When you think of image editors on any platform, your mind goes straight to Photoshop. For most of us, paying Adobe’s high costs will get us an app that does more than we really need or care to do. As a result, we feel Pixelmator will win the hearts of most users on the Mac. It handles just about every image editing task you’d think to throw at it, and for less than the cost of two months of a Photoshop subscription.
Free photo editing software for Mac 1: The GIMP for Mac OS X GIMP is a popular open-source image editor for Mac OS X and is often considered as the 'free Photoshop' because of its similar interface and features with Photoshop. As far as Mac photo editing software goes, you should be able to find a basic editing program for under $100, typically starting for as little as $30. Paying more than $100 will often land you a professional editing program with additional editing tools and presets compared to the basic versions. Seashore (Free) is another image editor based on the GIMP’s technology, but has an interface that fits more with Mac OS X. It also focuses on providing basic image editing tools for most users. Create beautiful photos, logos, social media graphics, and facebook covers with PicMonkey’s easy yet powerful photo editing and graphic design software. Picasa isn't a tool for deep and detailed editing, but it's extremely easy to use for the kind of quick crop and correct editing most digital camera owners need. GIMP (Windows/Mac/*nix, Free.
Pixelmator
Platform: OS X
Price: $30
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Features
- Layer-based workflow allows for flexible adjustments
- Several image adjustment tools for a variety of options
- Layer styles save time when creating common effects
- Includes a robust set of filters for image alteration and manipulation
- Supports importing and exporting several popular image formats
- Several helpful retouching tools, including a healing brush helps you easily remove unwanted blemishes and even objects in photos
- Beautiful filters for quick image enhancements, color changes, and popular “retro” looks
- Support for OS X Mavericks features like tags, multiple displays, and App Napp
- Excellent brushes and painting tools
- Over 160 awesome effects
- Open and save in PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, and many other popular formats
- Save images in iCloud for automatic syncing across all your Macs
- Share photos directly from Pixelmator via email and to popular social networks
- Works seamlessly with existing Photoshop documents
With the best photo editing software for Mac 2018, it is actually possible to create perfect photos. Choose one of the photo editors above and you will not be disappointed. All of them come with free trial periods whose lengths differ from one to the other. The Best Free Photo Editors app downloads for Windows: IrfanView (64-bit) PhotoScape IrfanView Photo Pos Pro Paint.NET JPEG Viewer PicsArt - Photo Stu.
Note: This doesn’t even begin to dive into the features in Photoshop, which are too long to name here. You can visit Adobe’s official Photoshop page to learn more, but even they don’t detail every single feature. Your best bet is to make use of their 30-day trial and explore for yourself.
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Where It Excels
Pixelmator does so much for such a low price. Thanks to Adobe, we’ve come to expect powerful image editing tools to cost at least a few hundred dollars. You can buy Pixelmator for only $30 and it’ll do most everything you need. Cost-efficiency doesn’t make an app worth buying, of course, but you can do so much with this one that it’s hard to believe the price is so low.
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If you take a look at the feature set you’ll notice it looks a lot like Photoshop’s. You won’t find some things (more on that later), but it can do the tasks most of us care about. You can repair photos with the healing brush, manipulate the structure of an image with the liquify tool, make all sorts of color adjustments with common tools like curves and levels but also employ filters for quick edits, save to a variety of formats (including Photoshop), and a ton more. Pixelmator has shapes and drawing tools, too, in case you’re creating images that aren’t just photos. You can add styles to those shapes, photos, or other elements quickly. The same works for layers. Pixelmator works a lot like Photoshop but with a more user-friendly and attractive interface. If you don’t feel like paying for Adobe software anymore, a small learning curve will have casual Photoshop users working well in Pixelmator very quickly.
Another huge advantage? Pixelmator is very fast. You don’t have to wait for much of anything. It utilizes a lot of OS X core technologies to stay optimized, and in version 3.0 FX the developers rebuilt its engine with speed enhancements in mind. The software just runs very quickly. For those with older hardware who feel Photoshop chugs along at too leisurely of a pace, Pixelmator will operate with less lag.
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Where It Falls Short
You’ll realize Pixelmator isn’t Photoshop in several areas if they pertain to you. It doesn’t have a Camera RAW plug-in, which is immensely useful for those who shoot in RAW. It’s practically an application in itself. Pixelmator also can’t handle HDR (only through artificial means) animation, 3D rendering, color management, fine-grained space-efficient web image export, and a variety of other specific tasks that you may or may not need. For most, these shortcomings will not matter. To photographers and designers, however, they might. Of course, if you focus on photography and require complex editing you may prefer using Photoshop Lightroom anyway, and can use Pixelmator for your other image editing needs. Regardless, if you don’t need anything mentioned here you won’t feel Pixelmator falls short at all.
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The Competition
If you don’t want to pay the hefty cost of Photoshop, you’ve come to the right section. Here are a few options that can help you do some of what Photoshop can do for a much lower price.
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Adobe Photoshop ($19 per month) still reigns king as the image editor of the “elite” but not of the people. If you need to handle more complex tasks or have every feature imaginable at your disposal, you want Photoshop. Of course, you’ll have to pay for that privilege. Photoshop, as many of us know, doesn’t come cheap.
GIMP (Free) has been the go-to open source image editor for awhile, and it can do many things Photoshop can do. If you prefer Photoshop’s interface, however, you might want to check out GIMPshop (Free) instead, as it is basically the same program made to emulate the style of Photoshop.
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Read more ReadSeashore (Free) is another image editor based on the GIMP’s technology, but has an interface that fits more with Mac OS X. It also focuses on providing basic image editing tools for most users rather than acting as a full replacement for Photoshop (or other expensive image editing software). If you just need to make basic edits, it is worth a look.
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LiveQuartz ($2) is another simple image editor. It comes with layer support, brushes and other tools, plus a few basic filters. It’s another decent option for basic edits.
Pixen (Free) is a more specialized image editor for pixel artists. It’s worth mentioning here because Photoshop’s tools for low-resolution artwork are pretty bad and Pixen makes for a good supplement (if you need one).
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Lifehacker’s App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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Apple’s Photos for Mac app is amazing, but it can be limiting. For doing simple photo edits, the tool is perfect, it’s loaded with photo cropper, features for lightening adjustments, setting white balance & a few more things. But if you’re an aspiring photographer, you probably need a powerful Mac Photo Editing App with a wide array of editing tools and other features.
So, whether you want to brighten up your dark dull images, remove a distracting background or use your creativity to the fullest, there’s a dedicated Mac photo editing app to step up your game. Best of all, most of these image editing tools are extremely affordable (& even free), so dive in to find the best tool to fit your personal/professional needs.
Top 10 Best Mac Photo Editing Apps
There are several image editing software available in the market for MacBook, so it becomes really challenging to pick up the best one. To help our readers, we’ve curated the ten useful photo editors (some are paid while some are free) to enhance your photo collection.
1. Movavi Photo Editor
Movavi is a full-featured photo editing tool designed for both beginners and professional users. It offers some amazing features to improve image quality, do photo restoration (remove noise from old images), perform portrait retouching (remove imperfections), erasing unwanted objects from the picture and so on. Aside from these main features, it offers tools for White Balancing, Color Correction, Makeup, Crop/Rotate/Resize, Add Texts/Images, Replace Background, and much more.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 3/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 3/5 |
| Features: | 3.5/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4.5/5 |
| Price: | $29.95 |
Movavi Photo Editor is available in more than 10 languages & requires merely 57.2 MB of space on your storage.
2. Lightroom
Next on our list of best photo editing software for Mac is Lightroom owned by Adobe Photoshop. Pretty much anything you want to do with your pictures can be accomplished through Lightroom. You can effortlessly blend, merge shadows, add highlights, make images sharper, crispier or even blur in a few clicks. The Mac editing app also allows users to add details & tint of colors to make the picture stand out. The MacBook photo editing tool is available in two versions: Classic (usually more preferred) & 2018 CC version.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 3/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 4/5 |
| Features: | 3.5/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 3/5 |
| Price: | Free (In-App Purchases) |
Lightroom is offered free for thirty days to let users decide whether their editing needs are fulfilled or not. After the trial period, users can add the CC subscription for using the complete toolkit.
3. Tweak Photos
As the name suggests, Tweak Photos is one of the best batch photo editing app for Macdesigned to tweak your images in a way to bring the best out of it. The image editing software can also be your best bet for ultimate batch editing, it can alter thousands of photos in just a matter of clicks. The interface is modern and easy-to-use, users can easily pick effects & apply to the entire batch of photos, rename them or convert file formats in just one go. Aside from performing basic editing, Tweak Photos offers features for Resizing, Auto-Correction, Rotate, Flip, De-noise images, Add Watermark, and other images, enhance & control Brightness, Sharpness & more. You can even add gorgeous frames & borders to make your image more aesthetic.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 5/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 4/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4.5/5 |
| Organizing: | 4/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4.5/5 |
| Price: | $4.99 |
Comprising all the essential editing tools & features, Tweak Photos is an ideal app to edit photos on mac. The tool automatically stamps the images with the original/modified Date/Time as per EXIF info & your choice of format.
4. Wondershare Fotophire
Fotophire by Wondershare is a popular photo editing toolkit designed for both beginners and professional users. The software is available on both the Windows and Mac platforms. The toolkit features more than 200+ effects and has strong capabilities to remove or replace the background or unwanted objects from any photo. The image editor brings a plethora of tools to create professional-looking blur & vignette effects, adjust white balance, saturation & other enhancements. Apart from it has wide file format support & bundle of filters, blend modes & textures to turn your photo into a piece of art.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 4.5/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 3/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 3/5 |
| Price: | $49.9 |
What we like the most about Fotophire is its Batch Processing feature that efficiently processes plenty of images in a determined style. Hence, a real-time saver to edit bulk photos.
5. Pixelmator
Known as one of the greatest alternatives to Photoshop, Pixelmator offers an ideal combination of a modern and simple interface with the ability to work on multiple layers for easy editing. The software has a bunch of editing tools, brushes, effects & other textures to enhance your photo collection. Depending upon users’ needs, Pixelmator offers two versions, Standard & Pro. As the name indicates, the Standard version allows users to perform basic photo editing, it proffers refined selection of tools and other filters. While the pro version is packed with extra brushes, photo effects and other editing features to push your creativity to the next level.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 3/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 5/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 5/5 |
| Organizing: | 4/5 |
| Help & Support: | 3/5 |
| Price: | $29.99 |
Similar to other Mac photo editing apps, Pixelmator allows users to adjust contrast, saturation, color, definition and much more. The software allows you to save your images in different formats like PSD, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDF and share them directly with your friends and family.
6. PhotoScape X
Amp up your photo editing skills in no time with a little help from PhotoScape X. It features an advanced range of image-related features including Photo Viewer, Batch editing, Collage, Cut Out, Combine, GIF, Color Picker, Screen Capture and more. PhotoScape has a variety of photo filters, effects & other adjustment settings to make your collection stand out. The tool is a popular choice for removing blemishes, moles, red-eye correction, creating fake HDR, liquify, creating a miniature effect, dehaze and more.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 3.5/5 |
| Features: | 3/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 3/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4/5 |
| Price: | Price: Free (In-App Purchases) |
PhotoScape X is available for both Windows & Mac OS & is a very useful tool Batch Photo Editing as well. It proffers various tools to batch format change, batch resizing, batch rename and more.
7. Affinity Photo
Restyle images for a unique look and feel on your Mac with Affinity Photo Editing Software. Its dashboard might seem overwhelming at first, especially for beginner editors. However, once you get the grip, you’ll know that it’s just the application you’ve been looking for. The image editing software features a great bunch of professional editing tools, filters, and other effects to entice the inner artist in you. The best part? The tool features a Before & After view that lets you compare the original picture with the edited one.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 3.5/5 |
| Features: | 3/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 3/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4/5 |
| Price: | Price: Free (In-App Purchases) |
The mac photo editing app supports more than fifteen file types and formats, including PDF, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, RAW and some other less popular ones as well.
8. Photoshop Elements
With complete control over Image composition (from the contrast to brightness), Photoshop Elements is one of the Best Photo Editing Software for Mac. Its interface is intrusively designed while keeping users’ needs & requirements in mind. The large colorful icons with comprehensive texts and graphics tips help both novices and advanced users. All the features are organized in the same way as most other Adobe products are. Apart from providing basic features for editing and adjusting image orientations, Photoshop Elements features Intelligent Selection of areas, scaling, smart cropper, restoration of damaged parts and much more.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 5/5 |
| Features: | 5/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4.5/5 |
| Organizing: | 5/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4.5/5 |
| Price: | $99.99 |
Photoshop Elements is one of the most ideal apps to edit photos on mac, as it comes complemented by automatic tools for editing that are only available within itself & not other versions of Adobe Photoshop.
9. DxO OpticsPro for Photos
Let your photos shine with DxO OpticsPro for Photos tool. With a tagline ‘Reveal the RAW emotion’ Dxo offers a simple user-friendly interface with amazing photo retouching features & deep color correction tools. The application aims to analyze your images intelligently, correct orientations, adjust balance & exposure, alter the calibration levels to enhance your collection. It’s Magic photo retouching feature literary works like a charm; just select the photo(s) you want to improve in terms of color or quality & click ‘magic; button to intensify the image.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 5/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 3.5/5 |
| Organizing: | 4/5 |
| Help & Support: | 5/5 |
| Price: | $9.99 |
In addition to basic editing features, DxO photo processing for compatible cameras can easily be managed within the editing mode. DxO OpticsPro acts as a third-party extension for the same. It is capable of applying White Balance Correction, Smart Lightning, applying Optical corrections and so on.
10. CameraBag Photo
An easy to use, lightweight photo editor tool, CaneraBag Photo is an amazing app that brings out the best of your photos. It features a clean and easy-to-use interface, on the right side of the dashboard, you’ll find the whole range of filters & customization tools. Unlike other best photo editing software for mac mentioned in the list, CameraBag Photo features 200+ Default Presets, which allows users to edit the photo(s) on the fly.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 3.5/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4/5 |
| Price: | $20 |
In addition to photo editing basics: adjust exposure, saturation, contrast, fix the noise, add blur, vignette effect. CameraBag Photo boasts other photo editing utilities like Hue Masking, HSV Mask, adding borders, watermark, fixing dead pixels, color mixer, filtered B+W, split tone and more.
Free Photo Editing Software For Mac Reviews
How Do You Edit Your Photographs?
All the aforementioned Photo Editing tools for Mac are well-designed and great looking pieces to easily edit images. However, if you ask us, we recommend using Wondershare Fotophire & Tweak Photos that works suitable for both amateur & pro photographers. Both the photo editing tools have enticing editing feature set to make your photo collection stand out & both have strong capabilities for Batch Editing & Processing!
Free Photo Editing Software For Mac 2018
Do let us know your favorite editing tips, tricks, and hacks in the comment section below. And which Mac photo editing tool is your personal favorite?