- January 02, 2020
- 18 min to read
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.
Dismissing the use of photo editors and opting for raw photos is like compromising the visual appeal by at least 20%. You cannot let go of that little percentage if you have the choice. If you own an Apple Mac and you’ve been wondering which photo editing software is the best, then this article will put some light on your thoughts. A: Luminar 4 is the best photo editing software because it offers the most powerful collection of features and tools for different editing needs. Q: What is the easiest free photo editing software? A: Paint.NET is the easiest free photo editing software, however, it has a very limited number of features suitable only for basic editing.
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)
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.
- It's a Mac RAW photo editor too, and the app claims the best support for Photoshop's ubiquitous.psd file format outside of Photoshop itself. Affinity Photo is a power tool.
- 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. Luminar (7 days trial) Luminar is another full-featured photo editor that’s popular with both Mac and Windows users.
2. Luminar (7 days trial)
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 2020 (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)
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.
You can use free image editors as a launchpad before you jump on the pro packages. As a novice, you might be interested in creating greeting cards or social media posts. For your perusal, we have listed some of the best free photo editors for Mac. Let’s explore the list, which can work on your Mac like Photoshop.
What Are The Best Free Photo Editing Mac Apps in 2020?
#1. Apple Photos
Apple’s stock app offers you great editing tools to resize, crop, collage, zoom, warp your images. And once you edit your pictures, you can create GIF of the same. A glaring feature of the Apple Photos app is it allows you to store all your images and edits in iCloud. Thus, you can quickly access all your photos and pictures on other Apple devices like iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.
Smart Sliders helps you edit images like a pro, even if you are a beginner. By using the markup tool, you can add text, shapes, sketches, or signature to your images. And last but not least, you can turn Live Photos into a funny video to share on your social media pages.
#2. GIMP
For more than 20 years, GIMP has continuously been one of the best raw image editors for Mac. This GNU Image Manipulation Program was developed for Linux, but since it is open-source, you can use its tools on your Mac computers. If you are in a creative field of digital media and advertisement, you can use your imagination to create the most elegant images.
This software supports multiple languages like C, C++, Perl, Python, Scheme, and others. Whether you are working for digital or printed media, you can always get high-fidelity color reproduction by using high-quality color management features.
#3. Fotor Photo Editor
BBC mentioned this app as lite Photoshop. This probably sums up everything. With many other testimonials, Fotor is your reliable companion if you want to use lots of editing options and effects. This app is primarily divided into four main features: portraits touch up, batch, collage, and photo editing.
You can adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, white balance, and saturation. Further, Fotor helps users sharpen/blur, highlight, add a vignette, or film grain of the image. Check its flexible text editing tool, which allows you to adjust text fonts, size, and color.
#4. PhotoScape X
This is your all-in-one image editor that comes with countless features to create and edit the best photo on your Mac. For your social media posts, you can take any picture and remove the background. Although this one is a nasty trick, you should give credit to the original image source.
One of the significant features of PhotoScape X is you can use this software in international languages like English, Spanish, Português, Dutch, French, Italian, and languages of some eastern countries.
#5. Photo Image Editor Pixelstyle
Pixelstyle can overwhelm you with its repertoire of features. However, as a beginner, you can quickly filter your requirements and pick features of this software. Among its more than a dozen filters, you will be impressed by a few like copying elements or layers, gradient filling, cloning, smudging, image resizing, and others.
Red-eye is one of the notorious killers of picture quality. Thankfully, Pixelstyle has a tool to remove red-eye from your photos. For amateurs, this software offers fantastic photo adjustments to adjust brightness, contrast, hue, and white point.
#6. Polarr
Whether you are a pro editor or a learner of creative arts, Polarr has something to impress you. For novices, Polarr has auto-enhance tools and high-quality filters to go into details of photos. For pro users, they can explore layer support, curve tools, local adjustments, and other features.
If you compare Polarr with Photoshop, you will find the former more accessible and intuitive. By using watermark support, you can be the sole owner of your creation. Since it works offline, you don’t need a constant Internet connection.
#7. Paint S
Paint S is arguably the best image editing tool for social media professionals, who frequently have to add text to images. Apart from adding text, you can also crop, rotate, and scale images easily. The software’s ability to support layers allows you to re-edit your images freely.
A notable feature of this software is you can save your images in several formats like TIFF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and many other popular formats. To make your photos more attractive, Paint S helps you select and remove unwanted elements.
#8. Gravit Designer
Gravit Designer is the most modern photo editor for Mac. Whether you are a novice or a professional, you can explore its features to create killer marketing communication (including websites, icons, UI design, presentations) or you can use it to design concept art. The interface is intuitive and neat.
The software offers more than 40 effects and 28 blending modes, which is one of the hightlights. Among other smart features of Gravit Designer are powerful text engine, out-of-the-box web fonts, assets & design templates, multiple export formats, and more.
That’s all, folks!
Free Mac Photo Editor Download
Wrapping up…
I hope the above apps will push you to the next level, and once you achieve that proficiency, you can use premium photo editors on your Mac.
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Free Apple Photo Editor
Would you like to add something to this list of free picture editor for Mac? Share your feedback with us in the Comments section below.
Nikhil runs iGB’s official YouTube channel. He is the official lensman of iGB and GB’s small studio is Nikhil’s playground, where he does all wonders with his remarkable signature. When Nikhil is not in his studio, you may spot him in a gourmet restaurant, chomping his way through some delicious food. He is a great traveler, who can go for long drives in search of good food.
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