Editing pictures is such a broad term. That could include everything from a small adjustment like cropping your pics all the way to more complex photo compositions and everything in between. So, when you're looking for the best photo editor for Mac, it's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all answer. But don't worry, this article will talk about apps that cover all those levels to help you find the best one for you.
ON1 Photo RAW is definitely going to come up in all your searches for the best photo editing software for Mac. It has a modern and streamlined interface that looks similar to that of Lightroom’s. The software lets you edit RAW files but also comes with many handy features and tools like a Portrait Mode, Focus Stacking or HDR, Layers, Local. Available Platforms – Windows & MAC. PhotoScape is a free photo editor for both Windows and MAC devices and is a great piece of software for making simple photo edits. The interface is undoubtedly basic – it has a very “Windows XP” feel in terms of windows and folder navigation. It is unbelievably easy and quick to use, however.
Here's a list of the best photo apps for Mac you'll read about:
- Lightroom
- Affinity Photo
- Photoshop
- Gimp
- Photolemur
- Snapheal
- Pixelmator
- Preview
- Fotor
- Google Photos
Editing pictures can quickly create duplicate versions of the same picture. You could end up with an edited and an original copy of all of your photos. So, it's good to get into the habit of checking and cleaning up your duplicates. And thankfully, you can use the app Gemini 2. It's an app that will scan your hard drive for similar-looking, as well as exact copies, and let you delete them within minutes.
1. Lightroom
If you're looking for the best photography app for Mac, look no further than Adobe Lightroom. It's an industry standard for all photographers, from budding amateurs to professionals.
The nice thing about Lightroom is that you can also use it as a photo manager. Cataloging the pictures you edit and even copy and pasting edits between images. It's a robust tool that will allow you to do any retouching you want to your photo.
2. Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo is the app that's going to give you the most bang for your buck. While it's loaded with all of the essential retouching tools like red-eye correction, blemish healing, and cloning. But it also has more powerful editing features like masking, filters, and layer adjustments.
One of the nice things about this app is that it's a non-destructive editor. This means when you make any edits, it doesn't destroy or save over the original image. So, if you push an edit too far and don't like what you've done, you're able to revert back to the original. However, Affinity Photo doesn't have an image management feature. Which may make it easier for some people to use, but it also makes it harder to keep track of which pics you've already edited.
3. Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is arguably the most popular photo editor on this list, and it's also the most powerful one. There is absolutely nothing you can't do with this app. In fact, its name has become a synonym for photo editing. When people say they edited an image, it's not uncommon for them to say, 'I Photoshopped that.'
But Photoshop isn't for everyone. Because it's so robust, it might be a bit of overkill if you're only doing basic retouching to your photos. On the other hand, if you're looking for more advanced features, you might find the Adobe subscription is worth the price.
Free Image Editing Software Mac
4. Gimp
If you're looking for free photo editing software for Mac, then you'll want to check out Gimp. It's like a much simpler and free version of Photoshop. All the things that might have confused in Adobe Photoshop have been simplified and decluttered in Gimp. It's a great app that gives you total control over your photos, so you can edit them however you'd like.
5. Photolemur
Photolemur bills itself as the easiest and fastest way to edit your photos. Once you import your picture, it analyzes it before using its algorithms and AI to automatically enhance it. And don't worry, you can always adjust how much your pic is improved if you don't like how Photolemur edited your image. Photolemur is a great app for beginners and those of you who are only dipping your toe into the photography water.
6. Snapheal
If you've ever taken a photo only to look back at it and noticed a complete strange photobombing your pic, you can just launch Snapheal. Snapheal is an app that quickly gets rid of anything for your pictures. Whether it's a tiny blemish or an entire person in the background, fire up Snapheal and fix your photos fast.
7. Pixelmator
Pixelmator is a fun and easy-to-use photo editor on Mac that's going to take your photography game to the next level. With the app, you can combine two pictures together using their layers feature. You can make adjustments to contrast, lighting, and other various effects. And the great news is that it's still more inexpensive than both Photoshop and Affinity Photo.
8. Preview
When it comes to making very basic photo edits, look no further to Preview, the default Mac image editor. You can resize and crop pictures with it, but you can also make color adjustments, rotate the picture, or add shapes and text to your pics.
9. Fotor
Fotor is a simple and free photo editor for Mac. Loaded with all the basic tools you could need, like making color adjustments, adding borders or text, and rotating or tilting your images. The app lays out all of these tools in an easy-to-navigate interface, making it not only the most affordable editor on our list but also the easiest to use.
10. Google Photos
Even though Google Photos is usually thought of as a photo library manager, the app also has some useful tools to make small edits to your pictures. You can do things like add filters, adjust the light and saturation, and even rotate or crop your original image. While Google Photos is lighter on the number of tools to edit your pictures, the small adjustments it can make, it does them very well.
There are a ton of incredible apps that can help you edit your pictures. You just need to figure out which one works best for you and your photos. Can you get by with making quick edits in Preview, or do you need all the power an app like Adobe Photoshop can offer you? Hopefully, this article helps clear up some of those key differences between these apps.
Apple’s Photos for Mac app is amazing, but it can be limiting. For doing simple photo edits, the tool is perfect, it’s loaded with photo cropper, features for lightening adjustments, setting white balance & a few more things. But if you’re an aspiring photographer, you probably need a powerful Mac Photo Editing App with a wide array of editing tools and other features.
So, whether you want to brighten up your dark dull images, remove a distracting background or use your creativity to the fullest, there’s a dedicated Mac photo editing app to step up your game. Best of all, most of these image editing tools are extremely affordable (& even free), so dive in to find the best tool to fit your personal/professional needs.
Top 10 Best Mac Photo Editing Apps
There are several image editing software available in the market for MacBook, so it becomes really challenging to pick up the best one. To help our readers, we’ve curated the ten useful photo editors (some are paid while some are free) to enhance your photo collection.
1. Movavi Photo Editor
Movavi is a full-featured photo editing tool designed for both beginners and professional users. It offers some amazing features to improve image quality, do photo restoration (remove noise from old images), perform portrait retouching (remove imperfections), erasing unwanted objects from the picture and so on. Aside from these main features, it offers tools for White Balancing, Color Correction, Makeup, Crop/Rotate/Resize, Add Texts/Images, Replace Background, and much more.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 3/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 3/5 |
| Features: | 3.5/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4.5/5 |
| Price: | $29.95 |
Movavi Photo Editor is available in more than 10 languages & requires merely 57.2 MB of space on your storage.
2. Lightroom
Next on our list of best photo editing software for Mac is Lightroom owned by Adobe Photoshop. Pretty much anything you want to do with your pictures can be accomplished through Lightroom. You can effortlessly blend, merge shadows, add highlights, make images sharper, crispier or even blur in a few clicks. The Mac editing app also allows users to add details & tint of colors to make the picture stand out. The MacBook photo editing tool is available in two versions: Classic (usually more preferred) & 2018 CC version.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 3/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 4/5 |
| Features: | 3.5/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 3/5 |
| Price: | Free (In-App Purchases) |
Lightroom is offered free for thirty days to let users decide whether their editing needs are fulfilled or not. After the trial period, users can add the CC subscription for using the complete toolkit.
3. Tweak Photos
As the name suggests, Tweak Photos is one of the best batch photo editing app for Macdesigned to tweak your images in a way to bring the best out of it. The image editing software can also be your best bet for ultimate batch editing, it can alter thousands of photos in just a matter of clicks. The interface is modern and easy-to-use, users can easily pick effects & apply to the entire batch of photos, rename them or convert file formats in just one go. Aside from performing basic editing, Tweak Photos offers features for Resizing, Auto-Correction, Rotate, Flip, De-noise images, Add Watermark, and other images, enhance & control Brightness, Sharpness & more. You can even add gorgeous frames & borders to make your image more aesthetic.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 5/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 4/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4.5/5 |
| Organizing: | 4/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4.5/5 |
| Price: | $4.99 |
Comprising all the essential editing tools & features, Tweak Photos is an ideal app to edit photos on mac. The tool automatically stamps the images with the original/modified Date/Time as per EXIF info & your choice of format.
Best Free Photo Editing Software For Mac Reddit
4. Wondershare Fotophire
Fotophire by Wondershare is a popular photo editing toolkit designed for both beginners and professional users. The software is available on both the Windows and Mac platforms. The toolkit features more than 200+ effects and has strong capabilities to remove or replace the background or unwanted objects from any photo. The image editor brings a plethora of tools to create professional-looking blur & vignette effects, adjust white balance, saturation & other enhancements. Apart from it has wide file format support & bundle of filters, blend modes & textures to turn your photo into a piece of art.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 4.5/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 3/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 3/5 |
| Price: | $49.9 |
What we like the most about Fotophire is its Batch Processing feature that efficiently processes plenty of images in a determined style. Hence, a real-time saver to edit bulk photos.
5. Pixelmator
Known as one of the greatest alternatives to Photoshop, Pixelmator offers an ideal combination of a modern and simple interface with the ability to work on multiple layers for easy editing. The software has a bunch of editing tools, brushes, effects & other textures to enhance your photo collection. Depending upon users’ needs, Pixelmator offers two versions, Standard & Pro. As the name indicates, the Standard version allows users to perform basic photo editing, it proffers refined selection of tools and other filters. While the pro version is packed with extra brushes, photo effects and other editing features to push your creativity to the next level.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 3/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 5/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 5/5 |
| Organizing: | 4/5 |
| Help & Support: | 3/5 |
| Price: | $29.99 |
Similar to other Mac photo editing apps, Pixelmator allows users to adjust contrast, saturation, color, definition and much more. The software allows you to save your images in different formats like PSD, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDF and share them directly with your friends and family.
6. PhotoScape X
Amp up your photo editing skills in no time with a little help from PhotoScape X. It features an advanced range of image-related features including Photo Viewer, Batch editing, Collage, Cut Out, Combine, GIF, Color Picker, Screen Capture and more. PhotoScape has a variety of photo filters, effects & other adjustment settings to make your collection stand out. The tool is a popular choice for removing blemishes, moles, red-eye correction, creating fake HDR, liquify, creating a miniature effect, dehaze and more.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 3.5/5 |
| Features: | 3/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 3/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4/5 |
| Price: | Price: Free (In-App Purchases) |
PhotoScape X is available for both Windows & Mac OS & is a very useful tool Batch Photo Editing as well. It proffers various tools to batch format change, batch resizing, batch rename and more.
7. Affinity Photo
Restyle images for a unique look and feel on your Mac with Affinity Photo Editing Software. Its dashboard might seem overwhelming at first, especially for beginner editors. However, once you get the grip, you’ll know that it’s just the application you’ve been looking for. The image editing software features a great bunch of professional editing tools, filters, and other effects to entice the inner artist in you. The best part? The tool features a Before & After view that lets you compare the original picture with the edited one.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 3.5/5 |
| Features: | 3/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 3/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4/5 |
| Price: | Price: Free (In-App Purchases) |
The mac photo editing app supports more than fifteen file types and formats, including PDF, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, RAW and some other less popular ones as well.
8. Photoshop Elements
With complete control over Image composition (from the contrast to brightness), Photoshop Elements is one of the Best Photo Editing Software for Mac. Its interface is intrusively designed while keeping users’ needs & requirements in mind. The large colorful icons with comprehensive texts and graphics tips help both novices and advanced users. All the features are organized in the same way as most other Adobe products are. Apart from providing basic features for editing and adjusting image orientations, Photoshop Elements features Intelligent Selection of areas, scaling, smart cropper, restoration of damaged parts and much more.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 5/5 |
| Features: | 5/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4.5/5 |
| Organizing: | 5/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4.5/5 |
| Price: | $99.99 |
Photoshop Elements is one of the most ideal apps to edit photos on mac, as it comes complemented by automatic tools for editing that are only available within itself & not other versions of Adobe Photoshop.
9. DxO OpticsPro for Photos
Good Free Picture Editing Software For Mac
Let your photos shine with DxO OpticsPro for Photos tool. With a tagline ‘Reveal the RAW emotion’ Dxo offers a simple user-friendly interface with amazing photo retouching features & deep color correction tools. The application aims to analyze your images intelligently, correct orientations, adjust balance & exposure, alter the calibration levels to enhance your collection. It’s Magic photo retouching feature literary works like a charm; just select the photo(s) you want to improve in terms of color or quality & click ‘magic; button to intensify the image.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 5/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 3.5/5 |
| Organizing: | 4/5 |
| Help & Support: | 5/5 |
| Price: | $9.99 |
In addition to basic editing features, DxO photo processing for compatible cameras can easily be managed within the editing mode. DxO OpticsPro acts as a third-party extension for the same. It is capable of applying White Balance Correction, Smart Lightning, applying Optical corrections and so on.
10. CameraBag Photo
An easy to use, lightweight photo editor tool, CaneraBag Photo is an amazing app that brings out the best of your photos. It features a clean and easy-to-use interface, on the right side of the dashboard, you’ll find the whole range of filters & customization tools. Unlike other best photo editing software for mac mentioned in the list, CameraBag Photo features 200+ Default Presets, which allows users to edit the photo(s) on the fly.
| Rating’s Breakdown: | |
|---|---|
| Overall: | |
| Setup: | 4/5 |
| Photo Editing: | 3.5/5 |
| Features: | 4/5 |
| Ease-of-Use: | 4/5 |
| Organizing: | 3/5 |
| Help & Support: | 4/5 |
| Price: | $20 |
In addition to photo editing basics: adjust exposure, saturation, contrast, fix the noise, add blur, vignette effect. CameraBag Photo boasts other photo editing utilities like Hue Masking, HSV Mask, adding borders, watermark, fixing dead pixels, color mixer, filtered B+W, split tone and more.
How Do You Edit Your Photographs?
All the aforementioned Photo Editing tools for Mac are well-designed and great looking pieces to easily edit images. However, if you ask us, we recommend using Wondershare Fotophire & Tweak Photos that works suitable for both amateur & pro photographers. Both the photo editing tools have enticing editing feature set to make your photo collection stand out & both have strong capabilities for Batch Editing & Processing!
Do let us know your favorite editing tips, tricks, and hacks in the comment section below. And which Mac photo editing tool is your personal favorite?