Google has updated its mobile photo and video cloud storage app Google Photos with a couple of new features, including burst photo support and a new cropping tool. The cropping tool has a neat Auto feature that automatically straightens out the photo based on the horizon line, and composes it according to the rule of thirds. Below that, you can tint a photo. Cropping photos – cutting them down to a size you prefer – can easily be done in as little as a few seconds with a basic photo editing tool. Whether you need to cut out unnecessary visual aspects or change the shape or aspect ratio of the photo, cropping is the way to go for quick results.

Long gone are the days where snapshots came back from the photo lab and disappeared into albums and shoe boxes. Now, digital photos are tweaked, adjusted, and remixed in ways their analog counterparts couldn't imagine.

Photo by NoiceCollusion.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite image editing tool. The votes have been tallied and now we're back with the top five contenders for the crown of Best Image Editor.

Best Image Editing Tool?

Once the venue of seasoned photographers with dark rooms and bins of chemicals, photo touch ups and …

Picasa (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

Picasa is the kind of application that geeks love because it's so simple and effective and non-geeks love because they usually don't have the time or inclination to get bogged down in the more technical aspects of digital photography. If your tech un-savvy mom or dad emailed you tomorrow and said she or he needed an easy-to-use program for organizing and editing photos, you'd likely send them to download Picasa. The built in editor is more than robust enough for most casual users and includes basic color correction, cropping, and a variety of special effects—the majority of which manage to avoid being cheesy. Picasa isn't a tool for deep and detailed editing, but it's extremely easy to use for the kind of quick crop and correct editing most digital camera owners need.

GIMP (Windows/Mac/*nix, Free)

GIMP has long been toted as the open-source competitor to Adobe Photoshop. Many people are quick to point out GIMP's shortcomings, claiming it isn't a true Photoshop replacement, but in the process they overlook what GIMP has accomplished. Without the extremely polished and commercially driven Photoshop to stand against, GIMP is almost entirely unrivaled in sophistication. Color correction, channel mixing, advanced cloning, paths, and layered compositions are all part of the GIMP package. There is very little the average Photoshop user does that can't be done in GIMP, and if you're not working for a company footing the bill for Photoshop, the free-as-in-beer price tag looks mighty fine.

Adobe Photoshop (Windows/Mac, $699)

Photoshop has achieved such status in the design community and such widespread recognition by the general public that even non-designers recognize what someone is saying when they exclaim, 'That's photoshopped!' Many of the techniques and methods that are standard across photo editing software were pioneered in Photoshop, like layers, slices, and image correcting macros and filters. On its own Photoshop is a titan of photo editing power, but thanks to a nearly complete dominance in the graphic editing industry, there are entire companies devoted to creating plugins for it. When it comes to manipulating images, if you can't do it in Photoshop, there's a strong chance you won't be able to do it at all. Photo by HVarga.

Paint.net (Windows, Free)

Paint.net was originally the senior project of some computer science students at Washington State University, taken on under the mentorship of Microsoft. The project exceeded expectations and has been in development now for 6 years. Over the years it has grown to include layer-based composition, blending, and support for plugins—the majority of which are designed by an active support community. The interface of Paint.net is easy to pick up, and an unlimited undo function makes correcting your learning-curve mishaps a snap—making Paint.net a favorite among Windows users looking for a no-nonsense (yet powerful) image editor.

Adobe Lightroom (Windows/Mac, $299)

Lightroom is on the same branch of the editing family tree as Picasa: a hybrid of an organizational tool and a photo editor. Unlike its big brother Photoshop, Lightroom wasn't designed to be a detailed pixel-by-pixel editing tool. Lightroom focuses on being a digital darkroom for modern photographers, allowing them to quickly make the corrections necessary to their workflows. Lightroom excels at batch work and advanced color balance corrections; photographers can even tether their cameras to their computers with Lightroom integrating directly into their editing workflow. Photoshop might be the appropriate tool for giving a single image a deep and intense workover, but Lightroom is the tool you call on when you have a huge batch of images from a photoshoot that need to be cropped, corrected, and made print ready as soon as possible. Photo by M. Keefe.

Now that you've seen the top five contenders for best image editing application, it's time to log your vote to determine who goes home with the crown.

Which Image Editor is Best?
( online surveys)

Can't believe your favorite editor didn't make it to the top five? Wishing a copy of Adobe Photoshop would fall off the back of a truck for you? Sound off in the comments below with your photo editing opinions.

Crop a picture to trim away outer edges that are unnecessary.

To remove the background of a picture, see Remove the background of a picture. To make a picture bigger or smaller, see Change the size of a picture.

In addition to basic margin-cropping, you can also crop pictures to specific shapes and aspect ratios, or crop picture fills inside a shape (in Office for Mac and in Office 2010 and later).

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Office can help with you with basic image editing as illustrated in the video above, but for more advanced tasks, you may need a dedicated image-editing app. Digital Trends has recommendations for free photo-editing software.

WindowsmacOSWeb

Crop the margins of a picture

Use Insert > Picture to add the image to an Office file (such as a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel workbook).
Right-click the picture. A pop-up menu appears with two buttons either immediately above or below the menu. Crop is one of the buttons.
Select the Crop button.
Black crop handles appear on the edges and corners of the picture.

Crop the image by doing one of the following:

Description	Action
Crop one side	Drag inward on the side cropping handle
Crop two adjacent sides at the same time	Drag inward on the corner cropping handle
Crop equally on two parallel sides at once	Press and hold Ctrl while dragging inward on the side cropping handle
Crop equally on all four sides at once	Press and hold Ctrl while dragging inward on any corner cropping handle

You can also outcrop, or add a

Photo Cropping Tool For Mac