Great Free Photo Editor For Mac

Best free photo editors free download - Fotor Photo Editor, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, ACDSee Pro 3, and many more programs. The great features of this free Mac photo editor is that it can non-destructive, rich text, core image filters, raw support, etc. While edit photos. For people who seldom do photo editing, it may be hard to use. Best Photo Editor Overall Best for Editing Novices Best Budget Pro Photo Editor Best for Sharing Photos Best Free Editor for Mac Users Best Open-Source Photo Editor Product.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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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

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.

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)

Free

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. Free flash drive audio editor for mac.

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. Chat editor for mac computer picture.

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.

Explore more about: Adobe Photoshop, Batch Image Editing, Image Editor, Photography.

  1. 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!

  2. For RAW images editing i would like to recommend 'Raw Therapee', pretty full featured free software, very simular to Adobe Lightroom.

  3. 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'?

  4. I think PhotoScape X is more full-featured than Fotor.

  5. 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

  6. Adobe sales Photoshop CC plus Lightroom for $9.99 a month. Not $19.99.

  7. 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 :)

  8. No Affinity Photo? Really? Where do you live?

Even if you can't afford to purchase photo editing software, you can still find free software to create and edit images. Some are developed by individuals, and some are feature limited or an earlier version of a more advanced program. In some rare instances, there are no strings attached, but most often you will need to provide information to the company by registering, or endure ads or nag screens.

Though these are all stand-alone applications you also might want to take a look at the free mobile apps from Adobe. They include:

Also don't forget there are also mobile apps from SketchGuru, Skitch, and a number of other Android and iOS imaging apps such as Instagram which gives you the ability to play with images by applying a variety of preset effects and filters to your images.

Finding the Best Photo Editing App for You

The key decision behind using any imaging application lies with what the requirements are for the task at hand. You need to closely research the product and get really clear on both the product's strengths and its weaknesses. Also, take the time to look at the work others have created with the product. For example, if you are looking to create simple graphics or to touch up family photos, then an application without a serious number of filters and effects may just fit the bill. On the other hand, if you want to do compositing and add effects then a limited feature set may not be ideal for your needs.

The attractive user interface is simple and straight forward with most features using intuitive slide-bar adjustments. It also has a lot of features that will keep the average user happy including simple tools to correct red-eye, sharpen, crop, re-size, add borders, and Raw file processing. There are some annoying issues: the highlight box around Auto balance examples is grey rather than a highlight; printing is usable but is rudimentary and sometimes does not pick the printer page size correctly. It automatically saves files with '_edited' appended to the filename which is good protection for beginners. Lightbox photo editor for mac. My favourite feature, which most editors don't have, is the split screen view so you can compare your images before and after the adjustments you have made.

Also, it is important that you check out whether the application has been updated recently. A lack of updates is the first clue that this software may just be on its last legs. Also just doing a simple Google or Bing search around the application will tell you volumes. For example, Picassa, one of the apps mentioned in this piece has been withdrawn. That's the bad news. The good news is its feature set has been folded into Google Photos which is free.

GIMP for Mac OS X

What We Like

What We Don't Like

  • Might not be updated frequently.

  • Lacks adjustment layers.

GIMP is a popular open-source image editor originally developed for Unix/Linux. Registry editor for mac. Often lauded as the 'free Photoshop,' it does have an interface and features similar to Photoshop.

Because it's volunteer-developed beta software, stability and frequency of updates could be an issue; however, many happy users report using GIMP for OS X without significant problems. GIMP is not compatible with Mac OS 9 and earlier.

Pinta

Photo Editor For Mac Free Download

Pinta is a free pixel-based image editor for Mac OS X. One of the most interesting aspects of Pinta is that it is based on the Windows image editor Paint.NET.

Pinta offers the basic drawing tools that you'd expect from an image editor, as well as some more advanced features, such as layers and a range of image adjustment tools. These features mean that Pinta is also a viable tool for users looking for an application to allow them to edit and improve their digital photos.

Image Tricks

Image Tricks is a fun and easy to use free image editor for Mac OS X. It is an application that encourages experimentation and offers the ability for a wide range of effects to be combined and applied to pictures.

Image Tricks is an ideal application for less experienced users to achieve creative results, thanks to the range of filters and masks that are available. There is also a paid Pro version that offers more filters, though you can see the effects that they produce in the free version, without saving them.

GraphicConverter X

Free Photoshop Editor For Mac

What We Like

Best Free Photo Editor For Mac

  • Works with a huge variety of formats.

  • Cocooner function allows non-destructive editing, preserving original image.

What We Don't Like

  • Can be difficult at first.

  • Cluttered interface.

Best Free Photo Editor For Macbook Pro

GraphicConverter is a multi-purpose graphics tool for converting, viewing, browsing, and editing hundreds of image types on the Macintosh platform. If there is a file format or image processing task that your existing software can't handle, chances are that GraphicConverter can do it if you're willing to tackle the learning curve.

Best Free Photo Editor For Mac

GraphicConverter is a worthwhile tool to have on hand but needs some serious work in the usability department. The application is not free, but you can use the shareware without time limitation if you don't need batch processing features.

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