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.
It has a photo editor that will help you to remove background and manage many other editing tasks for your photos. Simplicity is a key feature for the software because you will not have to exit the web when editing your photos.
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.
Free Photo Background Apps
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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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.
Download Photo Editor For Mac
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
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)
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.
Basic Photo Editor For Mac
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.
Free App For 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?