In the past, you would need to spend a few hundred dollars to get your hands on a decent photo editing application. Those days are over. These days, you can get your hands on some amazing free photo editing software for mac. This post is about best free photo editing software for Mac that lets you effortlessly edit photos the way you like them.
Are you looking for photo editing software for your mac? If so, then you’re in the right place. I’ve put together a list of free mac photo editing software that will help you to edit photos on your mac more easily. These free mac photo editing software can fix, enhance, or add effects to your digital photos.
Pixelmator:
Pixelmator is a photo editing for Mac app developed by two Lithuanian brothers and based on a combination of open source and Mac OS X technologies.
This software has many features, including more than 40 tools for selection, painting, retouching, navigation, color correction, and color management, GPU-powered image processing, pixel-accurate selection, and more. Just for color correction, it has 16 tools and more than 50 filters.
This set of powerful tools allows users to edit photos, sketch, draw, paint, and add shapes and more than 160 effects. Thus, the tool allows not only photo processing but also graphics creation, such as logos, etc.
The app works on a layer-based image editing technique, where different layers can be arranged and grouped for processing.
The combination of technologies used includes Open GL, Core Image for Mac’s graphics card, Open CL for parallel computing, and 64-bit architecture. The result is a noticeable fast image processing.
Overall, Pixelmator is a great Mac photo editing software that can produce stunning results in the hands of the gifted artist.
Canva:
Canva is the best free photo editing software for Mac. It is used for the professional level of photo editing with different kinds of templates. To make logos, posters, pamphlets, and hashtags of the photos, one can use Canva as a photo editor. Canva has free cloud storage for the images to keep the images organized. It is a mobile application with free and paid versions. Using this Mac photo editor, you can adjust contrast, brightness, and effects with text editing tools. For home users, the free version is enough. But for the business purpose, there are some paid packages are as given below:
- Canva Pro is available for US$9.95 per month.
- Canva Enterprise is available for US$30 per month.
GIMP:
GNU Image Manipulation Program is the full form of the GIMP. It is one of the best photo editor of the Mac photo editor. It is used for advanced photo editing. GIMP is open-source software. This software has highly customized image enhancement tools as a free photo editor. It has various ways to enhance the images like cropping, filtering, reduce the noise, blur the image including masks, curves, and animation as well. It is also a famous Mac photo editor alternative to Adobe Photoshop. The GIMP package has some pre-installed plugins with others available to install separately. It has more than 40 export formats with different types of layers. As this is a free photo editor, one can download this from the GIMP website without paying any amount.
Fotor:
Fotor is one of the free photo editor for Mac. If you want to enhance the photos in seconds, then Fotor is one of the best photo editors to improve the quality of the images. This software has highly recommended premium level filters to add some specifications to an image. It has a quick enhancement of the image as there is a feature to allow more than one image to be enhanced in one goes. It has features like artificial lightning, sunset, portrait, landscape, and theater. Fotor supports JPG, PNG, and PDF formats to export the images.
Pixlr X:
Pixlr X is an updated version of the Pixlr Editor which is based on the comprehensive browser. It is free photo editor software for the quick results of image enhancement. Using this one can enhance colors, saturation, sharpen, and blur images with some effects and frames. It includes some advanced editing tools with a clear interface. It helps to put images in a complex composition from multiple images. It also includes all the Instagram style options with pop art effects. There is no requirement to pay a single penny, as it can be installed from its official website. It is the best free photo editing software for Mac.
Adobe Photoshop Express Editor:
It is a Mac photo editor which provides an efficient way to improve lighting and exposure problems of an image. This free photo editor supports all platforms either a smartphone or tablet. It has a well designed full-screen option to enlarge the images. It is used to edit and decorate the images with excellent fill light options. You can retrieve the original image any time as it has non-destructive edits of the images. It supports only JPG format to export the images. There is no option for direct sharing on social media. For social media sharing, you have to choose a file name and destination.
Affinity Photo:
It is a successor to PhotoPlus. This is the best free photo editing software for Mac. It is a type of raster graphics editor. This application can be considered as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Using this, one can edit and manipulate the raw files of the images to enhance them. It is the best photo editor which is the first recommendation of thousands of users. It is one of the cheapest and simplest software used for photo editing. It has a one-time price of $49.99 for downloading. For beginners, it is one of the best choices to learn photo editing.
Lightroom:
It is a Mac photo editor with a pro editing and management tool. Lightroom can be installed from the Mac App Store. It is not a free photo editor as it will require a $9.99 monthly subscription. If you want simple editing of raw files, then Lightroom is one of the best choices for the Mac photo editor. This software can adjust all types of contrast and brightness with all simple effects and frames. It is a part of the Creative Cloud Photography. Other than this, it supports Windows, iOS, Android, and tvOS also.
Pixelmator:
It is a Mac photo editor used as a photo editing application. One can create pixel-based art using its features like painting, retouching, navigation, and color correction as well as layers based image editing. It is an alternative to Adobe Photoshop. You can install this from the Mac App Store. It is not a free photo editor for Mac as it costs $29.99 per month after the free trial of 30 days. It is a faster and simplest application than the others. It has another version named Pixelmator Pro which allows you to combine more than one image in a single edited image. Most of the users recommend Pixelmator without its pro version.
Google Photos:
It is the best free photo editing software for Mac. It also supports other platforms like Windows, Android, and iOS. It is one of the online photo editors which is cloud-based. It has 15GB of free space to organize the images in an ordered way. It has all the basic filters and editing tools used for the simple and straightforward editing of the images. It is a free photo editor. From Google Photos, you can retrieve the original image any time as it has non-destructive editing of the pictures. Google Photos allows its users to secure the images from third party access.
Darktable:
It is a free photo editor for Mac which is available in 26 languages. This can handle a large number of images by editing them in one go only. It has a feature of non-destructive editing which can be helpful to retrieve the original image from the edited images. It has a full implementation of color management. Darktable searches your image by tags to sort and filter them. It has basic operations like crop and rotates, base curve, exposure controls, and white balance. It supports the JPEG, CR2, NEF, HDR, PFM, RAW export formats. It is open-source software that can be used by end-users to edit the photos.
Picktorial:
With the version of 4.0 of Pictorial, it is the best free photo editing software for Mac. Users need not pay a single penny to access this as they can download this application from the Mac App Store. This software has some built-in features to edit the photographs. It can be used as an alternative to more expensive photo editing software. It is quite similar to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. It is used for color correction, conversion, and image sorting. Picktorial has raw image processing software to access the raw files of the photos. It is used for Digital Asset Management, remove noise, retouch on the spot, and Local Adjustment.
Conclusion:
As we all know, there are number of photo editing software for mac available online. These software allow us to do a variety of things with our photos. Some allow us to make creative edits while others let us fix common issues. But many times, you’ll want the best free photo editing software Mac tool on your computer rather than using online image editors.