Most free photo editors available on the App Store are quite basic, offering just a limited number of filters and allowing you to easily and quickly liven up your photos before posting them on social media.
But if you’re an aspiring or professional photographer, you probably need a more powerful app with a broader set of tools to use your creativity to the fullest. Besides, you probably use your Mac for photo editing because working on a large screen makes it possible to adjust the slightest details.
1. Apple’s Photos (Built-in app)
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. Best Mac Photo Editing Software 2019 - Photo Editor Reviews. Recently, we spent over 50 hours testing 10 Mac photo editing programs. We compared the programs' editing capabilities by importing the same group of photos into each one and applying the same edits.
Apple’s Photos app is included for free on all recently released Macs. It does a good job at organizing your photos, but its collection of photo enhancement tools leaves much to be desired. Hopefully, our selection of the best free programs for photo editing on Mac will help you choose the right app to suit all your creative needs.
2. Luminar (30 days trial)
And OBS Studio are both equipped with a powerful API, making it possible for plugin growth to supply more customization and also capability particular to your requirements. Collaborate with developers in the streaming neighborhood to get the functions you need. Obs for mac.
Luminar is another full-featured photo editor that’s popular with both Mac and Windows users. It can work as a standalone app as well as a plugin for such popular programs as Apple Photos.
Luminar uses Artificial Intelligence to enable sophisticated yet quick photo enhancements. Among these AI features are Sky Enhancer, which adds more depth and detail to the sky in your photos while leaving other areas untouched; Accent AI, which analyzes a photo and automatically applies the best combination of different effects to enhance your image; and Sun Rays, which allows you to place an artificial sun and adjust the lighting to your liking or make the sun rays already in your photo look even more incredible.
Luminar has over 60 filters you can apply to your photos to enhance them in a moment. Luminar also provides a set of powerful tools for cropping, transforming, cloning, erasing, and stamping, along with layers, brushes, and many more incredible features. Luminar supports the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, making photo editing even more effortless and pleasing.
3. Photolemur 3 (Free Version with watermark)
Photolemur is a relative newcomer on the photo editing market but it has all the chances to win the favor of beginner photographers and hobbyists. Running on Artificial Intelligence, Photolemur is a completely automatic photo enhancer, meaning that it does all the editing for you in no time. It has the simplest interface, with only a few buttons and sliders to adjust the enhancement to your liking and view the before and after results.
All you need to do is choose a photo (or a few) that you want to improve, drag and drop or import them using the Import button, and let the program make enhancements. After it’s done, you can compare the edited version with the original image by using the before–after slider and, if you want, adjust the skin tone or even enlarge the eyes using additional sliders. Pretty easy, huh?
Photolemur also offers a number of impressive styles to touch up your photos and give them a sophisticated and professional look. With this app, you don’t need to stuff your head with photo editing nuances and terms. Just run Photolemur and watch the magic happen!
4. Aurora HDR (14 days trial)
As you probably can tell from the name, Aurora HDR is designed to help photographers enhance their HDR photos, making them even more detailed and beautiful. It’s an ideal tool for editing your photos, with an extensive collection of more than 20 tools including details, tone, mapping, color, glow, and vignette. Each tool has its unique selection of controls to adjust its effects.
Aurora HDR enables you to work with brushes, layers, and masks, and provides a number of automatic AI tools for recognizing and removing noise, enhancing colors, lighting, and details, improving clarity, and adding contrast to dull areas while leaving other areas untouched.
Aurora HDR does a great job dealing with difficult lighting situations and creating full-of-life images while being easy to use.
5. Pixelmator (Trial 30 Days)
Pixelmator is a photo enhancer beloved by many Mac users, as it offers a good combination of a modern and simple interface, the ability to work on multiple layers, and powerful features that take photo editing to a whole new level. With so many editing tools, brushes, and effects, you can enhance your photos to your liking. You can choose between two versions of Pixelmator – standard and pro – depending on your needs. The standard version is great for basic photo editing with its selection of essential tools and filters, while the pro version is packed with extra brushes, tools, and effects that let you push your creativity to new boundaries. You can decide which version is suitable for you according to what features you’re looking for in a photo editing app.
6. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 (Trial link)
Photoshop Elements isn’t as affordable as other photo enhancers for beginner photographers. But luckily there’s a trial version available, so you can check it out before deciding whether this app is worthy of your money. Photoshop Elements acquired many powerful features from Photoshop, only Elements is simplified for amateur photographers and enthusiasts. It includes a good number of effects and filters, plus automated editing options for improving lighting, color balance, and exposure, and even opening closed eyes and reducing the effects of camera shake.
In addition to all of these awesome features, Photoshop also offers editing modes for beginners, intermediate users, and experts. Beginners will probably prefer Quick mode, as it focuses on essential tools to quickly enhance your photos by improving color, lighting, and other basic settings. Guided mode provides intermediate users with step-by-step guidance with more professional features like artistic effects, skin tone correction, and background replacement. Expert mode gives you full access to the app’s really powerful editing features and is ideal for creating stunning images.
7. Affinity Photo (Free Trial)
We compare the best alternatives to Apple's free music-making app GarageBand. All new Macs come complete with a free copy of the powerful GarageBand music production software - but if you fancy something different then there are lots of fine alternatives out there. In this article we bring you ten of the best music-production packages for Mac, as well as key specs and download links. In addition, this audio recording software for Mac can recognize and identify tracks as it records, and automatically tag the files with the relevant artist, track title, album tags as it goes. These downloads are fully searchable by artist, title or album, creating your entire music library simply and quickly. A lossless music recorder that can record any sound playing on Mac, such as songs, games, movies, as well as streaming audio including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and other sources without losing any quality. Best Audio Recorder to Capture Any Sound on Mac Losslessly.
Affinity Photo’s interface may seem overwhelming at first, especially for novices, but when you come to grips with it you’ll find that the app is just what you’ve been looking for. Its numerous professional tools, effects, and filters encourage you to get creative with your photos. Among the coolest features Affinity Photo has to offer is a before and after view to compare the original photo with its edited version.
Affinity Photo works with 15 file types, including common ones like PDF, PSD, JPG, and GIF as well as some less popular ones. The app amazes with its abundance of basic and top-notch editing tools, allowing you to tweak your photos using all possible kinds of instruments. Affinity Photo allows you to edit HDR photos, apply artistic filters and effects, play with masks and layers, and create breathtaking compositions by combining several images in one. If you find its interface a bit much and are afraid of getting lost in all those advanced tools, you should probably look for something more suitable for your level. But Affinity Photo is worth mastering.
8. Google Photos
Google Photos is a popular cloud storage service for photos and videos. It can’t boast countless masterly tools like other photo enhancers that we review in this article, but it includes some fundamental features like filters, color adjustment sliders, and transformation tools.
Although Google Photos may not be that helpful when it comes to editing photos, it does a pretty good job at storing high-resolution images and videos with 15GB of free online storage, compared to iCloud’s mere 5GB (which you can upgrade to 50GB for a monthly fee). If you’re planning to go on a trip and take plenty of photos, then it might be smart to sign up for Google Photos to use that extra storage space when you come back.
9. PhotoScape X (Free)
A relatively new photo editing app, PhotoScape X has been gaining popularity with many Mac and PC users since its release in 2008. Its interface is simple but unconventional, with a number of tabs running along the top of the window. Each is responsible for a specific stage of editing. The Viewer tab allows you to browse and organize your photos. After you pick a photo, you can switch to the Editor tab, which includes a broad set of instruments, filters, and effects and a useful feature that enables you to compare the adjusted photo with the original.
The next tabs, including the Batch tab, mainly concentrate on editing and renaming multiple photos at once. The GIF tab allows you to easily create an animated GIF from a group of selected photos.
The downside of PhotoScape X is a lack of selection tools, so all changes are applied to the whole image rather than to a selected part.
10. Gimp (Free)
Gimp is a free open-source photo editing app that has been on the market for over 22 years and is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux. Unlike many free apps, Gimp doesn’t have any ads or in-app purchases. Its grey interface might seem a little old-fashioned and it may be a bit sluggish when it comes to complex effects, though.
Gimp offers a vast collection of advanced tools that hardly any free photo editor can boast. It has numerous enhancement options such as clone and heal brushes, layers and channels, accurate selection tools, a number of transformation instruments, and, of course, color adjustment controls. Gimp is one of the most powerful tools for enhancing photos and is beloved by so many users for its price (free) and versatility. But if you can’t come to grips with Gimp’s interface, it may be worth paying some cash for a more user-friendly program.
If you’re looking for adobe photoshop alternative, GIMP is one of the best free alternatives to photoshop. It provides lots of image creation and image editing features like layers, masks, advanced filters, transitions and a myriad color adjustment options etc. Here you can get GIMP latest version for free. To download GIMP, Click on the button to get GIMP download for Windows and Mac OS X.
Despite having a relatively small team of developers behind GIMP, It is a very powerful raster based photo editing program and is similar to Adobe Photoshop. The latest stable version of GIMP for Windows and Mac is 2.10.10.
Do you want to install GIMP on your PC and Laptop? You can get GIMP offline installer at no cost right from us. Click on the GIMP download links for Mac and Windows operating system given below to start the downloading process. The download links are 100% safe, fast and secure.
GNU image manipulation program is the full form of “GIMP”. It is powerful raster based software used for photo editing and graphics designing. With lots of sophisticated graphics editing tools, GIMP download is completely free and open source image editor.
GIMP has all the major tools that a graphic designer, illustrator or a photo editor needs and is one of the best alternatives to Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop 7 download costs between $10 to $60 a month if you have the Adobe subscription. But if you’re using GIMP for photo editing, it is absolutely free.
Photo Editing software i.e. GIMP provides you all the major image editing tools and some advanced graphics designing features and capabilities. You can also draw vector paths and shapes in GIMP download. It is comparatively used fewer system resources, requires less hard disk space and lightweight as compared to PS.
Following is the list of some features and capabilities of GIMP 2.10.10
Free and Open Source: It is completely free and open source raster image manipulation software With lots of tools and capabilities.
Cross-Platform Software: You can Download and install GIMP for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distributions.
Lightweight: GIMP is lightweight, fast and uses fewer system resources.
On Canvas Layer Selection: With On Canvas Layer Selection feature of GIMP download, find any layer you might working on with one shortcut key.
Full integrated search option: Allows you to search for tools, filters and anything using commands.
Open Raw Images: Supports you to directly open raw images in GIMP.
80 GEGL Based Filters: It helps and improve the functionality of some filters as well as speed up GIMP.
GUI Customization: Using GIMP preferences you can customize and change themes of GIMP user interface.
Better Color Management: GIMP download gives you an option to improve and edit the high-quality picture with lots of color precision options.
GIMP Transform Tools: Many new image-transforms are introduced in the latest version of GIMP 2.10.10 to improve the image and look more realistic.
Layer Group Mask: Manage your image layers with lots of new GIMP capabilities.
Mypaint Brush Tool: Extension of Paintbrush tool with lots of new brushes.
The GIMP Development Team lists the GIMP minimum hardware requirements as:
To download GIMP updates and plugin, Internet Connection is required.
The main Pros of GIMP download are as follows:
Some Cons of GIMP download includes:
Following is the list of Raster Image Manipulation software used as GIMP alternative.
GIMP free download is one of the great photo editing tool with lots of filters, transitions and good customer support. It looks like adobe photoshop and is an excellent alternative to PS. Unlike some other good photo editors, GIMP is free software.
If you’re looking for free Graphic designing program, we recommend you to download GIMP software.