Social media apps like Instagram and Pinterest dominate the internet with their popularity. In this day and age, you might rarely come across an image that doesn’t have a filter on it. Whether it’s a light boost in color or a total black and white transformation, filters are everywhere.
However, sometimes you might want to re-use a photo without the filter. This could be for a professional image or just for safekeeping.
This might seem impossible to do but due to advances in technology, it is easier than ever!
In this guide, I’ll discuss multiple ways you could use to remove filters from your photos using mobile apps and our free tool BunnyPic. You’ll also learn how to remove Snapchat filters as those could be a bit tricky.
Let’s get started.
How to Remove a Filter from a Saved Photo
You just noticed a great-looking photo you took saved in your gallery.
It has a nice filter on it but, you wish you saved a copy of the original to have one without the filter.
You can remove a filter from your saved photos by using BunnyPic or mobile apps.
Removing Filter from a photo using BunnyPic
If you are working on a PC and are trying to remove a filter you applied to your image it might seem difficult. Adding filters is destructive editing meaning the original image would be altered permanently. This is because editing tools such as Photoshop flatten the image and all the effects become part of the original image.
Fortunately, our free online tool, BunnyPic, is a powerful web-based Photoshop editor. Even if you don’t have the PSD file you can open up your image and color correct it using BunnyPic.
Here’s how to use BunnyPic to remove filters from photos:
- Go to the BunnyPic editor and press Open From Computer.
- Select the image you want to remove the filter from.
- On the right, click on the Layers icon.
- Click the half-black half-circle icon on the bottom, this will open the options for adjustment layers.
- Select one of the Adjustment layers to add them on top of your photo.
- Adjust till you see the colors matching the original.
Some Adjustment layer options you should focus on are:
- Curves and Levels – great for adjusting tones and colors
- Color balance and Hue/Saturation – great for adjusting colors of the image
This is a powerful way to have full control over the color correction of your photo.
If you want to know more about adjustment layers check out our guide on the 10 Photoshop Tools to Improve Your Photography.
Removing Filter from a photo using mobile apps
Firstly we’re going to try and color correct the image using Snapseed.
Snapseed is a free photo editor available on mobile devices with around 28 tools and filters to help edit your images.
With the photo saved in your gallery follow the instructions below:
- Go to the App store if you have an iPhone or the Playstore if you’re on Android
- Search for the app “Snapseed” and download it
- After downloading, open Snapseed
- Open your photo on Snapseed
- Adjust the colors, shadows and highlights in the app till you see the original color
The most useful tools to you would be:
- White Balance
- Tonal Contrast
- Tune Image
- Curves
Play around with these until you start to feel the image is close to the original.
How to Remove Snapchat Filter from a Photo
There are 2 ways to remove the Snapchat filter on your photos.
The first is using the magic eraser, which is a Snapchat app used to quickly edit and remove elements.
To use the Magic Eraser tool follow these instructions:
- Download the “Magic Eraser” from the app store.
- Go to the filtered Snapchat photo and save it to your device.
- Press the Magic Eraser button and brush it over the elements you want to remove.
- After brushing the eraser, Snapchat will automatically remove the filtered objects.
Another way is by re-editing the photo saved into your Snapchat Memories.
This one is fairly simple.
- Go to your saved snap
- Click Edit
- Now, just swipe left and right to change the filters or set it back to the original.
How to Remove Snapchat Stickers from Photos
Another cool feature of Snapchat is the ability to add stickers to your images. Stickers are a popular and common feature for customized snaps.
However, this makes the original image cluttered making it difficult to re-use it again. So, if you plan on getting the original image back it makes sense to remove the stickers.
You can remove the stickers using the Magic Eraser tool:
- Download the Magic Eraser app on your phone.
- Go to the Snapchat photo with stickers and save it to your device.
- Select the Magic Eraser and brush it over the stickers you want to remove.
- After brushing the eraser, Snapchat will automatically remove the stickers.
You can even remove the stickers using BunnyPic.
- Simply transfer your photo to your PC and open it in BunnyPic.
- In BunnyPic, duplicate the original layer by pressing going to Layer > Duplicate Layer or press CTRL+J
- With the top layer selected, pick one of the selection tools from the left toolbar and select the sticker.
- Now, go to Edit > Fill and select Content-Aware.
- This will remove the sticker while keeping the background intact.
Conclusion
Due to a number of free apps and online tools removing filters from your photos can be easily done without any experience in graphic designing. The best way to remove a filter is to color correct the image in some kind of photo editing tool like BunnyPic.
However, Snapchat filters are different than normal color filters. Those can be removed using the Magic Eraser tool or by simply re-editing the image in Snapchat.
