What Is A Good Photo Editing Program For Mac

1. Best Macbook For Photo Editing
2. Good Photo Editing Program Free
3. Best Photo Editing Apps For Mac
4. What Is A Good Free Photo Editing Software For Mac

To help you select the best software, we tested six popular photo-editing programs, all either free or under $100: Apple Photos, Corel PaintShop Pro, GIMP, Google Photos, Adobe Photoshop Elements. To fix these problems, you need Movavi Photo Editor for Mac – a simple program that’s equally good both for beginners and professionals. Download for Free Buy Now Don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to use complicated desktop applications for photo processing. 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. 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 few more things.

When we think about a generic photo editor, Photoshop is the first name that comes to mind. A pioneer in its field, it’s one of the most tool-packed, multi-purposed programs and a great photo editor by all means. However, you need to be very skillful to feel comfortable working with Photoshop. Its features allow you to do wonders, but mastering them can be tiring and time-consuming for both beginners and professional photographers.

But don’t worry. There are many alternatives to Photoshop that are straightforward and easy to learn. The following list includes photo editing software that don’t necessarily address beginners but are very good for them. Which is the best photo editing software for you? There is no good answer. You have to try different types of photo editors and see what you prefer: a standalone photo editor, a phone editing application, or an online photo editor.

Before choosing a photo editor, consider your interests, skills, technical resources, budget, and workflow.

1. Luminar

When you open Luminar 2018 for the first time, you are immediately faced with a user-friendly and neat interface, extremely pleasant for a photo editor. There is a panel with presets in the lower part of the screen, a panel with photo filters and layers in the right part of the screen, and a few handy tools in the upper part of the screen. It’s straightforward even for beginners.

The filters’ range varies from basic such as brightness and contrast adjustments to powerful image enhancements and creative effects. Some of them use Artificial Intelligence algorithms to provide automatic adjustments for different types of images. Luminar offers many presets too. They are called Looks and cover a lot of photography styles (landscape, portraiture, aerial, street, etc.). More Looks can be downloaded from Luminar Marketplace.

Luminar provides intuitive masking tools and layers to create subtle adjustments and realistic-looking pictures. You can find many free learning materials, video tutorials, and examples on Skylum website.

The next Luminar release is announced for late December 2018 and includes a much needed digital asset management software that gives you access to photo albums, organizing, sorting, and browsing tools, the ability to rate and label your photos, and better tools for batch processing.

Luminar is suited for both professional photographers and beginners. The future release will make Luminar a powerful competitor in the market.

2. Adobe Photoshop Elements

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a compact-size version of Photoshop that gives you access to many of Photoshop cool effects without requiring so much learning time and skills.

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a great app for beginners and advanced users who want a quick fix. For example, it provides many tools for portraits retouching. It recognizes faces and facial elements and allows you to adjust specific parts of the face like lips, eyes, and nose. It also provides a function for fixing closed eyes.

Adobe Photoshop Elements is also a great way get to know the process of professional photo editing, as you can choose the difficulty of your tools and learn faster to use Photoshop.

3. Apple Photos

Apple Photos is the built-in photo editor for Mac and gets better and better with each update. It has Apple’s signature design and its modern interface is easy to navigate and learn.

Apple Photos provides options for iOS Live Photos, has amazing sharing features, and offers all the basic adjustments a photo editor needs. It also provides cool effects and filters. Unfortunately, filters aren’t customizable and more advanced features are missing. However, it satisfies the basic requirements and it’s a good start for a beginner.

A nice built-in editor, Apple Photos can help you with simple and fast edits and guide you on your path to perfect photos.

4. Microsoft Photos

Microsoft Photos is Microsoft’s software for organizing and editing photos. It’s relatively new and supports only Windows 10 but it’s also available for Xbox One, HoloLens, mobile devices, and Hub.

Microsoft Photos provides tools for viewing pictures, creating albums and movies with your photos, adding 3D effects, and basic editing. You can only adjust color, clarity, and light, crop and rotate images, and add text or textures. However, if your use Microsoft products and want a free photo editing software for beginners, you can give it a try.

5. Aurora HDR

If you like to improve your HDR photography, Aurora HDR editor is the right program for you. HDR photography captures details from images with different exposures and creates unique results. It’s useful for architectural and interior design photography, real estate photography, landscape shots, and many more.

Aurora HDR merges multiple images with different exposures and creates a single stunning image relatively fast. It can create a HDR photo from a single picture too. Of course, it isn’t just a merging tool as it allows you to retouch your photos and add creative effects.

Aurora HDR delivers high-quality images. It removes disturbing effects such as halos, ghosting, artifacts, and chromatic aberration and creates vivid and realistic images.

6. ON1 Photo RAW

ON1 can be used as a plugin and as standalone software. It provides powerful editing tools, ranging from basic to special image effects, HDR tools, panoramic stitching, and more.

ON1 offers all necessary tools for professional photographers at an affordable price. It has been upgrading and evolving quickly since its release in October 2017, trying to satisfy its customers’ requests. One drawback of this editor is the low performance of masks and layers. But ON1 offers a wide range of appreciated photo effects. If you are looking for your first photo editor, worry for your budget, or really want to experiment with a multi-purpose program, ON1 is a good choice.

7. Zoner Photo Studio

Zoner Photo Studio is a photo editor available for Windows. It offers a wide variety of tools and is a real competitor for Photoshop. Zoner Photo Studio is not expensive and has a monthly subscription that allows you to experiment for a short period of time and decide if you really need it without big investments.

Photographers claim that Zoner has a short learning curve. This is always a plus when you want to attract users dissatisfied with their current software. Overall, it has been described as intuitive and users can find similar tools in the Develop module (non-destructive editing) and in the Editor module (changes are integrated into the file). Users are still waiting for improvements in masking and layers area. That will elevate Zoner to the level of Photoshop.

Zoner is a powerful image editor, packed with a lot of professional tools.

8. Pixelmator Pro

For beginners who want more than a photo editor and look for graphic design, drawing, and vector graphics capabilities, Pixelmator is a good choice. It provides professional image editing tools and makes them accessible to everyone, beginners and advanced users.

Pixelmator values the user experience and a fluid workflow. It offers a single-window interface, which is elegant and focuses on the images you edit rather than on what’s around them. Using machine learning algorithms, Pixelmator provides great tools for selections, typography, and all sorts of editing. It has a very good price too.

Pixelmator Pro is professional software for photographers, designers, and artists. It’s a complete solution for creating digital art.

9. Corel PaintShop Pro 2018

Corel PaintShop Pro 2018 is the latest version of Corel PaintShop and comes with faster and more enhanced tools packed in its user-friendly interface. It’s a combination between a photo editor and a painting application that allows you to have fun while doing professional editing.

Corel PaintShop Pro 2018 provides manual and automatic image enhancements features. It’s a good choice for beginners because it’s easy to learn and use and offers a nice and straightforward workspace. However, some of its features require powerful resources and may be a little slow on older systems.

10. Paint.net

A free program for beginners, Paint.NET is an image editor developed to replace the build-in Microsoft Paint you can find in Windows. It’s also available for Mac. Even though it looks simple, there are a lot of surprising tools you can use. For example, it provides a plugin system with a selection of free plugins to allow you to customize your workspace.

The user interface isn’t cluttered, and it’s easy to understand. Simple features such as cropping, resizing, adding custom text, and working with layers are at hand. Unfortunately, working with layers has limited possibilities and image enhancing isn’t as good as in other applications.

Still, Paint.NET is a free application and its large amount of plugins can help you complete the task. It’s been growing a lot since the pixel-based application for drawing.

11. DarkTable

Another free and easy to use editor is Darktable. It’s available only for Mac. Even though it looks a lot like Lightroom, there are still many features missing. However, considering it’s free, it remains a good alternative. Darktable provides a database that manages your digital negatives and allows you to preview them in a panel equipped with lights and zooming tools. Also, it supports RAW editing.

Darktable has a great interface and cool features, and, most importantly, it’s free. So you definitely should consider it and give it a try.

12. СyberLink PhotoDirector

PhotoDirector is a smart photo editing software that provides a wide range of professional tools. It allows you to transform your pictures in works of art in no time.

PhotoDirector help you perfect your photos using impressive AI-powered tools, layers, and presets. The editing tools are well organized in tabs and intuitive labeled and the entire process it fast and fluid.

The distinctive feature of PhotoDirector is the AI Style Transfer tool. Using deep learning algorithms, it recreates the style of an artist or of a painting and transforms your photos accordingly. AI Style Transfer tool creates stunning results.

13. Affinity Photo

Affinity is designed for professional photographers. It’s available for Windows and Mac and provides all the tools you need. Affinity’s powerful toolbox offers features for image editing and retouching, working with multiple layers, and creating creative compositions.

Affinity provides quick correction and retouching tools, support for RAW files and a dedicated workspace, and dodge, burn, clone, patch, blemish, and red eye tools. You can also be impressed by the Inpainting Brush Tool, frequency separation capability, and liquefy features. Affinity doesn’t offer a digital asset management system and organizing files is quite hard. However, it’s one of the best photo editing software.

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Affinity is a valid competitor for Photoshop and Lightroom and a much cheaper alternative to other photo editing programs for beginners and professionals. It’s also available for iPad.

14. PIXLR.COM

Pixlr Editor is an online photo editor. It provides more than 2 million effects, filters, and overlays, which makes it an extremely smart photo editor. Its drawbacks are the pop-up ads that distract you from the editing and the need to install Flash. However, it doesn’t require installation and works with many browsers.

Among its best features are layers and masks, a customizable interface, the possibility to open pictures from URL or import them from stock libraries, drawing tools, and retouching tools.

You can use Pixlr in a web page or as a mobile application. The mobile version is as good as the web one and allows you to edit your pictures on the go.

15. PicMonkey

If you want to use a photo editing program for beginners without installing anything, PicMonkey is a good choice for you. It’s an online photo editor that provides all the basic tools you need.

PicMonkey offers exposure adjustments, crop, rotate and resize tools, textures, themes and frames, effects, and image retouching tools. Unfortunately it doesn’t support batch processing and editing one image at a time can be time consuming.

PicMonkey is a great tool for beginners who want to learn more about editing and experiment with their photos without investing in expensive software right away. Still, PicMonkey is not free and requires a subscription.

16. Polarr

Polarr is a free photo editor, available for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chromebook, and online. It’s great photo editing software for beginners because it provides a dedicated workspace for beginners, with basic tools and adjustments. Polarr allows you to adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights and shadows, color temperature, vibrance, and saturation. It also provides geometric transformations, filters, overlays, and effects. You can copy edits and apply them to other images.

Polarr offers image editing tools for advanced users as well. You can customize the interface by adding tools for creating distortions, adjusting sharpening and clarity, denoising, editing curves, adding borders and vignettes, and working with HSL.

Additional features like brush, color and depth masks, 3D LUTs, filters, overlays, double exposure, and batch exports are available for a monthly or yearly subscription.

17. IrfanView

IrfanView is a fast and compact free photo editor for Windows. It allows you to view images and convert them in other formats, create slideshows, do batch processing, and edit photos. IrfanView provides geometric transformation, color profiles, overlays and effects, screen captures, print options, and scan support. It’s a versatile program, perfect for working with large amounts of images.

IrfanView is a good choice for a beginner because it includes all the basic tools and supports many file formats. It’s perfect for adding watermarks and protecting your photos, resizing pictures before publishing them, and getting used with pictures’ information and settings.

18. BeFunky

BeFunky is another online photo editor and it truly lives up to its name. It’s designed to make photography fun and it’s a great way to learn to edit your photos. Among its features are tools that make your photos look like cartoons, oil paintings effects, or pop art styles. You can add a wide range of details to your photos like hand drawn graphics, photo frames, graphic overlays, customized text, and image layers.

BeFunky provides smart enhancement tools for fixing poor lighting, digital noise, fuzziness, and other common problems in seconds.

BeFunky feature is also available as a mobile application, which makes easy for you to learn how to edit pictures on the go. Even if it offers smart features, you still have to learn how to use it and practicing on your phone can be a good idea.

Every photographer has a preferred photo editing program. You just have to choose the best one for you. We hope this list will give you some ideas and help you decide what’s best for you.

There are dozens of free photo editors out there, so we've hand-picked the very best so you can make your pictures look amazing without paying a penny.

We've spent hours putting a huge range of photo editors to the test, and picked out the best ones for any level of skill and experience. From powerful software packed with features that give Photoshop a run for its money to simple tools that give your pictures a whole new look with a couple of clicks, there's something for everyone.

Many free photo editors only offer a very limited selection of tools unless you pay for a subscription, or place a watermark on exported images, but none of the tools here carry any such restrictions. Whichever one you choose, you can be sure that there are no hidden tricks to catch you out.

1. GIMP

The best free photo editor for advanced image editing

No ads or limitations

GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the best free photo editor around. It's packed with the kind of image-enhancing tools you'd find in premium software, and more are being added every day.

The photo editing toolkit is breathtaking, and features layers, masks, curves, and levels. You can eliminate flaws easily with the excellent clone stamp and healing tools, create custom brushes, apply perspective changes, and apply changes to isolated areas with smart selection tools.

GIMP is an open source free photo editor, and its community of users and developers have created a huge collection of plugins to extend its utility even further. Many of these come pre-installed, and you can download more from the official glossary. If that's not enough, you can even install Photoshop plugins.

2. Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 2019

Fuss-free photo editing with automatic optimization tools

Fine manual controls

If you've got a lot of photos that you need to edit in a hurry, Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 2019 could be the tool for you. Its interface is clean and uncluttered, and utterly devoid of ads (although you'll need to submit an email address before you can start using it).

Importing pictures is a breeze, and once they've been added to the pool, you can select several at once to rotate or mirror, saving you valuable time. You can also choose individual photos to enhance with the software's one-click optimization tool. In our tests this worked particularly well on landscapes, but wasn't always great for other subjects.

If you want to make manual color and exposure corrections, there are half a dozen sliders to let you do exactly that. It's a shame you can't also apply the same color changes to a whole set of pictures at once, but this is otherwise a brilliant free photo editor for making quick corrections.

For more advanced editing, check out Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 7 – the premium version of the software with enhanced optimization tools.

3. Canva

Professional-level photo editing and templates in your browser

Includes free cloud storage

Canva is a photo editor that runs in your web browser, and is ideal for turning your favorite snaps into cards, posters, invitations and social media posts. If you're interested in maintaining a polished online presence, it's the perfect tool for you.

Canva has two tiers, free and paid, but the free level is perfect for home users. Just sign up with your email address and you'll get 1GB free cloud storage for your snaps and designs, 8,000 templates to use and edit, and two folders to keep your work organized.

You won't find advanced tools like clone brushes and smart selectors here, but there's a set of handy sliders for applying tints, vignette effects, sharpening, adjusting brightness, saturation and contrast, and much more. The text editing tools are intuitive, and there's a great selection of backgrounds and other graphics to complete your designs.

4. Fotor

One-click enhancements to make your photos shine in seconds

Batch image processing

Fotor is a free photo editor that's ideal for giving your pictures a boost quickly. If there's specific area of retouching you need doing with, say, the clone brush or healing tool, you're out of luck. However, if your needs are simple, its stack of high-end filters really shine.

There's a foolproof tilt-shift tool, for example, and a raft of vintage and vibrant colour tweaks, all easily accessed through Fotor's clever menu system. You can manually alter your own curves and levels, too, but without the complexity of high-end tools.

Fotor's standout function, and one that's sorely lacking in many free photo editors, is its batch processing tool – feed it a pile of pics and it'll filter the lot of them in one go, perfect if you have a memory card full of holiday snaps and need to cover up the results of a dodgy camera or shaky hand.

5. Photo Pos Pro

Advanced photo editing tools packaged in a simple interface

Beginner and advanced modes

Photo Pos Pro isn't as well known as Paint.net and GIMP, but it's another top-quality free photo editor that's packed with advanced image-enhancing tools.

This free photo editor's interface is smarter and more accessible than GIMP's array of menus and toolbars, with everything arranged in a logical and consistent way. If it's still too intimidating, there's also an optional 'novice' layout that resembles Fotor's filter-based approach. The choice is yours.

The 'expert' layout offers both layers and layer masks for sophisticated editing, as well as tools for adjusting curves and levels manually. You can still access the one-click filters via the main menu, but the focus is much more on fine editing.

6. Paint.NET

Looking a little dated, but still a dependable all-rounder

Plugin support

More is not, believe it or not, always better. Paint.NET's simplicity is one of its main selling points; it's a quick, easy to operate free photo editor that's ideal for trivial tasks that don't necessarily justify the sheer power of tools like GIMP.

Don't let the name fool you, though. This isn't just a cheap copy of Microsoft's ultra-basic Paint – even if it was originally meant to replace it. It's a proper photo editor, just one that lands on the basic side of the curve.

Paint.NET’s interface will remind you of its namesake, but over the years, they’ve added advanced editing tools like layers, an undo history, a ton of filters, myriad community-created plugins, and a brilliant 3D rotate/zoom function that's handy for recomposing images.

7. PhotoScape

Raw image conversion, batch processing and much more

Good Photo Editing Program Free

Great selection of filters

PhotoScape might look like a rather simple free photo editor, but take a look at its main menu and you'll find a wealth of features: raw conversion, photo splitting and merging, animated GIF creation, and even a rather odd (but useful) function with which you can print lined, graph or sheet music paper.

The meat, of course, is in the photo editing. PhotoScape's interface is among the most esoteric of all the apps we've looked at here, with tools grouped into pages in odd configurations. It certainly doesn't attempt to ape Photoshop, and includes fewer features.

We'd definitely point this towards the beginner, but that doesn't mean you can't get some solid results. PhotoScape's filters are pretty advanced, so it's if good choice if you need to quickly level, sharpen or add mild filtering to pictures in a snap.

8. Pixlr X

A comprehensive browser-based photo editor for quick results

Stylish design

Pixlr X is the successor to Pixlr Editor, which was one of our favorite free online photo editors for many years.

Pixlr X makes several improvements on its predecessor. For starters, it's based on HTML5 rather than Flash, which means it can run in any modern browser. It's also slick and well designed, with an interface that's reminiscent of Photoshop Express, and a choice of dark or light color schemes.

With Pixlr X, you can make fine changes to colors and saturation, sharpen and blur images, apply vignette effects and frames, and combine multiple images. There's also support for layers, which you won't find in many free online photo editors, and an array of tools for painting and drawing. A great choice for even advanced tasks.

9. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor

A convenient way to correct lighting and exposure problems

Stylish design

As its name suggests, Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is a trimmed-down, browser-based version of the company's world-leading photo editing software. Perhaps surprisingly, it features a more extensive toolkit than the downloadable Photoshop Express app, but it only supports images in JPG format that are below 16MB.

Again, this is a Flash-based tool, but Adobe provides handy mobile apps for all platforms so you won’t miss out if you’re using a smartphone or tablet.

This free online photo editor has all the panache you’d expect from Adobe, and although it doesn’t boast quite as many tools as some of its rivals, everything that’s there is polished to perfection. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is a pleasure to use. Its only drawbacks are the limits on uploaded file size and types, and lack of support for layers.

Best Photo Editing Apps For Mac

10. PiZap

A fun photo editor for preparing your pictures for social media

Templates for social media

Free online photo editor PiZap is available in both HTML5 and Flash editions, making it suitable for any device. You can choose to work with a photo from your hard drive, Facebook, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Search, or a catalog of stock images. This is an impressive choice, though some of the stock images are only available to premium subscribers, and you'll need to watch out for copyright issues if you use a pic straight from Google Images.

piZap’s editing interface has a dark, modern design that makes heavy use of sliders for quick adjustments – a system that works much better than tricky icons and drop-down menus if you’re using a touchscreen device.

When you’re done, you can share your creation on all the biggest social media networks, as well as piZap’s own servers, Dropbox and Google Drive. Alternatively, you can save it to your hard drive, send it via email, or grab an embed code. You can only export your work in high quality if you’ve opened your wallet for the premium editor, but for silly social sharing that’s unlikely to be a problem.

What Is A Good Free Photo Editing Software For Mac

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