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.
Download JPEGView - Image Viewer and Editor for free. Lean and fast image viewer with minimal GUI. JPEGView is a lean, fast and highly configurable viewer/editor for JPEG, BMP, PNG, WEBP, TGA, GIF and TIFF images with a minimal GUI. Navigate to and click on the JPG file to edit. The JPG file will open in Paint. Make edits to the pictures in the JPG file using the drawing, text, cropping and other tools in Paint. Click the 'File' option from the top navigation bar and select 'Save' to save the JPG file with changes.
1. Movavi Photo Editor
- Photoshop is the best known photo editing software for macOS, but it's far from the only option. There are also some brilliant, feature-packed photo editors for your Mac if you don't need the.
- More than 2,000 attendees, including 900 franchisees and their guests, gathered for the 2017 Mac Tools Tool Fair at Opryland Gaylord in Nashville, Tenn., Feb. Nearly 300 products were launched at the 2017 Mac Tools Fair, including the MDT 10 scan tool and a new line of 20V power tools.
- IPhoto, the image manager that Apple supplies free for all Mac users, has a borderline image editor, providing only the basics -- cropping, scaling, rotating, brightness, red-eye fixing, importing, exporting and, of course, photo management in general.
- RAW Power for Mac 2.0 operates as both a standalone app, as well as an extension for Apple Photos. The updated version brings new adjustment tools including chromatic aberration correction, perspective correction, a black and white mode, a vignette tool, and a new enhance module. Batch processing.
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.
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
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?
Active1 year, 8 months ago
Is there something like the Windows Snipping Tool for OSX?
For those, who don't know about the tool, it's an easy to use software to take snapshot of any portion of screen, and is really useful in various situations.
gentmatt36.8k4545 gold badges171171 silver badges259259 bronze badges
Atul GoyalAtul Goyal97522 gold badges1212 silver badges1919 bronze badges
8 Answers
There is now a blog entry about Taking Screenshots in a Snap.
It's built into Mac OS.
- ⌘+⇧+3 captures the whole screen
- ⌘+⇧+4 captures a custom rectangle (click and drag over the screen region you want to capture)
- ⌘+⇧+4 then space captures a specific window (move the mouse cursor over the desired window, then click)
Press esc to cancel.
Screenshots are saved onto your Desktop and timestamped.
Holding control in addition to any of the sequences above causes the image to be copied instead of saved to the desktop.
By default the image format is png. However, you can change the format by typing in the Terminal:
Where
image_format
is one of jpg
, tiff
, pdf
, png
, bmp
or pict
(among others). If you omit the second line, you will need to log out and in again for the change to take effect.The settings for the shortcuts in the system preferences are located at:
System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screen Shots
System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screen Shots
The MacOS X application that enables screenshots is called Grab. It is located at
gentmattgentmatt/Applications/Utilities/Grab.app
36.8k4545 gold badges171171 silver badges259259 bronze badges
If you don't want to remember the shortcut keys, you can also use the built-in Preview app.
Just launch Preview, then from the menu, select File, Take Screen Shot, then choose
- From Selection - you will get a crosshair to drag
- From Window - you will get to choose which window to grab
- From Entire Screen - it will give a countdown first, so that you can get back to whatever app you want to take a picture of
It will then display the screenshot in Preview, and you can save, copy, paste, crop, etc. from there.
JKubeckiJKubecki
Macworld magazine's senior editor Dan Frakes just posted a very good short video tutorial (with show transcript) about the screenshot features of Mac OS X. This includes how to use the Grab app from the Utilities folder. The video is at: http://www.macworld.com/article/164123/2011/12/mac_os_x_screenshot_secrets.html.
His show description:'Mac OS X makes it easy to take screenshots—images of your screen or objects on it. But even veteran Mac users are often unaware of the many options available for getting the perfect screenshot. Here's a quick look at these underused options.'
His show description:'Mac OS X makes it easy to take screenshots—images of your screen or objects on it. But even veteran Mac users are often unaware of the many options available for getting the perfect screenshot. Here's a quick look at these underused options.'
john1975john1975
If you also need editing capabilities (e.g. like Windows Paint or however it's called these days), Skitch is a good add-on (and it's free).
nohillside♦nohillside57.1k1414 gold badges120120 silver badges168168 bronze badges
Easycrop, or start with the insanely great (and free) SnapNDrag, from Yellow Mug — http://www.yellowmug.com/
AntonyAntony
You may like Snip, I used it for a while and I found it fantastic. You can download it from Mac App Store for free
ZHENJiNG LiANGZHENJiNG LiANG
Of course, the most convenient way to snapshot on Mac is by pressing keyboard shortcuts, however, this traditional method lacks additional features like making annotations, uploading images online for sharing, etc. For this purposes, you can make use of professional Mac screenshot tools that features the same function as Snipping Tool.
Grab - A built-in screenshot tool on Mac that enables you to capture anything you see on screen.
Skitch - Easy tool that allows for capturing, annotating and sharing screenshots / images.
Jing - An effective screen capturing program that works for recording screen and taking screenshot.
grg♦145k2525 gold badges229229 silver badges340340 bronze badges
user78756user78756
Keyboard Maestro can drive Preview to behave exactly like snipping tool
Matco Tools
F13 (in the same place as PrintScreen on Windows)
Open Preview.app
Select menu File/Take Screen Shot/From Selection
dwilbankdwilbank
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