There are several free photo editing programs for Mac in the market, but not all of them are designed to deliver the same set of features and functionality. In this article, I have compiled a list of some of the best free image editing software for Mac including GIMP, Fotoxx, and Pixelmator. These programs allow you to perform almost every possible operation on your pictures like cropping, converting, fading, resizing and sharpening images. They also offer advanced options like layer designing and color correction.
Here, I will be listing out the best of my research.
DesignWizard
Platform: Windows
DesignWizard ranks among the best free graphic design software for beginners. The tool offers a large database of images along with a host of free templates (over 10,000), plus a simple, easy-to-use interface. While you can also quickly create custom templates, DesignWizard excels as a front-line, free graphic design tool for beginners.
Despite an easy-to-use interface and no upfront costs, it’s worth noting that most of the more powerful options in DesignWizard are only available in its for-pay version.
Setka Editor
Platforms: Windows, Mac
Setka bills itself as “everything you need to create content that converts.” This graphic design software is primarily focused on delivering enhanced content branding across your website, ad campaigns, and social media posts — and works from within your current CMS or in the cloud.
The caveat? Although the Setka Editor is free to try for two weeks, companies will need to select a plan — Starter, Pro, or Enterprise — to unlock the full feature set and keep using Setka.
Canva
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS
Whether you’re looking to create an ebook, infographic, business card, or email header, Canva has a template to simplify your process. The free web design tool, developed by non-designers, offers professional, easy-to-customize templates for just about any design need you can think of.
The drawback? You might need to invest in the paid version or try one of the more advanced free graphic design softwares as you skill up. While Canva’s free version is great for new designers working with templates, you can access more complex tools and features — such as team sharing — in the paid version.
Adobe Spark
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS
Adobe Spark is a free alternative to the company’s popular, for-pay Adobe Illustrator. While it’s not nearly as full-featured, it does support integration with other Adobe products. It’s easy to use and it comes with a host of free templates. If you’re looking to quickly create posters or videos for ad campaigns, Spark is a great choice.
The potential drawback? A limited feature set makes this a great starting point for beginners but less useful for more in-depth projects or experienced designers. The good news is that Spark is available for both web and mobile, meaning you can design anywhere, anytime.
Krita
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, Linux
Krita is a free, open-source painting program made by artists, for artists. Ongoing development of this tool depends on donations and is driven by the needs of the designer community at large. It’s no surprise, then, that Krita includes a customizable user interface, feature-rich toolset, and a comprehensive resource manager.
For businesses looking to boost their graphic design impact, Krita is a great tool — if they have the help of an experienced designer. For companies in need of simple, streamlined solutions, other software on this list offers a better fit for beginners.
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.
Fotor
Fotor Online Photo Editor is packed with features that make creating beautiful images as easy as executing a few clicks on your computer. It is free to use and also offers a modestly priced Pro version with enhanced capabilities.
Getting started with the photo editor requires you to sign up for a free account. Once that is complete, you have access to a wide variety of tools that enable you to edit your photos and design stunning collages and images using their large selection of templates.
You begin an editing session by importing the photograph of your choice from your computer, Dropbox, Facebook, or the Fotor Cloud. Within the editor, you can modify any aspect of the photo that you desire, including size, coloration, brightness, and contrast to name just a few.
Taking advantage of the large selection of templates lets you easily create photo cards, invitations or leaflets. Add clip art to your creations and choose from hundreds of fonts to achieve the exact design you want.
A great feature of this tool is the ability to beautify a photograph by taking actions like eliminating wrinkles and blemishes. You can always look your best by touching up your photos before posting them.
Fotor provides users with informative tutorial videos which walk you through the process of editing your photos and creating graphic designs. This makes it easy to discover the features that will make your images stand out from the crowd. You should add Fotor to your photo editing toolbox today.
Luminar
Luminar is an all-in-one photo editor with excellent RAW editing capabilities. It is aimed at both beginners and professionals alike, thanks to its intuitive and customizable interface that has something for everyone.
Other than providing advanced image editing tools like noise reduction and selective adjustments, Luminar contains 45 filters that are all geared to achieve professional-quality images in a single click. These are paired with over 60 presets that can each be used as a base on top of which users can make their own adjustments.
Luminar is also very quick at what it does, up to 6 times faster than other image editors of its calibre. It’s also available as a plugin for software like Lightroom and Photoshop, providing users with unmatched flexibility in the way they edit their photos.
As a result, Luminar is quickly becoming the preferred image editor for photographers at various levels of expertise. It is especially recommended if you are new to the world of photo editing and need something that lets you get to grips with advanced editing tools and allows you to take your editing to the next level when you are ready.
inPixio Photo Studio
inPixio Photo Studio 11 is a photo editing solution for Mac that delivers an impressive array of advanced features that enable you to take full control of your digital photographs. The tool’s developers merge the fields of photography and technology in their products, providing users with a powerful and easy-to-use photo-editing application.
Features available with inPixio include the ability to cut out any unwanted details in a photo with just a few clicks. Once items have been selected and removed from a photo, they can be pasted to any background to make creative photomontages or collages.
A creative blur can be used on portions of a photo to highlight certain elements and give the image an artistic touch. Visual settings such as brightness, contrast, and saturation can be modified to create perfect images. Advanced cropping and a versatile text tool to annotate your photos let you take a raw image and modify it in just about any way imaginable.
The Pro version of the tool employs one-click image correction to automatically improve the quality of your photos in less than a second. inPixio offers users a quality photo editor that lets anyone create stunning images.
GIMP
GIMP is an open source free photo editing software for Mac. Its name means GNU Image Manipulation Program, and it is a raster graphics editor developed by volunteers worldwide.
GIMP can be used for image retouching and editing, drawing, conversion between different image formats and more.
Its main strength is in its scripting language Script-Fu, which can be used to automate repetitive tasks. Scripting can also be done through Perl, Python, and Tcl, by using an external interpreter.
In addition, it also excels at a large number of file formats that the program can handle, such as BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF among others. The app can also import PDF files and raw formats of many digital cameras.
GIMP works through a set of layers, each containing several channels. These layers are used to add effects and filters, edit images using brushes, and other choices. Within these set of features, Path tools stand out, as they can create vectors, which can be used in complex selections.
This photo editing for Mac app also has the advantage of being capable of handling colors in a variety of ways, such as RGB, CMYK, Water-color formats, and hexadecimal formats. CMYK is very useful when working with printers.
GIMP also has a set of Smart tools, that although not so easy to use, may become very handy for the expert user. Among them, is the clone tool, which copies pixels; the healing brush, used to correct tone and color; and the dodge and burn tool, which can lighten (dodge) and darken (burn) pixels.
However, according to many users, this Mac photo editing software falls short in ease of use.
Overall, GIMP is one of the best free photo editing software for Mac, and presents a good alternative to those users looking for a sophisticated tool that is free, and are capable of overcoming its complications.
Conclusion
GIMP is a great option if you want to edit images on your Mac, but don’t want to spend any money. Of course, it works best if you’re willing to do a little bit of tinkering since it’s not quite as easy to use as some of the other free editing software for Mac we’ve talked about in this article. Still, for some users, that can actually be a good thing. GIMP gives you all of the essential tools that you need to make your photos look just right, but you have all of the control in the world to change settings and experiment with what works best.