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Smartphones give us so many tools for photography but limited built-in editing options. Luckily, there’s a huge collection of photo-editing and image-editing apps that allow you many creative ways to edit the backgrounds in your smartphone photos.
Without Canva Pro, I like to use Canva’s integrated apps and choose theEffects>Auto Focustool and allow my photo to refocus with a shallow depth of field. Doing this isn’t anything special, but it adds a bit more intention to my photos.
you may also use the incrediblelibrary of Canva’s appsto find other background editing tools. There are some like CanBorder which lets you add a border to your background or there’s the Gradients app which you can apply as a background after you’ve removed your subject from the background in Canva.
Picsart is a fantastic image editing tool, but it does come at a cost. It has extremely limited options for free users, including the lack of ability to even screenshot your workings (hence the photo above).
Picsart has a very realistic AI background generator which can be a fast and successful way to edit the background of your images. I uploaded a photo of a cup of coffee, and the four generated background results were all extremely realistic, including lighting, perspective, and other elements within the photo.
Other tools also have AI image generators built into them, but Picsart’s works seamlessly by analyzing your uploaded image and saves you a ton of time in editing or fixing the result.
3Adobe Express
Adobe Express is one of my favorite mobile photo editing tools. While there is a free version, paying forAdobe Express Premium is worth itfor the extra features it provides.
Express offers a variety of tools that enable you to perform serious photo edits on your image backgrounds, while also easily adding fun or quirky elements.
I took a photo of a gorgeous tree on my dog walk this morning, and now, using Express, I can turn it into a very funky-looking Christmas greeting card for the non-traditionalist in me. This edit took me less than a minute and I think it looks awesome.
There are ways to edit your backgrounds in less informal designs. Adobe Express has many AI tools built into it for background replacement and image creation to apply to your backgrounds.
4Lightroom
Lightroom’s mobile app has great features, along withLightroom desktop and web versions. Having said that, Lightroom as an editor is more for serious photo editing rather than fun editing, like changing backgrounds.
But if you want to make any edits in the Lightroom mobile app specifically to your photo’s background—even if it’s just tweaking colors or lighting rather than directly changing the entire background—the Lightroom mobile masking tool works successfully to mask subjects from their backgrounds.
Once masked, reverse the mask to apply it to the background rather than the subject, and then apply any of your chosen edits to the background area. For visual reference, I’ve made my grassy background a blue hue, which is an odd look, but it shows how well the mask works around the doggy model.
