Based on our testing, we believe CyberLink PhotoDirector Ultra 10 is the best Mac Photo Editing software, since it is good for both beginning and advanced users, but is especially good for anyone new to photo editing. You can also organize and share your photos using this software. Overall, GIMP is the best free photo editing software for Mac, and presents a good alternative to those users looking for a sophisticated tool that is free, and are capable of overcoming its complications. Adobe Photoshop Elements. Adobe Photoshop Elements is a raster graphics editor for entry-level users. For this, it has most of the. 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. 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.
All of us want to capture those precious moments so that we can relive them at a later point in life. However, there are many times when we do not find that the photo captures exactly what we want due to lighting, insufficient color contrast, background disruptions and such little things. This is when photo editing apps come to the rescue. Here is an overview of the 20 top photo editing Mac apps.
ColorStrokes
Download Paid App ($ 4.58)
With this app, you get a whole new color palette that you can add to your photos to enhance them using the unique color splash tool with dramatic effects. Another great feature is that you can go for various monochrome backgrounds. The editing tools are very handy and are exactly what you need.
Snapheal
This app is for making professional photo edits and enhancements and can fix just any photo in a matter of seconds. There are options to delete unwanted objects, erase watermarks, tune images, fix skin spots, adjust colors and lighting and a lot more without the advanced know-how of photo editing.
Fotor Photo Editor
The flexible collage feature in this app gives it a unique edge. There are 80 templates and 16 backgrounds for you to select among. Also, you can edit photos with regard to contrast, brightness, sharpen or blur, crop, exposure, white balance and much more. You can add borders and add tilt shifts too for all image formats.
Image Tricks Lite
This app uses Mac OS X Core quartz compositions and image filters to edit your photos. You can adjust colors, create photo art, tile images, distort faces, add borders and frames, zoom into photos, apply shadows, blur images and do a lot more. Also, you have image generators that generate random images based on mathematical
Photo Effects(Lite)
Using Photo Effects (Lite), you can easily add cool effects to your photos right from your iPhone by simply choosing your effects and photo to which it is to be applied. Once these photo effects have been applied, they make for great wallpapers.
iSplash Color Photo Editor
With iSplash, you can convert just any photo to grayscale, select a part of it and convert just that to its original color. This way, you can emphasize on certain parts of pictures by selectively coloring them.
Photo Glamour
Helps add glamorous effects to your photos of all formats with a magazine-style look. There are excellent glamour effects, vignetting and visual effects- with the option to mix these together with the Mixer. Compare with original image, copy or paste to the clipboard and alternatively share on social networks or print.
LiveQuartz Photo Edit
Based on special non-destructive layers and image filters, editing photos with this app is easy. Has tools including brush, drawing, gradient, lasso, magnifier, background eraser, layer mover, duplication, rich text, selection, hand and filter effect- all of them working flawlessly
FX Photo Studio Pro
Make your photos look extraordinary and stunning with this artistic photo-editing app. There is an extensive variety of filters, photo effects, editing tools and frames to choose from. You can control colors and integrate with iPhoto, Aperture, Photoshop and Lightroom and share o popular social networks.
Flare
Adding textures and effects to your photos is just effortless with this app. There are built-in presets to choose from or you or you can go for customization. There are many color effects, lens effects, creative effects, and edits to fine tune your photos. This app is easy for beginners, while also providing the tools that a professional would require.
Analog
With Analog, you can impart some soul to your photos with stunning borders, filters and effects. There are tools for image rotation, cropping and round-tripping. Edited images can be shared on Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and Cloudapp with only two clicks.
Diptic
Diptic is the app for creating splendid photo collages. Put together multiple photos and apply numerous effects to them. There are 56 customizable layouts and rounded borders that work on full screen. Also has an aspect ratio slider to give you your desired canvas size. Photos can be imported from Aperture and iPhoto and shared on social networks.
Photo Effect Studio Pro
This app has been developed under graphic designers and professional photographers so that you can edit images in any way you like. There are 30 textures and 20 custom frames to choose between along with vignettes and effects with layers. Share photos, save them or even print them with ease.
Great Photo Pro
The photo-editing tools are superb and include DSLR Depth-of-field effect, FX effects, auto enhancement, comprehensive tools, Color splash and many more. Create collages of 3 to 9 photos with patterns, design templates and colors. Flip, rotate, crop, zoom and snapshot images with the user-friendly UI and real-time process.
BlackWhite Studio
This app has been designed for both professionals and beginners and helps create multi-tone and black and white images. With over 150 available presets, you can select your effects from the special panel. There are vignettes, borders and also finishing touches to be added. Also experiment with DuoTones, TriTones, Silver Plates and new image tones.
PhotoMagic Pro – Photo Editor & Photo Effects App
Cool effects and filters along with adjustment options for saturation, brightness, contrast, sharpness, exposure, vignette and noise. Add text to your images with many fantastic effects too. You can share, save or print your photos using this app as well.
Splash Colors FX
With Splash Colors FX, you can convert images to black and white and then highlight parts of it using a brush to reveal its original colors. The blur and opacity of the brush can also be adjusted for more. For more accurate editing, you can increase or decrease brush size or zoom the photos. Compatible with Aperture and iPhoto and allows sharing on social networks.
PanoEdit
PanoEdit, as the name suggests, is a panorama stitching app. There is automatic multi-row, vertical and horizontal stitching and handling of animated objects. There is a projection editor exclusively for panorama straightening. Automatic crop and exposure difference compensation available too.
Photo Focus Pro Lite
Add depth and splendid effects to photos with this app. Customize effects so as to focus on a particular subject. There are color effects, focus effects and image effects and all edits automatically get saved. Allows sharing on popular social networks.
Photo Edit Studio
Edit photos using multiple layers and your creativity. Over 60 effects available along with edit options. The tools are quite a bit like those of Photoshop. There are layer boundaries too for graphic designing.
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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
![Editor Editor](https://www3.pcmag.com/media/images/504935-apple-imovie-for-mac.jpg?thumb=y)
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
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
Photo Editor For Mac Free
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.
Best Product Photo Editor For Mac Free Download
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.
Basic Photo Editor For Mac
Adobe’s lighter Photoshop Express is also available for free with very basic tools.