Pros & Cons
-
- Super simple interface.
- Improves many photo types.
-
- No photo organization tools.
- No detailed corrections.
- Its function is equaled by included desktop operating system features.
- Expensive for what it is.
- Slow with high-resolution and raw camera files.
I've seen many attempts at one-button photo correction software, and I've seen many applications claiming to offer near-magical AI technology. Both apply to photo-enhancing app Photolemur. Like the Auto Tone button in Lightroom or the Auto Enhance buttons in Apple Photos or the Windows 10 Photos app, Photolemur does its darnedest to bring your digital images to optimal lighting, color tone, and more with just one click. While I found that Photolemur did improve some photos, it wasn't significantly better than what you get free with your OS. In this day of Instagram retouching, its lack of user-controlled image adjusters is simply too limiting.
Photolemur's makers claim that it applies 11 types of correction. As needed it can perform color recovery, exposure compensation, face retouching, foliage enhancement, JPG fix, natural light correction, noise reduction, raw file processing, sky enhancement, smart dehaze, and tint perfection. Many of these abilities, along with automatic red-eye fixing, already come free with the Windows Photos app. And an unreleased Photolemur correction in the works, automatic horizon straightening, is already available in Apple Photos.
Pricing and Starting Up
You can see most of Photolemur's magic by installing its free download version. Unfortunately, it's not a modern Windows Store app, but rather a less-secure Win32 program. It does require Windows 8 or later or macOS Sierra . You can try it out free, or rather for the price of an email address, but that limits you to exporting one image at a time and puts a watermark on your photos. To remove those limits costs $30 on either platform. The included Window and Mac Photos apps have none of those limitations. For testing, I installed PhotoLemur on both an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC all-in-one PC with a 4K display running Windows 10 Pro and a 21.5-inch iMac running macOS Sierra.
User Interface
Photolemur starts up with one of the simplest interfaces I've seen among photo apps: a small dialog invites you to drag and drop your photos or open its file picker to start importing.
You can drag multiple images onto the target, and, after you do so, another very simple interface appears with your shots as thumbnails.
When you click into a thumbnail, Photolemur's optimization processing (with the label "Doing Magic") starts cranking away. When it's done, you see a version of the image with a before-and-after line bisecting it. You can't zoom in on this view for a closer look; Photolemur picks a size, and that's it.
Similar Products
Our Current Picks for The Best MLB Streaming Services for 2026
Improving Your Photos
For well-shot photos, the difference between before and after isn't huge. The processing usually applies some sharpening and increases color saturation. Conversely, often with very bad photos, not enough correction was applied. But there is often an improvement, as this sample shows. As I mentioned earlier, though, the autocorrection isn't significantly better that what you get in Windows 10's included Photos app or in macOS's Photos app.
I understand Photolemur's wish to be a one-step, no-adjustment-required photo fixer, but the technology just isn't there yet. Even one simple slider like the Light control in the Windows 10 Photos app would go a long way towards making Photolemur exponentially more useful. Maybe it's just me, but some color-tweaking abilities would also go a long way.
Uneven Adjustements
Photolemur's claimed automatic face retouching does not impress. In fact, when I processed face photos, blemishes became more pronounced than in the unedited photo. It did give one portrait's skin a healthier glow, however, and I did see some skin smoothing on some face shots.
With landscape test shots, the app produced something like an HDR effect. For me, the sky and trees were punched up too much, though the processing did bring out some detail missing in the original. A lot of it is a matter of taste: some prefer a more subdued, natural look, where others prefer a more vibrant, postcard-like look.
I also tried opening high-resolution raw camera files, which took much longer to process. Even higher resolution JPGs shot with a Canon EOS 6D DSLR took rather long to process. Some raw files I threw at it never completed processing at all. Perhaps the developer needs to add a "file not supported" message for non-recognized raw file formats. The app's website claims that it supports a healthy 800-plus camera models' raw formats, but my testing with content from a few DSLRs turned up several unsupported formats. With the raw files for which Photolemur was able to complete processing, I saw even less improvement than for JPGs, with darkly shadowed areas not brightened and blown out highlights remaining white.
Sharing and Output
You can only export to disk, Facebook, or Twitter. For some reason, I wasn't able to rename the export filename from the original imported filename. I didn't run into this issue on the Mac version, however, which adds Snapheal as a share target. That app from MacPhun lets you remove unwanted objects such as passersby from your photo. When I shared a photo to Facebook, I had to allow the Photolemur Facebook app access to my account, and I could only share it to the timeline, not as a direct message.
Monkey With Your Photos
I'm a huge fan of automatic photo correction. In fact, while most professional photographers openly scoff at the notion, they secretly use it 80 percent of the time, according to data from Adobe. But it's usually a starting point, not the whole photo editing story. I like Photolemur's super-simple approach, and if it truly made every picture look great with its single processing step, it would be the holy grail of photo editing.
But I fear that that may never to happen, considering all the years that companies with much deeper resources have been working on it. Though Photolemur somewhat improved my test photos, it could still benefit from at least basic light and color adjustments. The app's face retouching and raw processing were also far from impressive in testing.
Despite all that, there's no reason you shouldn't download the trial version and see if it works for you. My feeling, however, is that most people will want to be able to do more with their photos. Software like Adobe Photoshop Elements, our consumer photo editing software Editors' Choice, allows just that, as do the built-in Photos apps in macOS and Windows.
Best Photo Editing Picks
Further Reading
Final Thoughts
Photolemur
Photolemur is as simple a photo-enhancing app as you'll ever see, but it doesn't go far enough in perfecting your digital images.