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.
- 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 few more things.
- Photos comes with every Mac and provides powerful, easy-to-use editing tools along with photo organization and sharing features. Use Photos to perfect your images, and don't be afraid to explore all of the tools — if you don't like a change you made, you can go back to the original photo any time.
- New version of award-winning photo editor created by Skylum team for Mac & PC. Order Luminar today and get an exclusive price for the most advanced image editing software. If you have Luminar 2018, you’ll get all updates for free. Workspaces give you instant access to powerful tools that work best for the photo style of your choice.
Install Movavi Photo Editor on any Apple personal computer compatible with Mac OS versions 10.7–10.13, for example, OS X Lion, OS X Yosemite, OS X El Capitan, macOS Sierra. Mac tools box for sale. The app is so easy to learn that you don’t even have to know the basics about how to edit photos on Mac.
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)
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.
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.
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. https://ratemygol.netlify.app/speed-fix-tool-for-mac.html. Affinity is very powerful and one of the best looking app to work with :)
No Affinity Photo? Really? Where do you live?
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.
Best Free Photo Editing Software For Mac
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.
Photo Editing Tool For Windows
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
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
Best Mac For Photo Editing
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.
Best Photo Editors For Mac
Photoshop Touch
Free Photo Editing For Mac
£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.
Best Photo Editing Tool For Photos On Macbook
Adobe’s lighter Photoshop Express is also available for free with very basic tools.