With the best photo editing software for Mac 2018, it is actually possible to create perfect photos. Choose one of the photo editors above and you will not be disappointed. All of them come with free trial periods whose lengths differ from one to the other. Asking which is the best pixel-based photo editor for Mac OS X may sound like a simple and straightforward question, however, it is a more complex question than it may at first seem. The Best Free Photo Editors for macOS Justin Pot @jhpot May 4, 2017, 1:13pm EDT If you’re a Mac-using professional photographer, you’re probably already paying $10 a month for Adobe Creative Cloud’s Photography plan, which includes Photoshop and Lightroom.
Mac has always been considered as one of the best platforms for artists, especially in the field of photography, video and design.
Today we will be featuring some of the top photo editors for Mac that can do the job when to require. Here we have both free and paid programs on this list so you can choose the one that fits your pocket.
Photos for OS X
Photo is an easy-to-use and streamlined design program, the all-new Photos has been engineered from the ground up to help you keep your growing library organised and accessible.
Powerful and intuitive editing tools help you perfect your images as well as create beautiful gifts for sharing. And with iCloud Photo Library, a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos can be stored in the cloud — so you can access your entire collection from your Mac, iOS devices, and even your PC, anytime.
When you make changes on your Mac like editing a photo, marking a Favorite or adding to an album, they’re kept up to date on your iPhone, your iPad and iCloud.com. And vice versa — any changes made on your iOS devices are automatically reflected on your Mac.
Photos makes it simple to apply more advanced adjustments to your image. You can make precise edits by enabling the histogram, adjusting levels, adding definition and more. You can even add a vignette for a final artistic touch.
Price : Free
Photoshop CC
www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
Create anything you can imagine. Anywhere you are. The world’s best imaging and design app is at the core of almost every creative project. Work across desktop and mobile devices to create and enhance your photographs, website and mobile app designs, 3D artwork, videos and more.
A whole new experience in digital design. See how the latest releases help you quickly turn any inspiration into incredible work with great new features for web and app design, photography and print and graphic design.
Price : $19.99/monthly
GIMP
www.gimp.org/downloads
GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems.
It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes. Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done.
You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins.
Price: Free
Pixelmator
www.pixelmator.com/mac
Full-featured image editor for Mac. Pixelmator for Mac is a powerful, fast, and easy-to-use image editor.
It lets you enhance and touch up photos, sketch, draw and paint, add text and shapes, apply dazzling effects, and do so much more.
Pixelmator is built and developed from the ground up for the Mac, taking full advantage of the latest OS X features and technologies.
Price: $29.99
Paintbrush
paintbrush.sourceforge.net
Paintbrush is a simple paint program for Mac OS X, reminiscent of Microsoft Paint and Apple’s own now-defunct MacPaint.
It provides users with a means to make simple images quickly, something that has been noticeably absent from the Mac for years.
Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF.
Full support for transparency is available for image formats that support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). You can also paste images copied from many common Mac applications, including Microsoft Office and Apple iWork.
Price: Free
Acorn 5
flyingmeat.com/acorn
Acorn is an image editor for Mac OS X 10.10 and later. One of a kind, no subscriptions, no hassle.
Powerful Image Editing – Use non-destructive curves, levels, and filters. Add layer masks and selections to touch up your images or make something entirely new.
Price: $29.99
Fotor for Mac
www.fotor.com/mac
With Fotor’s state-of-the-art photo processing engine, it’s easy to process high quality photos quickly. Adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, white balance, and saturation, sharpen/blur, add a vignette, or crop, straighten, rotate and more.
Batch processing lets you quickly process dozens of photos to save you time and effort. New Batch processing can help you for Scenes, Effects, and Borders, as well as Batch resizing, renaming, and file conversion.
Price : Free
Pixen
itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixen/id525180431
Pixen is a pixel art editor designed for working with low-resolution raster art, such as those 8-bit sprites found in old-school video games.
With innovative features like a unique color palette system, patterns, layers, and high-zoom support, Pixen packs all the tools pixel artists need in an intuitive, Mac-native interface.
Pixen also makes creating frame-by-frame animations fun and easy. Animations – Create and arrange image frames in the filmstrip view to piece together animations; export animations as animated GIFs or even spritesheets!
Tools – Leverage Pixen’s wide array of tools when composing pixel art: Pencil, Eraser, Eyedropper, Zoom, Rectangular Selection, Magic Wand, Lasso, Move, Fill, Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse.
Price : $9.99
Pixlr Desktop
pixlr.com/desktop
Powerful, and incredibly easy to use. Apply a quick fix and fine-tune any picture or add your personal touch with effects, overlays and borders.
Over 2 million combination of effects. Add your personal style to photos with over 100 effects, 340 overlays, and 200 borders. Adjust transparency, resize, and rotate each element to create the perfect touch.
Selection made easy. Influence icons Influence Masks give you precise control over how effects are applied to specific areas of your photo, allowing you to be creative and original in completely new ways. A little more control goes a long way.
Price : Free, $1.99/month or $14.99/year
That’s it for now, we will be updating this list when there a new kid on the block, but for now these are the best photo editors for Mac. Which one did you like the most?
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)
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
Free Mac Photo Editor Download
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.
Simple Photo Editor 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?