Zero Budget? 10 Photopea Tools for Photos You Sell

Free in the browser, for any purpose

Photo fixes for $0: ten tools for photos you sell, simplest first. Let's jump right in. Number ten: Photopea edits product photos to sell online, without spending a dime. It runs free in your browser, with nothing to install.

Anyone can use it, for any purpose. Your work belongs to you, and you can sell what you make. You don't have to mention it was made in Photopea, either. Small business owners use it for promo pictures and website content too.

Ads keep it free of charge for everyone. They may cover five to 15% of the screen. By our count, at least 85% of the screen stays for your photo. The link is in the description.

Up next, getting your photo in.

Open your photo

Number nine: your photo opens from File, then Open, in the top menu. You can also drag it in, or paste it with Control and V. An experimental option even takes a picture with your device's camera. There are no uploads, because Photopea runs on your own device.

An optional install adds a home-screen icon that opens Photopea in its own window. It runs on a phone or tablet too, though a big screen and a mouse help. A phone-size screen gets one small ad at the bottom, 320 by fifty pixels. A tiny-looking screen is the browser's zoom, and a reset to 100% fixes it.

By our count, that's four ways to bring a photo in. If step-by-step guides like this help you, subscribe. Every official page is linked below. Next, cropping and straightening.

Crop and straighten

Number eight: the Crop tool keeps the part of your photo you want. You draw a rectangle over it, and everything outside is removed. You drag the rectangle to move it, or drag a corner to change its size. Dragging near its edge rotates it, so you crop at a different angle.

That's how a tilted shot comes out straight. A checkmark in the top menu confirms the crop. Edit, then Transform, also turns a photo ninety degrees or mirrors it. Cropping keeps the resolution and the quality of what stays.

For an exact size, Image, then Canvas Size, takes a width and a height, like 100 by 100 pixels. By our count, that's 10,000 pixels. Coming up, light and color.

Fix light and color

Number seven: light and color fixes sit under Image, then Adjustments, in the top menu. Three have shortcuts: Control and L for Levels, M for Curves, and U for Hue and Saturation. By our count, that's three shortcuts for three everyday fixes. Shadows and Highlights lightens the shadows or darkens the bright parts of a photo.

A raw camera file opens with sliders for white balance, exposure and contrast. An adjustment layer changes the colors of what's below it. One example: a Hue and Saturation layer with saturation at zero. A smart filter can be switched on or off at any time.

Dodge lightens and Burn darkens, aimed at shadows, midtones or highlights. Layer, then New Adjustment Layer, adds one. Then, the small spots.

Fix small spots

Number six: the Spot Healing Brush removes small spots and unwanted objects. You paint over the spot and release, and it fills in from what surrounds it. A stone on a sandy beach, for example, turns into sand. It usually takes one to five seconds, and up to ten when healing over half the image.

By our count, ten small spots take at most fifty seconds at five each. By hand, the Clone Stamp would take several minutes for a similar result. The Clone Stamp copies one area over another, after an Alt-click picks the source. A softer brush edge blends in the new part.

With a selection active, a brush edits only inside it. Now, cutting out the subject.

Cut out the subject

Number five: one click removes the background, with Select, then Remove BG. The tutorial opens the photo with File, then Open, before that click. Then File, Export As, PNG saves the result to your computer. By our count, that's three menu steps from opening to saving.

A PNG keeps the cut-out transparent, because JPG doesn't support transparent pixels. For a hand-made cut, the Magic Wand selects an area of similar color, like a blue sky. It sits in the toolbar on the left, sharing one button with another tool. Each click starts a new selection, and holding Shift adds it to the old one.

Tolerance and Contiguous, in the top menu, change what the wand picks up. Quick Selection works like a brush: you draw strokes over the area you want. Its brush tip size is set in the top menu. In Subtract mode, or holding Alt, the same strokes take parts away.

The Magnetic Lasso sticks to the edges of objects as you trace them. The Inverse command, under Select, swaps what's selected for what isn't. For hair or fur, Refine Edge has you mark the photo in three colors. White is what you keep, black is what's deleted, and grey is the unsure part.

To delete what's selected, Edit, then Clear, or the Delete key does it. A Smart Object layer needs Layer, then Rasterize, first. Then the cut-out sits alone, ready for any background. Up next, a plain background behind it.

Put it on a plain background

Number four: File, then Open and Place, adds a new background as its own layer. Photopea opens JPG, PNG, WEBP and many other files, even raw camera photos. You move it, resize it by dragging its corners, and press Enter to confirm. If it covers your photo, Layer, then Arrange, then Send to Back puts it behind.

Layers are drawn one on top of another to make the final image. The ones at the bottom of the list sit in the back, and the top ones in front. For a plain color instead of a picture, Layer, then New Fill Layer, adds one. A fill layer holds a solid color, a gradient or a pattern.

When you change the canvas size, a fill layer refills the new canvas by itself. By our count, this setup needs just two layers: the cut-out and the background. Say Maya sells handmade mugs, and her cut-out mug needs a plain backdrop. Edit, then Fill, paints the whole layer with the main color.

With a selection active, it fills only that area. The toolbar keeps a palette of two colors, a main one and a background one. The X key swaps them, and the D key resets them to black and white. Dropping another file onto an open document adds it as a new Smart Object layer.

The New Layer button adds an empty layer on top of the one you've selected. Then, the right size for where it goes.

Resize for where it goes

Number three: Image, then Image Size, sets a new size, and a DPI value too. More pixels mean more precision, and a larger file. 300 DPI means 300 dots, or pixels, per inch. The tutorial's example is a picture nine inches wide at 300 DPI.

Nine inches times 300 pixels per inch makes it 2,700 pixels wide. The tutorial sets the width and height to nine inches, and the DPI to 300. It keeps the width-to-height ratio while resizing, then crops off the extra. Image Size stretches what's in the picture, while Canvas Size only trims the sides.

So a car two inches big can become three inches, but only with Image Size. For print, the guide enters a size and a DPI, like ten by fifteen inches at 300. Every document, even one with only vector shapes, has a size in pixels. Say Maya wants a ten by fifteen inch print of her mug at 300 DPI.

By our count, that's 3,000 by 4,500 pixels. Shrinking a normal layer from 100 pixels to ten, and back, loses some image information. A Smart Object keeps the original stored, so it scales back with nothing lost. By our count, at ten by ten, only 1% of the pixels are left.

In Free Transform, a chain icon between width and height locks the aspect ratio. Coming up, sharpening and checking it.

Sharpen and check

Number two: the Sharpen tool sharpens just the part you brush over. You set its Strength in the top menu. Like a brush, it takes a diameter and a hardness for its tip. Brush options like these sit in the Brush window too.

Blur works the same way, for softening one area. For the whole photo, Smart Sharpen sits under Filters, then Sharpen. Filters open from Filters in the top menu, by category, then by name. Checking comes next: with the zoom tool, a click on the photo zooms in.

It zooms out the same way, anywhere on the image. Control and Spacebar switch to zooming, and Spacebar alone switches to the Hand tool. By our count, that's two quick keys for checking every corner. The History panel takes you back to any earlier step by its name.

Control and Z only switches between the last two states, so History goes deeper. A sharp photo can still look blurry on screen, because of how the screen scales it. A Full HD screen is nineteen twenty by ten eighty pixels. On a Full HD screen, the scale is usually 125%.

At 200%, each pixel is simply drawn as two by two screen pixels. At 125, a screen pixel mixes colors from several image pixels, which blurs it. By our count, two by two is four screen pixels for each pixel of your photo. Last, exporting the photo and keeping the edit.

Export and keep the edit

Number one: File, then Export As, saves your photo as a PNG, a JPG, a PDF and other formats. The Save for Web window lets you pick the format and enter the size of the output. Save as PSD keeps the whole document, with its layers, so you can edit it again. When you finish, the PSD can be saved to other formats.

In modern browsers, File, then Save, can replace the file you opened from your device. For a PNG, quality 100% keeps it lossless, and lower makes it smaller. The window previews the result and shows the new file size. Converting hundreds of photos at once, like PNG to JPG, takes a target format and a quality.

Every five minutes, Photopea keeps a temporary backup of each open document on your computer. Those backups are deleted when you close the document or the site. By our count, five minutes between backups means twelve in an hour. Your work stays only if you save it before you close Photopea.

A Premium account is optional, a one-time payment for a set time, like ninety days. After that, the account simply switches back to free. Say Maya exports her mug photo as a PNG at full quality. In one blog example, an 18.7 kilobyte PNG went down to 4.8.

By our count, 18.7 over 4.8 is about 3.9 times smaller. Now that your photo looks great, want to see where to sell it? Click the video on screen now.