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.
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
As a Mac photo editor, Affinity Photo is not for the easily intimidated. If you’re willing to put in the time to get comfortable with the less-than-intuitive interface, though, the rewards can be great. Where you can use it: Browsers on Mac and Windows, and as an app for Android and iOS. Welcome to the official YouTube channel of Affinity Photo, the only fully loaded photo editor integrated across Mac, Windows and iOS. Subscribe for a wide range of tutorials, covering everything. Affinity Photo is a photo editor software app. Just like Photoshop, it is capable of performing very advanced image editing tasks, but at a fraction of the price of Photoshop. Affinity Photo is part of the Affinity Suite, which also includes Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. Affinity Photo is one of the aspiring photo editing apps, offering plenty of features to accommodate both entry level and professional users. The program is smooth, yet.
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
Affinity Photo Edit
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.'
Affinity Photo Download For Mac
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.
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
Affinity Photo For Mac Os
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.
Significant Affinity updates are landing today across the company’s Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps on Mac, iPad, and Windows.
The company says version 1.9 of the creative suite is faster, takes the app’s non-destructive workflow to the next level, and enables significantly easier collaboration between remote workers…
Here’s what the company has to say:
A key feature which sets Affinity Photo apart from the competition is its non-destructive workflow, and that has been taken to another level again with the ability to add liquify adjustments as live, maskable layers. On top of that there are substantial improvements to its RAW engine, new linked layer functionality, path text, as well as a whole new mode to control the stacking of astrography images for stunning results.
Affinity Designer, the graphic design app, gets a new contour tool which offers an incredibly intuitive way to add contours and line offsets to any shape or path. Also added is the ability to place linked images and resources, reducing file size and simplifying collaborative working.
In Affinity Publisher, IDML import will be noticeably faster and the new Package feature allows users to bundle all the image and font resources from a project into a folder which can be transferred easily to another system to aid collaboration or for print production.
Placed PDFs can now be set to ‘passthrough’ ensuring 100% fidelity on export, and users can easily integrate text and image links into a document from an external data source with the new data merge feature.
The 1.9 update is available across all Affinity apps on macOS, Windows and iPad from today and is free to existing users.
The company has reintroduced its 90-day free trial for the Mac versions, and offers a 50% discount when buying them.
For almost a year now, the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to severely impact people all over the world, not least in the creative community. Last year, to support that community, we made all our apps free for anyone to use for 90 days. We were humbled and overwhelmed by the response.
When that offer ended, it appeared things were getting better and we all hoped that by now the situation would have continued to improve. Sadly, it’s clear that the pandemic continues to have a serious impact and so once again we are offering a 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite for anyone who wants to use them. Even if you used the trial last year, you can do it again. There’s also a 50% discount if you would prefer to buy and keep the apps, including our iPad versions, as well as a half price offer on all digital content in the Affinity Store.
All apps are compatible with both Big Sur and M1 Macs.
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