphics card (WebGPU), so your photo still never leaves your device; the model (about 2.6 GB) downloads once and is kept by your browser. Powered by Stability AI.
• Face Swap (AI): put a face from one photo onto a face in another — the face is fitted to the new pose and expression and its skin tone and lighting are matched — on its own layer, entirely on your device. Only for photos of people who have given permission.
• Photoshop-style workspace: File, Edit, Image, Adjust, AI, View and Help menus; a right-click menu with quick actions at the spot you click; a History panel to jump back to any step; and keyboard shortcuts (press ? in the editor).
• Colorize black & white (AI): turn old monochrome photos into natural colour, with an intensity slider. More about colourising photos.
• Restore old photos (AI): automatically find and repair scratches, cracks and dust, fix fading and grain, and optionally colourise. More about photo restoration.
• Select Object (AI): click anything to select it, then remove it, cut it out, blur everything else or make it a colour pop.
• Lens Blur (AI): estimates depth so you can blur by distance like a real camera, choosing the focus point with a click.
• Magic Eraser (AI): paint over a tourist, power line, logo or blemish and an inpainting model fills the area to match its surroundings. More about the magic eraser.
• Background (AI): remove the background for a transparent PNG, or replace it with a colour, a blur or your own image. More about changing backgrounds.
• Portrait Blur (AI): blur the background behind a person, pet or product for a shallow depth-of-field look. More about portrait blur.
• Face & Retouch (AI): smooth skin while keeping eyes and lips sharp, or blur every face for privacy. More about face retouching.
• Enhance: one-tap auto enhance for exposure, contrast and colour, plus AI upscaling (×4, for small photos) and standard upscaling up to 4× with sharpening and noise reduction.
• Adjust and Filters: exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance, warmth, tint, sharpness, vignette, grain and fade, plus 16 filters with an intensity slider. More about filters.
• Crop & Rotate: free or fixed ratios (1:1, 4:5, 16:9, 9:16 and more), 90° rotation, flips and a straighten slider.
• Text & Stickers and Draw & Censor: captions with outlines and shadows, emoji stickers, pens, highlighters, and blur or pixelate brushes.

How to edit a photo

1. Drop a photo onto the editor, paste it, or click Choose Photo.
2. Pick a tool from the toolbar. Tools marked AI download their model the first time.
3. Preview the change, then press Apply. Every applied step can be undone.
4. Hold Compare to see your original at any point.
5. Click Download, choose PNG, JPG or WebP, set the size and quality, and save.

How the AI works — and its limits

Open models do the heavy lifting, each downloaded to your browser the first time you use it and then cached:

• Background & portrait tools: ISNet segmentation via the open-source @imgly/background-removal library.
• Magic Eraser & scratch repair: MI-GAN inpainting from Picsart AI Research (MIT).
• Colorize: DDColor (Apache-2.0).
• Restore: scratch detection from Microsoft's Bringing Old Photos Back to Life (MIT).
• Select Object: SlimSAM, a compact Segment Anything model (Apache-2.0).
• Lens Blur: Depth Anything V2 Small (Apache-2.0).
• AI upscale: Swin2SR real-world ×4 (Apache-2.0).
• Face tools: Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker (478 points per face).

They're good, not magic. The eraser works best on small-to-medium objects against natural textures like sky, grass, walls and water; large objects in front of detailed patterns can leave smudges, so erase in a couple of passes and undo anything you don't like. Background tools can struggle with fine hair, glass and low contrast — see our background removal guide for tips. Face detection can miss very small or turned-away faces, so always check before you share.

Enhance, Adjust, Filters, Crop, Text and Draw are classic image-processing tools rather than AI: they're fast, predictable and work in every browser.

Frequently asked questions

Is the AI photo editor really free?

Yes. There is no sign-up, no watermark, no daily limit and no paid tier. The AI runs on your own device, so there's no per-image server cost.

Are my photos uploaded to a server?

No. The AI models are downloaded to your browser and run locally with WebAssembly. Your photo is processed on your device and never sent to NextG Design or anyone else. See our Privacy Policy.

Why does an AI tool take a moment the first time?

The first time you use an AI feature, your browser downloads its model — from about 4 MB (face tools) and 14 MB (Select Object) up to 62 MB (Colorize) and around 100 MB for Restore. They're cached, so later uses start much faster.

Does it work on phones?

Yes, in modern mobile browsers. AI features need WebAssembly SIMD support, available in current Chrome, Safari (iOS 16.4 and later), Firefox and Edge. Very large photos are reduced to 16 megapixels so they stay smooth to edit.

Does it work like Photoshop?

It borrows Photoshop's workflow: a menu bar, a tool rail, a Properties panel, a History panel you can click to step back, right-click actions and single-key tool shortcuts (W select, E eraser, C crop, T text, B brush and more). It also has layers with opacity and blend modes, lasso and marquee selections, curves and levels, and a clone stamp.

Can I undo changes?

Yes. Every applied edit can be undone and redone with the toolbar buttons or Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y, and you can hold Compare to see your original photo at any time.

Related guides

• How to Remove a Background from a Photo (and Get Clean Edges)
• How to Blur Faces, Number Plates and Private Details in Photos
• Social Media Image Sizes: A Practical Cheat Sheet
• How to Make Product Photos with a White Background

Browse all of our image editing guides, or see every single-purpose tool on the All Tools page.