Apple Macs are great devices for photo editing, especially for professionals. The Mac’s Retina display, coupled with powerful processors, make for a seamless image editing workflow.
Some Mac users may be wondering what the best photo editor for Mac is. Just have a try of ArcSoft PhotoStudio for Mac, which almost can do all that the Windows version can do. Just have a try of ArcSoft PhotoStudio for Mac, which almost can do all that the Windows version can do. The Mac is still the best device for serious photo editing, so you need some serious photo editing apps to make an impact. The built-in Photos app on Mac offers several useful photo editing tools. You can crop, adjust lighting and color, set the white balance, add filters, remove unwanted blemishes, and a few more things. Snapseed is a complete and professional photo editor developed by Google. == KEY FEATURES== • 29 Tools and Filters, including: Healing, Brush, Structure, HDR, Perspective (see list below).
No matter if you’re an amateur looking to enhance your family vacation photos or a professional photographer working under pressure, there are Mac image editors to suit your needs.
Video editor for mac book pro. Whether you shoot with a smartphone camera or a DSLR, you need software to get the most out of your images. Here's what you need to know to pick the best photo editing software.
Here are the best free and paid image editors for Mac.
The Best Free Mac Image Editors
If you’re looking for a basic editor, you don’t need to buy a fully featured editing suite. A basic image editor is both easy to use and has all the features that you’d need to fix and enhance your personal photos.
1. Photoscape X
Photoscape X is a great basic image editor for Mac you’ve probably never heard of. It’s an all-in-one app that lets you edit RAW images, fix photos, add filters, and more. Using the brush tool you can quickly fix small issues with your photos. Photoscape has a batch mode that lets you resize and rename photos with just a click.
Download:Photoscape X (Free)
2. GIMP
GIMP is an open source project that’s been in active development for over twenty years. It’s often referred to as the best free photo editor. Thanks to its community-based development, it offers professional features that you only otherwise find in paid apps like Photoshop.
GIMP is laid out like a professional editing tool and has a steep learning curve. But it has all the basic and professional features you would expect from a graphic design suite. GIMP’s Layers feature is powerful and you can even use some Photoshop plugins with GIMP. If you’re new to GIMP, use our introductory guide to GIMPAn Introduction to GIMP Photo Editing: 9 Things You Need to KnowAn Introduction to GIMP Photo Editing: 9 Things You Need to KnowGIMP is the best free photo editing app available. Here's everything you need to know about editing photos in GIMP.Read More to learn the basics.
Photo Editor
Download:GIMP (Free)
3. Photos
If all you’re looking for is a simple way to manage your photo library on Mac8 Starter Tips for Managing Your Photos Library on Mac8 Starter Tips for Managing Your Photos Library on MacAre your Mac photos a mess? Follow these beginner's tips to get them under control and improve your picture organization.Read More and perform some basics edits to fix or enhance your personal photos, the built-in Photos app will be more than enough.
Free Photo Editing For Mac
The Photos app has a good auto-enhance tool, a crop tool, basic image editing, and filter support. Plus, it has a familiar user interface. If you feel comfortable editing photos in the iPhone Photos app, you’ll be right at home on the Mac version as well.
4. Pixlr X
Pixlr X runs smoothly on any modern web browser. If you only need to edit a couple of photos every now and then, it doesn’t make sense to download a feature-rich image editor. Instead, see if Pixlr’s web-based image editor is enough for you.
Pixlr X has all the basic image editing features you’d expect. You can crop, resize, add filters, and easily remove the background from any image. There are a couple of tools for adjusting the visual elements of the picture and you can add text and doodle over images. If you have a stock image, you can use Pixlr X to quickly create a poster or flyer as well.
Visit:Pixlr X (Free)
The Best Paid Mac Image Editors
If you’re serious about photo editing, you’ll need professional tools. A fully-featured photo editing suite will help improve the quality of your work. Because paid apps are designed for professionals from the ground up, you’ll end up saving a lot of time once you get used to the workflow.
1. Lightroom
Looking For A Good Photo Editor
Lightroom is the default photo editor for professional photographers. Lightroom’s workflow sets it apart. Other than the stellar photo editing features, it also has a simple yet robust image organization feature. And this is why a lot of professionals stick with Lightroom.
If you’re clicking thousands of photos for a project and you need to select a couple of dozen good ones, Lightroom makes the process easy for you. You can skim through thousands of RAW files, mark the important photos, move them to a different directory, edit them in a particular style, save that style as a preset, go back and apply it to other photos, and then finally export the images in multiple formats.
And once you’re done with the project, you can use Lightroom’s library to keep the important photos and back them up using your Adobe Cloud account. For professionals, this is what makes Lightroom’s $9.99/month starting price palatable.
Download:Adobe Lightroom ($9.99/month)
2. Photoshop
Photoshop is a different kind of photo editor. You can think of it as Lightroom’s bigger brother. Photoshop is designed specifically for image manipulation and enhancement. Photoshop is famous for its advanced selection tools, complex layer system, and infinitely customizable brushes.
You can use Lightroom to bring out all of the details from a RAW image file or to enhance an image aesthetically (to fix colors and saturation levels). Once you’re done with that, you can import the image in Photoshop to kick things up a notch. In fact, you can’t edit RAW images in Photoshop without the Camera RAW plugin.
Photoshop is a massive, complex application with over two decades of consistent updates. It has way too many features, but once you master the basics, Photoshop gives you the tools to turn your imagination into reality.
Apple Photo Editor App
Using Photoshop, you can merge multiple images together, completely change the color palette of an image, and fix parts of an image to make them better (particularly portraits).
Download:Adobe Photoshop ($9.99/month)
3. Affinity Photo
You can think of Affinity Photo as a lightweight version of Photoshop. It has the most common features from Photoshop like the advanced selection tools, brushes, and layer support. Affinity Photos weighs in at 350 MB instead of the 2GB behemoth that is Photoshop. Affinity Photo is also much faster than Photoshop, especially on Macs without a dedicated graphics card.
Plus, unlike Photoshop, you can buy Affinity Photo outright for $49.99. If you don’t like Adobe’s shift towards subscription pricing and increasing dependence on cloud syncing, take a look at Affinity Photo. If you’ve already learned the basics of Photoshop (you can open PSD files in Affinity Photo), it will be much easier to pick up Affinity Photo.
Download:Affinity Photo ($49.99)
4. Pixelmator Pro
Pixelmator Pro is a powerful image editing app that’s designed to be easy to use. It’s an all-in-one tool for image manipulation. Pixelmator Pro is a mix of Lightroom, Photoshop, and Illustrator. It has basic features from all three apps.
You can use it to edit RAW images, enhance photos, fix parts of images, and create posters by adding beautiful text and other elements. Pixelmator Pro can stretch itself from being a basic photo editing app to a graphic design suite, depending on your needs and skillset.
Download:Pixelmator Pro ($39.99)
Other Great Mac Apps Worth Using
There’s something for everyone in the apps listed above. We recommend most people start with Pixlr X and see if that does the trick. However, if you’re looking for a fast, beautiful, and feature-rich photo editor that’s designed for the Mac, Affinity Photo is a great choice.
There are many more great Mac apps out there just waiting to be explored. Take a look at our list of the best macOS appsThe Best Mac Apps to Install on Your MacBook or iMacThe Best Mac Apps to Install on Your MacBook or iMacLooking for the best apps for your MacBook or iMac? Here's our comprehensive list of the best apps for macOS.Read More to discover some of the apps you should be installing on your Mac.
I would definitely add Luminar - https://macphun.com/luminar It was initially developed for Mac, but they had announced the open Windows Beta just today. For Mac, it has really useful and effective tools, even 'AI' enhancement filter, which is a prototype of the legendary 'Make it awesome' button everyone was looking for. Take a look at it, you won't regret it!
For RAW images editing i would like to recommend 'Raw Therapee', pretty full featured free software, very simular to Adobe Lightroom.
Affinity for the Mac is my choice, that is just my opinion. The one time cost is well worth it. The app has the 'apple feel', almost intuitive. Apple-Mac architecture is not for every one but this paring is a winner. There is a tutorial, that is only basic or go to the Tube. How about 'Affinity Movie'?
I think PhotoScape X is more full-featured than Fotor.
Pinta is a worthy mention. I prefer it's UI over GIMP and GIMPShop. It's the cross platform version to Paint.NET. http://pinta-project.com
Adobe sales Photoshop CC plus Lightroom for $9.99 a month. Not $19.99.
Really! Agreed. Where does the author derive his opinions from?! Affinity is not only excellent as a standalone application, they also have extensions in support of Apple's Photos as well.
Agreed. Affinity is very powerful and one of the best looking app to work with :)
No Affinity Photo? Really? Where do you live?
It doesn’t matter what you do, but everyone out of three people has a desire to become a photographer. This desire comes from editing an image on mobile or seeing professional landscapes on Facebook and Twitter timeline. However, if you really want to be a photographer or you want to give your raw images a professional touch, do check out these best photo editor apps for Mac. As macOS is a very stable operating system, you would be able to use these tools without any problem. Some of them are free, but you may have to purchase some tools if you have a strong wish to be a professional photographer.
Best Photo Editor Apps for Mac
1] Photoshop CC
It doesn’t matter what kind of editing you want to do or whether you are a professional photographer or a newbie who wants to start photo editing, you can certainly use Photoshop, which has proved to be the best photo editing software for Mac. Although this is a paid software, the vast majority of people use this tool because of available features, accessibility, ease of use, affordable price and so on. You just need to spend $9.99/month to get the best photo editing tool for Mac. Alongside the image editor, you will get 20GB free storage to store all your files. The best thing is you can create 3D images, which is almost unavailable in most of the tools available for Mac. From basic editing like color correction to advanced editing, you can perform everything in this tool. Landscape, portrait, everything can be edited with the help of Photoshop CC.
2] Adobe Photoshop Elements
Photoshop Elements is another product by Adobe, which is one of the best alternatives to Adobe Photoshop CC. This particular tool would be useful when you have a lot of landscapes, and you need to edit them quickly. Instead of using Photoshop, you can try this Photoshop Elements tool, which is easier to use and it performs tasks quicker. From adding a special effect to change the color adjustment, you can do almost everything with the help of Photo Elements. Talking about price, it costs around $99.99. It has mainly four tabs called eLive, Quick, Guided, and Expert. The eLive tab will show various news related to Adobe. On the other hand, the Expert tab will let you edit the image within moments.
As the name suggests, Pixelmator Pro is a paid image editing software for Mac, which costs around $59.99. This is probably the most good looking and comes with the top-notch user interface with loads of functionalities to give your raw image a professional touch. All the options are just basic things, but they can do magic within moments. However, you may have to spend some time to understand all the features of this tool. Talking about features, you will get touch bar support, auto color adjustment, SVG support, color range selection tool, live previews and so on. You can share an adjustment after saving it in this tool, which is unavailable in other tools. As machine learning is integrated into this tool, you will definitely get a better and quicker result out of this software.
4] Corel AfterShot Pro
Corel AfterShot Pro is yet another awesome photo editor for Mac, which is available for macOS 10.9 or later version. It does support most of the RAW formats such as ARW, CR2, CRW, DCR, DNG, MRW, NEF, NRW, ORF, PEF, RAW, RW2, RWL, SR2, etc. Therefore, if you have a DSLR camera and you capture a RAW image, you can use this tool to enhance your photographs. Regarding other functionalities, you will get comprehensive watermarking, highlight recovery, blemish remover, image preset library, lens correction development kit, modular camera profiles, powerful adjustments, multi-version editing, precise control with selective editing, local contrast, high dynamic range tools (HDR), noise reduction, red-eye removal and more other options. You can customize the workspace according to your needs and hence, you can increase your productivity while using this tool. This awesome tools costs around $79.99.
5] GIMP
GIMP is available for various platforms including Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. If you do not want to spend money on paid tools, and you just need basic editing with some professional –looking options, you can try GIMP, which is a free image editing software for Mac. According to some professionals, GIMP is a mini-Photoshop since it has a lot of similarities with that tool. From options to the user interface, you might find them similar right after opening this tool. On your right-hand side, you can find all the layers and adjustments. On your left-hand side, you would get all the options, tools, and more. Like Photoshop, it has a top navigation panel, where you can find all the options like File, Edit, View, Select, Image, Layer, Tools, Filters, Windows, and more. From color correction to make an adjustment layer, you can do everything with the help of this free tool.
6] Krita
Again, if you do not want to spend money on a basic touch, you can opt for Krita that is a free and open-source image editing tool for Mac. More specifically, Krita is a painting tool more and less image editing tool. Being said that, if you want to draw a comic or comic character or something like that, you should install Krita, which will make it easier to do things. It offers some useful options like drawing assistant, mirroring tools, layer management, selections, layer masks, full-color management, HDR support, transform tools, color palette and more. The best thing is it has PSD support. That means if you have created a file in Photoshop and wanted to do rest of the editing in Krita, you can do so without any problem. Talking about compatibility, you should have macOS 10.11 or later version to install this free tool.
There are more other tools available in this category. However, these aforementioned apps are probably the best since they come with a wide range of support, they are feature-rich, and you can use them even when you do not have much knowledge.