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- The Best Image Editing App for Mac OS X. 11/04/13 2:30pm. GIMP (Free) has been the go-to open source image editor for awhile, and it can do many things Photoshop can do.
In terms of features and flexibility, open source stalwart GIMP is the best free Mac image editor you can find. This layer-based editor supports most file formats, and has all of the tools you need to touch up photos: adjustments for things like color balance and contrast, yes, but also filters and simple drawing tools.
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.
The five best …
Pixelmator - best for Mac
£22.99 - OS X
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.
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. Best pdf editors for mac.
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
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.
Adobe’s lighter Photoshop Express is also available for free with very basic tools.
These free photo editors are the best of the best and will get you just as good results as the expensive Adobe Photoshop.
The free photo editors below have tons of features and tools that you let you change or enhance your photos in just about any way you can imagine. You can also customize the interface of many of the programs so you can get the perfect working environment for you.
This list includes free photo editors that you have probably heard of as well as some hidden gems that for sure are worth checking out.
If you're looking for more options for free photo editors, maybe a free online photo editor will have what you need; you can use one in your web browser without having to download the software. To edit photos on your phone or tablet, a free photo editing app is what you need. If you only want to resize some photos, there are resources for that, too.
GIMP
What We Like
Similar to Photoshop in interface and capabilities.
Add-ons, including those created for Photoshop, add great functionality.
Generate files in all common image formats.
What We Don't Like
Interface not as sleek or pleasing as Photoshop.
Can be a bit buggy.
Lacks layer grouping, adjustment layers, and some other common Photoshop elements.
Full support for transparency is available for image formats that support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). Jpeg image editor for mac. When Apple released the original Macintosh in 1984, they included two applications: MacWrite and MacPaint. Enter Paintbrush. Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. Twenty-five years later, every Mac still includes a basic text editor in TextEdit, but a simple paint program is a thing of the past.
GIMP is likely the most popular free photo editor program. It's full of professional features and provides a very friendly and flexible interface.
The toolbox, layers, and brushes panes of GIMP are separated from the main canvas so you can truly adjust how you want to work without losing any of the features you need access to.
Various input devices are supported, add-ons can be installed to extend GIMP's functionality, and file formats like TIFF, PSD, PNG, JPEG, and GIF are supported.
There are tutorials on the GIMP website if you need help along the way. You can learn about layer masks, asset folders, brushes, and more.
GIMP works with Windows (10 down through 7), Linux, and Mac operating systems.
Paint.NET
What We Like
Lots of plug-ins available.
Clean, easy-to-use interface.
Good choice for intermediate users.
What We Don't Like
Windows only.
Lacks some advanced and commonly used features, such as burn and dodge.
Similar to GIMP, Paint.NET provides the ability to move its window panes around to customize the interface to your liking. Paint.NET also provides plug-ins to support new file formats and add new effects.
Included are layers, effects, and a whole host of basic and advanced things like a clone stamp, pencil, text maker, and paintbrush tool.
Several image file formats like BMP, JPEG, TGA, and DDS are supported.
Inkscape
What We Like
Cross-platform compatibility.
Large, active community; lots of help and tutorials available.
Excels at detailed drawing and line-specific editing.
What We Don't Like
No PMS or CMYK color support.
Sizeable learning curve.
Rendering can take a while.
Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, more akin to Illustrator as opposed to a photo manipulation package, but still has a lot of useful features.
The interface can be a bit cluttered but that's only evidence of the vast number of tools it includes. Nearly all the tools you'll be using often are planted along both sides of Inkscape for easy access.
Circles, arcs, 3D boxes, ellipses, stars, spirals, and polygons can be created using Inkscape. You can also draw straight or freehand lines.
Tons of file types are supported both when opening and saving. Among many other useful features, you can work with layers, apply a huge number of filters to a picture, and use spell check along with the text tool.
Like most photo editing programs, Inkscape supports extensions.
Inkscape works with Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Windows users can also download a portable version that's perfect for editing straight from a flash drive.
Adobe Photoshop Express
What We Like
Familiar interface for Photoshop users.
Control intensity of tool effects.
What We Don't Like
Limited format support.
Flash-based web access only.
Adobe has the free Photoshop Express program that you can use as a Photoshop alternative if you don't want to pay for their full software. Of course, it is missing some of Photoshop's features, so it's not as functional, but it still does a lot.
When you first open the Photoshop Express image editor, you can load an image from your computer or take a new one directly from your webcam. Once a photo is open in Photoshop Express, the menus on the left make it really easy to access all the one-click options like filters, crop tools, image corrections, the red eye remover tool, and more.
This photo editor also has borders, a spot healing brush for one-click touch-ups, effects like grain and fade, and a noise reducer. There's also a button you can click to quickly see the original photo for comparison with your edits.
Something really great about this image editor that you won't find in some similar programs is that with nearly every tool, you have full control over the intensity. This means you can slide a bar left or right to decrease or increase a tool's effect to get it just right.
Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Android, and iOS users can install Photoshop Express.
Krita Desktop
What We Like
Quick access to full-screen mode.
Particularly well-suited for comics and manga.
Lots of well-designed tools and brushes.
What We Don't Like
Cluttered interface.
Tool settings not easily accessible.
Lacks some features of other programs.
Krita Desktop is really easy to work with and is certainly an advanced image editor. Like some of these other programs, you can work with layers in addition to many other tools located in a floating toolbox off to the side of the program.
There are plenty of other features available as well, such as brushes and blending modes, advanced selection, and masking tools, drawing aids, filters, symmetry tools, and effects.
One thing worth mentioning is that, with the press of the Tab key, you can maximize the canvas to fit your entire screen, getting rid of all the menus and tools so you can have a huge space for working without any distractions.
Krita Desktop works with Windows (7 and newer), Linux, and Mac (10.12 and newer). There's also a portable version for Windows.
InPixio Photo Editor
What We Like
Broad format compatibility.
User-friendly interface.
What We Don't Like
Trial version applies watermarks to images.
Windows only.
Free Open Source Picture Editor
This free photo editor from InPixio is designed for simplicity, but that doesn't mean it's void of helpful features. The program itself is easy to understand and navigate, and you can do everything from add frames and designs to crop, change the brightness, and more.
With the one-click presets and frames, a before and after view, and easy-to-access editing tools, you can finish editing in no time and even share your picture directly on Facebook or Flickr from the Share menu.
If you like how you've edited something and want to apply those same edits to another photo, it's as easy as making a custom preset.
Lots of image file types can be opened in this program, and if saving to your computer, you can pick from JPG, PNG, TIFF, JXR, and WDP.
If you need help using this photo editor, you can refer to their online tutorials.
Some features are only available in the premium version; those are marked off in the program with a large 'Premium' banner.
InPixio Photo Editor runs on Windows computers, iPhone, and iPad.
Pixia
What We Like
Compatibile with common file formats.
Open files directly from clipboard, camera, and scanner.
Rich enough in features to satisfy advanced artists.
What We Don't Like
Interface is outdated.
Windows only.
Pixia has an outdated and unappealing interface, but the functions and tools aren't at all undesirable for a free photo editor.
Layers and layer masks are supported, as well as creating shapes, selecting objects, and common photo editing tasks like changing the color adjustment and tone balance, color filling, and selecting from different paint brushes.
All the standard image file formats can be opened with Pixia including those with Photoshop's PSD extension. Images can even be opened directly from the clipboard, a camera, or a scanner.
Artweaver Free
What We Like
Full-featured and easy to use.
Supports layers.
Good variety of brushes and effects.
What We Don't Like
Photoshop plugins and screen playback work only with premium version.
No Mac version.
Artweaver manages to include tons of useful image editing tools in an easy to use program. It has a tabbed interface to avoid clutter, supports using pen tablets, and works with some of the most popular image file formats, such as JPEG and PSD.
Standard editing tools like a crop, text, paint bucket, and gradient tool, among others, are included, but Artweaver also lets you save and replay events, use brushes, create and work with layers, customize the layout of the palettes, and import images directly from a scanner or camera, among other things.
The screen mode can be changed from regular to fullscreen to have even more room to edit images.
PhotoScape
What We Like
Easy to use.
Compatible with both Windows and macOS.
What We Don't Like
Lacks functionality typical of other programs.
Can be slow.
Only PhotoScape X still gets updated.
PhotoScape has several sections at the top of the program where you can open different tools to perform different actions. Viewer, Editor, Combine and Animated GIF are just some of PhotoScape's sections.
The editing feature has dozens of frames to choose from, each with the option to round the corners and adjust the margin and frame line settings of the frame.
You can also add objects and text and crop an image freely or use one of several presets (e.g., 16:9, Legal Ratio, and US business card ratio).
Some more tools included in PhotoScape is a red-eye remover, clone stamp tool, spot remover, paintbrush, and, among others, an effect brush (like grayscale, blur, darken, and brighten).
With each tool you select, a description of what it does and how to use it is displayed to the right, which is very helpful and not usually a feature included in programs like this.
PhotoScape is available for Windows 8–XP while PhotoScape X is for Windows 10 and macOS.
Free Picture Editor
Unfortunately, another program attempts to install during setup, but you can easily skip this by deselecting it.
CinePaint
What We Like
Open Source Picture Editor For Windows
Very powerful, despite being free.
Works with images and videos.
What We Don't Like
No Mac version.
Infrequently updated.
CinePaint's interface is very mundane, colorless, and boring, but that doesn't mean the tools aren't useful because they are.
Layers are supported so you can overlay images on each other, change their blend mode, and edit their opacity. You also get a selection tool with CinePaint, among many other common tools.
The first thing you'll notice when you use CinePaint is that when you're opening a photo to edit, you're unable to preview it to know that you're selecting the correct one, which is too bad.
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