You have a lot of factors to consider when deciding which is the best photo editor for macOS X, and the importance of the various elements will vary from user to user. Because of that, picking a single application must involve compromises as what is right for one user may be too basic, too complicated, or too expensive for another.
GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP as it’s affectionately known, is an open source editor with full support for layers, blend modes and masks — everything you need to transform photos.
Best High-End Photo Editors
If you have a completely open budget, then your best purchase is Adobe Photoshop. It was the original image editor and has been around since the old Apple Mac operating system. It's the industry-standard image editor and with good reason.
It's a hugely useful application with a comprehensive and well-considered feature set. Photoshop is equally well suited for home editing photos and producing creative and artistic raster images. Its development, especially since the introduction of the Creative Suite versions, has been evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Each release sees it become an even more rounded and robust application that runs natively on OS X.
Other photo editors have drawn inspiration from Photoshop. However, few can match the feature set that allows for the flexibility of non-destructive adjustments, easily applied layer styles, and the powerful camera and lens-specific image corrections.
More Affordable Options for Photo Editing
If you have a limited budget, then you can't find cheaper than free, and that is what GIMP is. GIMP is a free and open-source alternative to Photoshop, though the developers deliberately discount this.
GIMP is a powerful and flexible image editor that you can expand with free plugins. However, it isn't able to match Photoshop in several ways, including the lack of adjustment layers to make non-destructive edits to images and the flexibility of layer styles. Nonetheless, many users swear by GIMP and in the right hands, it can produce creative results that can match work produced by Photoshop. Sometimes GIMP can offer tools not available elsewhere. For example, the Resynthesizer plugin gave GIMP users a powerful, content-aware fill tool long before such a feature appeared in Photoshop CS5.
If you don't mind spending a little bit of money, though, you might also want to consider Pixelmator. It's a stylish and well-featured native photo editor for OS X.
Adobe Photoshop Elements is also a good, affordable alternative to the mainline product. It offers most of the features of Photoshop at a fraction of the price. It's certainly worth considering for home users, hobbyists, and even some professional work where advanced features are not needed.
Photo Editors for the Home User
OS X comes with the Preview application pre-installed, and for many users, this will offer enough tools and features to make simple adjustments to digital photos. However, if you're looking for a little more functionality without the steep learning curve of GIMP or Photoshop, Seashore would be well worth a look. And like GIMP, it's available for free.
This attractive photo editor has a clear and intuitive interface and a user guide that will take new users with little knowledge through the concept of layers and image effects. It would be a good stepping stone for a move onto a more powerful photo editor, though it's likely to offer more than enough functionality for a large number of users.
So Which is the Best Photo Editor for Mac OS X?
Trying to decide which is the best photo editor of OS X is a matter of determining which one does the best job of reaching various compromises.
All in all, we have to conclude that GIMP offers the best overall compromise. The fact that it is free means that absolutely anyone with an internet connection can use it. While it isn't the most powerful or best-featured app, it is near the top. Despite that, though, novice users can also use GIMP for simple jobs, without having to embark on the steep learning curve to make full use of every feature. Finally, with the ability to install plugins, it is possible that if GIMP doesn't do what you want it to, someone else may have already produced a plugin that will take care of it.
Screenshots
Description
Fotor was mentioned as the 'lite Photoshop' by BBC and it will cater all your photography needs.
'I found Fotor to be simple and intuitive to use… I think many photographers will like Fotor Photo Editor.' – TUAW
'If you're looking for an easy to use photo editor with lots of editing options and effects, look no further than Fotor' -- Softpedia.com
'Fotor might be the perfect solution for many amateur photographs, which is completely free to download and use.' – Macreview.com
People everywhere are getting their edit on with Fotor’s solid photo editor for Mac!
*** #1 free photography app in more than 70 countries ***
*** In the top 5 free apps overall in more than 50 countries ***
【Portraits Touch Up】
No matter whether you want smooth skin, to reshape your face, or make the way you look in portraits more lifelike, the touch up function helps you with all of that—deftly, and in double quick time. With basic tools such as: Smoothing, Wrinkle Remover, Blemish Fix, Reshape, Clone and Red-Eye Remover, you can touch up portraits with a single click. With make up tools such as: Eye Tint, Eye Shadow, Eye Liner, Mascara, Eyebrow Pencil, Blush, Lip Tint, and Teeth Whitening you can have a whole range of makeup at your fingertips.
【Batch】
Quickly process dozens of photos to save time and efforts. Batch processing can help apply Scenes, Effects, and Borders with one click, and can also quickly complete Batch resizing, renaming, and file format conversion.
【Collage】
Versatile collage feature gives you a ton of flexibility to create and customize! Select from over 80 templates up to 9 photos at a time, or use Free Style to move photos around whatever you want with 26 unique backgrounds to choose from. Finish off your masterpiece with the border color that catches your eye, or select from 10 border designs. Even adjust border width, add a shadow effect or round off the corners.
【Photo Editing】
Fotor's state-of-the-art photo processing engine makes it easy to process high quality photos quickly. Adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, white balance, and saturation, sharpen/blur, highlights/shadows, HSL, add a vignette or film grain, remove red eye, reduce image noise, or crop, straighten, rotate, fix image distortion or correct lens distortion.
Flexible Text Editing Tool
Got something to say? You can now add text to any photo. Lots of options to adjust the font, size and color of your text till it looks perfect!
Sophisticated Photo Enhancement
Most photos aren’t taken in a controlled environment and often there isn’t time to adjust the settings on your camera. Enter the magic of Fotor. “Scenes” offers 15 1-tap-enhance options that have been configured for various photo capture conditions. Click now, adjust later.
Effects & Borders
Fotor comes loaded with over 150 effects, including Classic, Retro, Lomo, B&W, and new popular packs of Cinematic, Disposable, Mono, Filmatic, Lighting Leaking, Groovy, Mellow, Spring, Warm Winter, Solar and Serenity. Over 60 styles of frames, including Simple lines, Borders, Artico, Styled, Floral, Old School, Holiday, Lovers, Gallery and Stamp.
Textures
You can now apply different textures (up to 26) on images under variable shooting scenes just by a click.
Focus
Unleash your creative inspiration by using a mix of clear focus and selective blurring. Fotor’s Focus editor gives your images the depth-of-field normally seen only on professional-grade DSLR cameras.
***Fotor Pro***
- Unlimited premium assets like effects, borders, textures etc.
- keep adding new features
- Subscription of Fotor Pro: USD $ 4.99/month, USD $ 19.99/year
- Price may vary by location. Subscriptions will be charged to your credit card through your iTunes account. Your subscription will automatically renew unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. You will not be able to cancel the subscription once activated. Manage your subscriptions in Account Settings after purchase.
What’s New
Optimization of performance, increasing speed, stability and compatibility to some device.
pretty slick, especially as a free app
What few “problems' one has to solve to make this editor work (like how to save edited images) is far overcome by what it can do. The problems just take going online and asking; answers are available and solutions easy with instructions. But features like changing f stop settings on blurry pictures are very sophisticated and save a lot of otherwise trashable fast action shots (I saved almost 2 dozen rodeo shots on my first try that were otherwise too blurry to be any good). I haven’t even started to learn features like touch up. But once one gets into “adjust” and realizes that there are several ways to adjust lighting, sharpness, and other more subtle shadings to enhance or better yet to take what looks like a black picture and make it a beautiful shot makes this at least as useable as Photoshop Elements without the increasingly expensive monthly or annual fees for expensive film editors. I AM IMPRESSED!
Cannot save edited images?
August 2017 Review - What is going on? Do we have to pay for Pro to be allowed to save images from the Edit function? Suddenly I cannot export any edited images. No matter what edits are made it says “Failed to save image” when trying to save it to my computer. If this functionality is now part of a paid version, then this app is officailly useless.
December 2016 Review - This app used to be great, but the recent updates have made it infuriating and basically useless. Used to be able to drag and drop images from a folder into the app, albeit one at a time, which was silly but it worked. That feature has been removed. Each time you open a new image in Edit mode, the menu resets back to the beginning and you have to navigate to where you were. There is no way to store the prefered folder for saving images. Each time you open the app, the folder setting is cleared and has to be reset. When switching from Collage to Edit, the folder setting is also cleared. For the love of god Fotor, just make a permanent setting for this! And recently, the worst possible thing… every 3rd image edited or created, when you click on the browse button to select the folder that wasn’t saved the last time you selected it, the app freezes and stops responding. The only option then is to force quit, relaunch, reset all your settings, and start again. Seriously Fotor, get it together and hire some qualified people design your app and make it work. This isn’t rocket science.
Developer Response,
Best Photo Editors For Mac
Dear user,
Sorry for the inconvenience. In order to solve this problem, could you please provide the following information:
1. the type of device you’re using
2. the device OS
3. the version of your Fotor
Meanwhile, I suggest that you could reinstall fotor.
The Best Photo Editor For Mac Free
I love this app!
I’m a food blogger and use this app for creating collages of my photos. My opinion may therefore be less useful because I’m not using Fodor's Edit or Design functions and I’m using just a handful of commands in the Collage function. I also don’t change the photos, unless it might be to zoom in on the food. But after the complexity and clutter of Lightroom, I find Fotor refreshingly simple and direct. I have my collages created and posted in minutes. It’s an enormous convenience to my workflow and I highly recommend it. I downloaded the app, so I don’t have much experience with the online interface, but I’ve seen it and it looks similar to the app, which is pretty easy to figure out and to use. Keep in mind, that this app is FREE! It’s an outstanding value for the price. Update: I’ve gone to the Pro version because it’s still so inexpensive and the program is of great value to me.
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The Best Film Editing Software For Mac
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The Best Photo Software For Mac
Best Free Mac Photo Editor
Family Sharing
With Family Sharing set up, up to six family members can use this app.