Adobe’s Photoshop is now 25 years old and is arguably the pinnacle of photo editing. But, at £8.57/month, it’s also much more expensive than most people can afford, so here are 25 alternatives for 25 years of photoshoppery.
Pixelmator is arguably the best photo editor on a Mac. It handles even the largest photos with ease, replicates as many Photoshop tools as are generally required, as well as Photoshop file support, and has an excellent heal tool that can interpret what’s around it and fill in detail.
Our photos captured from cameras reflect the most original view to its best. But sometimes we would like to add some spice onto them, or we need to edit with several photos in order to create a totally new one with our wonderful creativity. Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the app creates a seamless high-resolution panorama. When it comes to photo editing, both PC and Mac platforms can be very powerful and highly capable, with each having its own list of pros and cons. Choosing one platform over the other can be a difficult choice, because there are so many different aspects and variables to consider.
Excellent for quick touching up of photos to detailed manipulation for novices and pros alike. There’s even a very capable £7.99 iPad Pixelmator app with many of the same tools and ease of use that make the Mac app great.
Paint.net – best for Windows
Free - Windows
Paint.net started life as a simple replacement for Microsoft Paint, but evolved with new features such as multiple layers and more advanced photo editing tools. Today it is one of the fastest free photo editors for Windows, with a capable feature set that stops just short of some of the professional manipulation tools.
Excellent for quick edits, crops and the majority of daily photo editing. Best of all, it’s free.
Adobe Lightroom - best for bulk-managing photos
£99 - Windows, OS X
Arguably the best photo manager, Adobe Lightroom has enough tools, even for professionals, to avoid having to open up a separate image editor, including some of Photoshop’s healing and manipulation tools. It also has a solid collection of batch processing and automated correction tools based on lighting, lens and camera models, which makes it fast for most jobs.
Aviary Photo Editor - best for mobile
Free - Android, iOS
Aviary is a solid image editor with very capable image touch-up and resizing tools, now owned by Adobe. It’s straightforward interface makes it easy to use and has more to offer than most mobile editors obsessed with Instagram-style filters.
Autodesk Pixlr - best in the browser
Free - Windows, OS X, Android, iOS and web
Pixlr is a free jack of all trades photo editor with a solid tool set for almost any project. The web app is one of the most fully featured, while its mobile and desktop apps are also solid. Some of Pixlr’s most advanced features require a $15 a year subscription, but it has the backing of Autodesk, making of some of the best computer-aided design tools.
The best of the rest …
PaintShop Pro
£48 - Windows
Photoshop’s long-standing rival. PaintShop Pro is cheaper than its juggernaut of a rival but similarly specified. It lacks some of Photoshop’s most advanced features, and is bettered by some of its newer often-free competitors, but is still a capable editor.
Serif PhotoPlus X7
£79.99 - Windows
PhotoPlus is a solid all-round image editor for Windows from the company that created Affinity Photo for OS X. It has a decent set of tools, including lens correction tools and other favourites of photographers. The only downside is that many of the advanced tools require more manual manipulation than some other programs and therefore it isn’t as beginner friendly.
Photoshop Elements
£79.10 - Windows, OS X
Photoshop’s cut-down cousin Elements has improved dramatically over the last couple of years from a tool to avoid to a photo editor for everyone else. It has many of the same tools as its bigger brother, save for the advanced Content Aware Fill and a few other professional tools. Solid for most tasks, although free or cheaper tools with similar features are available.
Acorn 4
£22.99 - OS X
Another excellent image editor for OS X, Acorn is billed as the “image editor for humans”. It’s packed with advanced tools and filters but has a stripped back, simplified user interface that is designed to be familiar to Photoshop users and easy to pick up for notices.
Affinity Photo
Free - OS X (in beta)
Affinity Photo attempts to be Photoshop on a budget, but not dumbed down. It’s fast, packed with advanced tools and is aimed at professionals. Part of that tool set is end-to-end CMYK 16-bit per channel editing, RAW processing and a Photoshop Content Aware Fill-like tool called Inpainting.
Gimp
Free - Windows, OS X and Linux
Despite the unfortunate name – GNU Image Manipulation Program – Gimp is one of the most capable free open-source photo editors available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It has some very powerful tools, but isn’t as user friendly as some others.
Aperture
£59.99 - OS X
Apple’s long-standing photo organiser and editor, Aperture is one of the most efficient ways of tweaking groups of photos, and making and reviewing small adjustments. The magnifying loop tool is particularly effective. It’s simpler to use than many of its competitors and can be used in conjunction with iPhoto.
Apple Photos
Free - OS X
Plugin for iskysoft pdf editor pro for mac. Photos is Apple’s replacement for both iPhoto and Aperture, which will be available in the spring. A preview was made available of the app, which is fast, with enough tools to make photo management and tweaks easy.
Picasa
Free - Windows, OS X
Picasa is Google’s photo manager and editor. It plugs into Google+, but is a solid simple organiser and can be accessed through the app or on the web. It has enough tools to quickly tune photos, with a few fancy filters thrown in.
ACDSee Pro 8
$99.99 - Windows
ACDSee is an Adobe Lightroom analogue with photo management at its heart. It is fast and effective, but has limited metadata sorting and no automatic correction based on lens profiles. It has enough editing tools to improve the odd photo, but some of it can be a clumsy mix of destructive and non-destructive editing.
The cheaper ACDSee 18 lacks some of the more advanced features but could be a good option for photo management.
Preview
Free - OS X
Apple’s built-in image and document viewer for OS X is a bit of a dark horse. Underneath its simple viewing exterior hides a fast and effective image editor that’s perfectly capable of cropping, resizing, reformatting and simple touchups. It is particularly good at editing a bunch of images at once.
Microsoft Paint
Free - Windows
Microsoft’s original image editor. It’s changed a bit in recent years and is still a solid, basic image editor. It’s worth a go for nostalgia’s sake at the very least, or for simple cropping and resizing jobs that really don’t require something as powerful as Photoshop.
Sumo paint
Free - web
A Photoshop facsimile in the browser, the free Sumo Paint is an excellent quick photo editor. Many of the advanced tools are only available in a $19 pro version, but for straightforward touching up of images, resizing and similar the free editor does the job.
PicMonkey
Free - web
PicMonkey is free, browser-based image editor with a solid feature set for simple photo touchups, adding text to images and adding frames. Images can be taken from a computer or various cloud services, including Dropbox and Flickr. A paid-for upgrade removes the ads and gives access to more fonts and effects.
FotoFlexer
Free - web
Billed as “the world’s most advanced online image editor” it has numerous features for most types of editing. Image manipulation tools are just a simple click and drag-a-slider away, but most tools have little in the way of guidance so beginners might struggle. Those looking for more powerful fill features will need to look elsewhere.
Ribbet
Free - web
Ribbet, despite it’s odd name and frog logo, is a quick and easy-to-use online image editor that does most of the editing for you, making it excellent for beginners or simple jobs. A few advanced tools are available, but better options are out there.
Fotor
Free - Windows, OS X, iPhone, Android and web
Fotor is a free image editor that’s available on just about any platform either in app or web app from. It has a good selection of tools, each with an easy-to-use sliding scale of effect. Batch editing is a bonus, as are the filter tools.
BeFunky
Free - Android, iOS and web
A quick and easy-to-use image editor that apes Instagram on the iPhone and Android, but with a few more tools. The web app is similarly simple, and solid for quickly customising photos before sharing them.
Snapseed
Free - Android, iOS
Snapseed is Google’s mobile image editor that’s been sidelined after it was acquired to be integrated into Google+. But the app still works and its tools, filters and easy-to-use touch controls are still some of the best around.
Photoshop Touch
£3.99 to £7.99 - Android, iOS
Photoshop Touch is Adobe’s touchscreen focused mobile variant, but it isn’t nearly as powerful or feature rich as its namesake. It has a selection of photo filters and some decent touchup tools, but it’s biggest selling point is integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which is useful for desktop Photoshop users.
Microsoft Photo Editor Mac Free Download
Adobe’s lighter Photoshop Express is also available for free with very basic tools.
macOS is the operating system that powers every Mac. It lets you do things you simply can’t with other computers. That’s because it’s designed specifically for the hardware it runs on — and vice versa. macOS comes with an entire suite of beautifully designed apps. It works hand in hand with iCloud to keep photos, documents, and other stuff up to date on all your devices. It makes your Mac work like magic with your iPhone. And it’s been built from the ground up with privacy and security in mind.
macOS Mojave
Simply powerful.
Featuring Dark Mode, new pro-inspired features, four new apps, and a redesigned Mac App Store.
Easy to Use When it’s simple to do everything, you can do anything.
On a Mac, everything is designed to work just the way you expect it to — from operating it with simple, intuitive gestures to asking Siri to find a file to having your apps automatically update themselves. Whatever you set out to do on a Mac, there’s much less to learn and that much more to accomplish.
Dark Mode adds a dramatic new look to your desktop and apps that puts the focus on your content. Dynamic Desktop makes your Mac even more beautiful with two time-shifting desktop pictures that match the time of day wherever you are. And Stacks keeps your desktop free of clutter by automatically organizing your files, images, documents, PDFs, and more into tidy groups.
Photoshop For Mac
Continuity All your devices. One seamless experience.
Your Mac works with your other Apple devices in ways no other computer can. If you get a call on your iPhone, you can take it on your Mac. With Continuity Camera, you can use your iPhone to take a picture or scan a document nearby, and it will appear right on your Mac. When you copy text or an image from one device, you can paste it into another with standard copy and paste commands. You can even unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch. No password typing required.
Privacy and Security We believe your data belongs to you. Period.
Everything you do with your Mac is protected by strong privacy and security features. That’s because we build data security into everything we make, right from the start.
Privacy. You trust our products with your most personal information, and we believe very strongly that you should be in complete control of it. We respect your privacy by enacting strict policies that govern how all data is handled. And when you browse the web, Safari helps prevent data companies from tracking the sites you visit.
Security. macOS is engineered with advanced technologies that are constantly working together to keep your Mac and the information on it safe. Gatekeeper makes it safer to download and install apps from the web. The Apple File System further safeguards your data with built-in support for encryption, crash-safe protections, and simplified data backup on the go.
Compatibility Need to work with Windows? Mac does that, too.
With macOS, it’s easy to transfer your files, photos, and other data from a Windows PC to your Mac. Work with popular file types such as JPEG, MP3, and PDF, as well as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. And, of course, you can run Microsoft Office natively on a Mac. If you want, you can even run Windows on your Mac.4
Built-in Apps Apps as powerful and elegant as your Mac. Because they’re designed for it.
With every Mac, you get a collection of powerful apps. They’re the same apps you use on your iPhone or iPad, so they’ll feel instantly familiar. They all work with iCloud, so your schedule, contacts, and notes are always up to date everywhere. And because they’re native apps — not web apps in a browser — they take full advantage of the power of your Mac to deliver the fastest possible performance and more robust features.
New to Mac. macOS Mojave brings four new apps to your desktop. Get all the news that matters from sources you trust, all in one place.5 Track the market with Stocks. Instantly capture personal reminders, class lectures, even interviews or song ideas with Voice Memos. And control all your HomeKit-enabled accessories from the comfort of your desktop with the Home app.
Stocks
Voice Memos
Creativity. Organize, edit, and share a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos, and rediscover your favorite memories. Transform home videos into unforgettable movies or quickly share clips with your favorite people. Create music like the pros with a huge collection of sounds, instruments, amps, and a lineup of virtual session drummers and percussionists perfectly suited to play along with your song.
Productivity. Create beautiful documents with stunning simplicity. Visualize your data precisely and persuasively in spreadsheets with images, text, and shapes. Make stage-worthy presentations using powerful graphics tools and dazzling cinematic effects to bring your ideas to life. And collaborate with friends and coworkers in real time — whether they’re across town or across the globe.
Communication. Easily manage all of your email accounts in one simple, powerful app that works with email services like iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft Exchange. Send unlimited messages to anyone on any Apple device, using the same Messages app on your Mac as you do on your iPhone. And make unlimited high-quality video and audio calls right from your Mac with FaceTime.
Organization. Keep your iCloud, Google, and Exchange calendars in one place, create separate calendars for home, work, and school, and view them all or just the ones you want. Keep all your contact info up to date on all your devices, and easily import numbers, addresses, and photos from Google and Microsoft Exchange. And keep track of little and big things with notes that can include links, photos, map locations, tables, and more.
Internet. Surf the web on the fastest, most energy-efficient browser,6 with built-in privacy features that keep you in control of your information. Map out new destinations from your desktop, with gorgeous 3D city views like Flyover, point-to-point directions, and comprehensive transit directions. Use Apple Pay to make purchases on the web in Safari with Touch ID on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. Paying takes just a touch and is quick, easy, and secure. And with Spotlight, instantly search your entire Mac or get results from the internet in just a few keystrokes.
Spotlight
Media. Find the latest apps and extensions for your Mac, right on your Mac. Enjoy the music, movies, and TV shows you already have on your beautiful Retina display, or discover soon-to-be favorites. And take advantage of the world-class bookstore built into your Mac, where you can peruse the latest titles from your desktop.
iCloud All your stuff. On your Mac, and everywhere else you want it. Automatically.
Every Apple app uses iCloud — it’s the magic behind the seamless experience you have with all your Apple devices. So you always have your photos, videos, documents, email, notes, contacts, calendars, and more on whatever device you’re using. And any file you store in iCloud Drive can be shared with friends, family, and colleagues just by sending them a link. iCloud Drive also lets you access files from your Mac desktop and Documents folder on any iOS device. It’s all done automatically. Just like that.7
R editor for Mac. Hi, Could you please suggest a good R editor for Mac OS X (10.7.5) Previously my operating system was Windows and there I used Notepad++, I really had very nice experience with. R editor for mac.
Technology Advanced to the core.
macOS features powerful core technologies engineered for the most important functions of your Mac. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) introduces a modern standard for video compression, making movie files up to 40 percent smaller and 4K streaming video faster.8 Metal 2 powers the graphics behind every pixel, making your gaming experience more visually breathtaking and fun. Create ML gives developers a faster and easier way to build machine learning into apps. And support for virtual reality lets developers create immersive worlds for you to step into.
Accessibility We make sure that everyone is able to use a Mac.
macOS comes standard with a wide range of assistive technologies that help people with disabilities experience what the Mac has to offer, providing many features you won’t find in other operating systems. These include Accessibility Keyboard, VoiceOver, FaceTime,9 Switch Control, and text to speech, all designed to help anyone get more out of Mac.
Apple Trade InGet up to $1400 for your current computer.*
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