5 Stock Image Editing Software For Windows

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Key notes

  • Stock images software refers usually to photo editors that include a free content library.  
  • Using the features these editors have plus their free templates, backgrounds, and photos, one can create stock images for commercial use.
  • Some of the highly praised and popular editors for stock photos are in the Adobe suite. 
  • Corel or Xara also have powerful editors that you can use to get and create royalty-free photos.

Stock photos can be found and use by anyone, unrestricted, without the obligation to pay the distribution or use rights. The images can be used as many times as one pleases, for any purpose. 

One of the common licenses in stock photography is royalty-free images, sometimes contrasted with Rights Managed licenses and usually used in subscription-based photography business models.

Benefits of using royalty-free images

  • Stock photos are used legally because they comply with international copyright laws.
  • Stock photos can be used on designs, multiple promotional campaigns, and digital media.
  • It is cheap and very fast to use.
  • It saves time and money.
  • You can search, find and use international stock photos very fast without any added costs.
  • Many benefits can be received from stock agency-free memberships.

Having said that, let’s see which software has a stick library and which is the best to use to edit your stock photos.


What is the best software to get and create stock photos?

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is one of the best graphic design software for beginners and pro alike. You can use it to edit your best photos and create royalty-free images with ease.

Photoshop comes with a lot of smart tools designed to help you edit your images and get the best version out of them.

Moreover, you can improve your skills by creating interactive projects, using templates that contain photos, illustrations, and graphics from Adobe Stock.

Initially, whatever you get from the Adobe Stock will be watermarked. But if you buy a product license it you will be able to work with as any other file in Photoshop. 

Here are other key features of Photoshop:

  • Cropping, straightening, rotating, and flipping.
  • One-click auto-adjustment.
  • Blemish removal – removing spots or dirt from the image.
  • Slide controls to improve the colors of the image.
  • Lots of eye-catching effects you can select from.
  • Panoramic image option.
  • Give a personal touch to photo borders.
  • RAW photo support
  • Sharing: on social media sites like Facebook, Revel, Twitter, Tumblr, and more.
Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop

Edit your own photos with ease or get professional stock photos for personal use with the industry’s leading photo editing tool.
Free trialVisit website

Adobe Indesign

Adobe InDesign is ideal for layout design usage.  For example, this software can be used for online magazines, printed books, brochures, or digital magazines most especially to create a royalty-free image.

You can improve your InDesign project with more than 60 million creative images, graphics, 3D photos at a high quality and resolution by using Adobe Stock’s templates.

The fact that Adobe Stock is integrated into the InDesign platform will ease considerably your work, so you can search for the images by going to the Select File tab and then clicking on Search Adobe Stock. 

The illustrations will be watermarked, so as soon as you buy a product license, you will be able to edit them as an InDesign document.

Adobe Stock is integrated into Creative Cloud Libraries, so you can visit Adobe Stock’s official website in order to search for a watermarked image.

Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign

Use Adobe’s stock templates, but bring your own touch to create the most amazing layouts the industry has seen.
Free trialVisit website

Adobe Illustrator

This is the right tool for vector art to create logos, sketches, icons, typography or even complex illustrations for videos or mobile is an illustrator.

In order to use the best creative assets in Adobe Illustrator, you can search for images, 3D assets, graphics and illustrations in Adobe Stock, that is integrated into Adobe Illustration Platform.

As well, you can download a single asset or you can choose a subscription plan for more Adobe Stock illustrations. For a start, you can download 10 images for free in order to bring more color to your projects.

Illustrator is perfect to sharpen your design skills for banners, typography, logos, wallpapers and more.

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator

Make a statement out of your ideas and bring them to life with the visual design tools in this amazing Adobe app.
Free trialVisit website

Corel PaintShop Pro

Corel’s photo editors couldn’t have missed from such a list. With a brand new interface and enhanced tools, PaintShop Pro is more powerful than ever.

The entire photo editing workspace has been redesigned to offer users a modern, thrilling experience and AI-powered tools.

Despite the many tools, the software is quite intuitive to use. Besides, users have access to 100+ royalty-free backgrounds that they can borrow for their designs.

Key features:

  • It has professional tools that can be used easily by both professionals and newbies.
  • Video tutorials and other forms of support forums to understand the software better.
  • Over ninety creative filters can be used to enhance the image texture and color.
  • Compatible with image files like JPG, RAW, TIFF, GIF, PNG, PSD and PDF.
  • RAW editing support with Corel AfterShot 3.
  • PhotoMirage Express feature for mesmerizing effects on regular photos
  • Painter Essentials 7 included if you want to also hone your digital painting skills.

⇒ Download Corel PaintShop Pro

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer

xara photo&graphic designer

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is an all-inclusive photo editing software, specially designed for Windows PC. and one of the best parts is that it supports older Windows OS versions as well.

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer boasts some very dynamic features, many of which are highly optimized to facilitate and speed up photo editing.

Some of these features include customizable templates, background eraser, magic erase, photo grids, photo heal (to remove spots, blood- eye or wrinkles), filters, photo resize, and many more.

What you’ll love though is the free content catalog that comes with the product. Namely, a large collection of very flexible and easy-to-edit SmartShapes and a huge collection of royalty-free stock photos & illustrations from Pixabay.

⇒ Dowload Xara Photo&Graphics Designer 

Downloading and creating your own royalty-free images is easy. As you have seen, a lot of software comes with its own collection of stock content that can be used for inspiration.

Do you have a favorite software among the listed ones? Tell us in the comments below.

More about the topics: 3D design, windows software