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I love Adobe products, but they are so difficult to use and learn. I recently tried to create a very simple logo in Adobe Illustrator and I wanted to hit my head or computer against the wall several times throughout the process. Same applies to Photoshop. When I see photographers working miracles with blending several images, adding some fantastic effects, drawing and doing other magical things with that tool, that must have come from another planet, I think they deserve a monument. I know that it probably only looks scary and after you get used to it, you can fix a pimple or a red eye in a snap. But what if you don’t have time or desire to watch tutorials and spend hours trying to figure out how that thing works? I love software that works like a magic wand – Bibidi Bobbidi Boo and your picture looks amazing! Pixlr Touch Up, in my humble opinion, does just that.

In this post, we’re going to talk about Pixlr Touch Up for Chrome, that you can easily download from Chrome Web Store, however there are several other mobile and desktop options for the app. See more.

Tutorial:

After you download the app, you can launch it from Chrome App Launcher and you can create a desktop icon by dragging it from Chrome Apps menu.

You can choose a file from your computer or Google Drive.

After the picture is opened, you have editing options at the bottom of the screen – Adjust, Effects, Overlays and Type.

Here you can see all the options available under Adjust menu.

Obviously, I need to rotate my photo and I’m selecting that. As you can see, you can also crop, resize, adjust contrast, color, auto fix, focal blur, touch up, clone, sharpen, blur, airbrush, smooth and liquify.

In the Rotate menu, you can also straighten the photo, which is a very useful feature to fix crooked photos.

Another useful feature is Autofix. It comes in handy, if you want to fix the contrast and color balance. This photo was shot on an overcast day and colors did not come out as vivid as they were in reality, but Autofix brought them back.

Now, I want to add even more depth and vibrance to the colors and I select the Color option from the menu.

I’m pretty happy with how the picture looks now, so I’m going to save it. I can give it the same name and replace the existing one or give it a new name and I can also toggle the quality of the image.

Obviously it it impossible to go over all of the effects and options in Pixlr in one tutorial, but I’m going to show you few more, so you get the idea.

Here are some of the filter in the Effects menu. For this picture I like the Aladin filter as it suits the ornament and makes it look bold.