Edit Photo For Mac Free

16-04-2021
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Adobe Lightroom. The ability to work with RAW files is the main advantage of Lightroom usage.

  • Similar to Photoshop in interface and capabilities. Add-ons, including those created for.
  • To put it simply, BeFunky makes photo editing easy. With our world famous Photo Editor, you can turn photos you like into photos you love!From essential editing tools such as crop, resize, and exposure to our more unique effects like Cartoonizer, Digital Art, and Enhance DLX, it's beyond easy to create great looking photos.
  • January 02, 2020
  • 18 min to read

Most free photo editors available on the App Store are quite basic, offering just a limited number of filters and allowing you to easily and quickly liven up your photos before posting them on social media.

But if you’re an aspiring or professional photographer, you probably need a more powerful app with a broader set of tools to use your creativity to the fullest. Besides, you probably use your Mac for photo editing because working on a large screen makes it possible to adjust the slightest details.

1. Apple’s Photos (Built-in app)

Apple’s Photos app is included for free on all recently released Macs. It does a good job at organizing your photos, but its collection of photo enhancement tools leaves much to be desired. Hopefully, our selection of the best free programs for photo editing on Mac will help you choose the right app to suit all your creative needs.

2. Luminar (7 days trial)

Luminar is another full-featured photo editor that’s popular with both Mac and Windows users. It can work as a standalone app as well as a plugin for such popular programs as Apple Photos.

Luminar uses Artificial Intelligence to enable sophisticated yet quick photo enhancements. Among these AI features are Sky Enhancer, which adds more depth and detail to the sky in your photos while leaving other areas untouched; Accent AI, which analyzes a photo and automatically applies the best combination of different effects to enhance your image; and Sun Rays, which allows you to place an artificial sun and adjust the lighting to your liking or make the sun rays already in your photo look even more incredible.

Luminar has over 60 filters you can apply to your photos to enhance them in a moment. Luminar also provides a set of powerful tools for cropping, transforming, cloning, erasing, and stamping, along with layers, brushes, and many more incredible features. Luminar supports the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, making photo editing even more effortless and pleasing.

3. Photolemur 3 (Free Version with watermark)

Photolemur is a relative newcomer on the photo editing market but it has all the chances to win the favor of beginner photographers and hobbyists. Running on Artificial Intelligence, Photolemur is a completely automatic photo enhancer, meaning that it does all the editing for you in no time. It has the simplest interface, with only a few buttons and sliders to adjust the enhancement to your liking and view the before and after results.

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All you need to do is choose a photo (or a few) that you want to improve, drag and drop or import them using the Import button, and let the program make enhancements. After it’s done, you can compare the edited version with the original image by using the before–after slider and, if you want, adjust the skin tone or even enlarge the eyes using additional sliders. Pretty easy, huh?

Photolemur also offers a number of impressive styles to touch up your photos and give them a sophisticated and professional look. With this app, you don’t need to stuff your head with photo editing nuances and terms. Just run Photolemur and watch the magic happen!

4. Aurora HDR (14 days trial)

As you probably can tell from the name, Aurora HDR is designed to help photographers enhance their HDR photos, making them even more detailed and beautiful. It’s an ideal tool for editing your photos, with an extensive collection of more than 20 tools including details, tone, mapping, color, glow, and vignette. Each tool has its unique selection of controls to adjust its effects.

Aurora HDR enables you to work with brushes, layers, and masks, and provides a number of automatic AI tools for recognizing and removing noise, enhancing colors, lighting, and details, improving clarity, and adding contrast to dull areas while leaving other areas untouched.

Aurora HDR does a great job dealing with difficult lighting situations and creating full-of-life images while being easy to use.

5. Pixelmator (Trial 30 Days)

Pixelmator is a photo enhancer beloved by many Mac users, as it offers a good combination of a modern and simple interface, the ability to work on multiple layers, and powerful features that take photo editing to a whole new level. With so many editing tools, brushes, and effects, you can enhance your photos to your liking. You can choose between two versions of Pixelmator – standard and pro – depending on your needs. The standard version is great for basic photo editing with its selection of essential tools and filters, while the pro version is packed with extra brushes, tools, and effects that let you push your creativity to new boundaries. You can decide which version is suitable for you according to what features you’re looking for in a photo editing app.

6. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 (Trial link)

Photoshop Elements isn’t as affordable as other photo enhancers for beginner photographers. But luckily there’s a trial version available, so you can check it out before deciding whether this app is worthy of your money. Photoshop Elements acquired many powerful features from Photoshop, only Elements is simplified for amateur photographers and enthusiasts. It includes a good number of effects and filters, plus automated editing options for improving lighting, color balance, and exposure, and even opening closed eyes and reducing the effects of camera shake.

In addition to all of these awesome features, Photoshop also offers editing modes for beginners, intermediate users, and experts. Beginners will probably prefer Quick mode, as it focuses on essential tools to quickly enhance your photos by improving color, lighting, and other basic settings. Guided mode provides intermediate users with step-by-step guidance with more professional features like artistic effects, skin tone correction, and background replacement. Expert mode gives you full access to the app’s really powerful editing features and is ideal for creating stunning images.

7. Affinity Photo (Free Trial)

Affinity Photo’s interface may seem overwhelming at first, especially for novices, but when you come to grips with it you’ll find that the app is just what you’ve been looking for. Its numerous professional tools, effects, and filters encourage you to get creative with your photos. Among the coolest features Affinity Photo has to offer is a before and after view to compare the original photo with its edited version.

Affinity Photo works with 15 file types, including common ones like PDF, PSD, JPG, and GIF as well as some less popular ones. The app amazes with its abundance of basic and top-notch editing tools, allowing you to tweak your photos using all possible kinds of instruments. Affinity Photo allows you to edit HDR photos, apply artistic filters and effects, play with masks and layers, and create breathtaking compositions by combining several images in one. If you find its interface a bit much and are afraid of getting lost in all those advanced tools, you should probably look for something more suitable for your level. But Affinity Photo is worth mastering.

8. Google Photos

Google Photos is a popular cloud storage service for photos and videos. It can’t boast countless masterly tools like other photo enhancers that we review in this article, but it includes some fundamental features like filters, color adjustment sliders, and transformation tools.

Although Google Photos may not be that helpful when it comes to editing photos, it does a pretty good job at storing high-resolution images and videos with 15GB of free online storage, compared to iCloud’s mere 5GB (which you can upgrade to 50GB for a monthly fee). If you’re planning to go on a trip and take plenty of photos, then it might be smart to sign up for Google Photos to use that extra storage space when you come back.

9. PhotoScape X (Free)

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A relatively new photo editing app, PhotoScape X has been gaining popularity with many Mac and PC users since its release in 2008. Its interface is simple but unconventional, with a number of tabs running along the top of the window. Each is responsible for a specific stage of editing. The Viewer tab allows you to browse and organize your photos. After you pick a photo, you can switch to the Editor tab, which includes a broad set of instruments, filters, and effects and a useful feature that enables you to compare the adjusted photo with the original.

The next tabs, including the Batch tab, mainly concentrate on editing and renaming multiple photos at once. The GIF tab allows you to easily create an animated GIF from a group of selected photos.

The downside of PhotoScape X is a lack of selection tools, so all changes are applied to the whole image rather than to a selected part.

10. Gimp (Free)

Gimp is a free open-source photo editing app that has been on the market for over 22 years and is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux. Unlike many free apps, Gimp doesn’t have any ads or in-app purchases. Its grey interface might seem a little old-fashioned and it may be a bit sluggish when it comes to complex effects, though.

Gimp offers a vast collection of advanced tools that hardly any free photo editor can boast. It has numerous enhancement options such as clone and heal brushes, layers and channels, accurate selection tools, a number of transformation instruments, and, of course, color adjustment controls. Gimp is one of the most powerful tools for enhancing photos and is beloved by so many users for its price (free) and versatility. But if you can’t come to grips with Gimp’s interface, it may be worth paying some cash for a more user-friendly program.

Many people assume they need an Adobe subscription to edit photos, even semi-professionally, but that’s not true. Photos for Mac is the answer for anyone who wonders, “Does Mac come with a photo editor?” Moreover, the good-old Preview you use to open PDFs and images has enough basic tools for editing an image on your Mac. In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at what you can do with Mac’s native photo editors and exactly how to do that.

As you start editing your pictures, it’s common to start accumulating duplicates of the same image—the original, an edited one, and perhaps any other version you might crop or resize later. So, it’s best to use an app like Gemini 2 to help you find and eliminate duplicate files wasting space on your Mac.

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With Gemini 2, you can scan your entire hard drive, your photo library, or just a specific folder for duplicates. Then, you can choose to review all of the copies it found to select which version to delete. Or you can let Gemini 2’s AI decide, and you can remove your duplicate photos with just one click of the Smart Cleanup button. And the best part is that you Download and try Gemini 2 for free.

How to edit pictures on Mac using the Photos app

As an editing app, Photos comes with everything you need to adjust the quality, light, color, sharpness, and other qualities of the pictures you take. It may lack the editing power of professional software like Photoshop, but it’s the perfect tool for aspiring and amateur photographers. It’s equally useful for the millions of us who take pictures every day and want to make them look good before posting online and sharing with friends. With this free photo editor for Mac, you’ll be able to adjust, resize, crop, rotate, and enhance your photos, as well as apply filters to them — all without spending a penny.

To edit a picture, go through the following steps:

  1. Launch the Photos app.
  2. Find the image or group of images you want to edit in your library.
  3. Double-click on the photo you want to edit (or press Command-Return).
  4. Click Edit in the toolbar. Now you’ll see three tabs above the image: Adjust, Filters, and Crop. Clicking on one will unveil further editing options in the right-hand menu.
  5. Another way to open a picture to edit is to press Command-Return to open in Edit view.

How to adjust pics in the Photos app

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There’s a whole range of ways to use the Adjust feature to make significant or subtle changes to your pics. (And remember, if you aren’t happy with any of them, just click Revert to Original in the top left-hand corner of the editing window).

The Photos Adjust feature can be broken down into several specific tools.

  • Light: everything from shadows to brightness to contrast.
  • Color: make it warmer, colder, or adjust specific colors in a small area of a picture.
  • Black & White: make the shot monochrome.
  • Retouch: improve sharpness and other aspects of the picture.
  • Red-eye: remove red eyes on a pic.
  • White Balance, Curves, Noise Reduction, and many more.

Each of these settings can be adjusted with a series of sliders. Simply move one or more and watch the photo change. Click Done once you are happy with the edits you’ve made.

How to crop photos on Mac using Photos app

When you crop a picture, you can adjust the ratio or remove the parts you don’t want to improve its composition. With Photos, you can also flip it from horizontal to vertical, or the other way around.

Here is how you crop an image using Photos:

  1. Launch Photos.
  2. Find the photo you want to edit and double-click on it.
  3. Click Edit and go to Crop in the top toolbar of Photos.
  4. Click on Aspect on the right to choose an aspect ratio, or click Auto In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen to crop automatically.
  5. Click Done once you are happy with the picture.

Another way to crop or resize is to make these changes manually. Go through steps 1 - 3 above, then select Aspect. Now you can adjust the aspect ratio according to a series of pre-set parameters.

Once you’re satisfied with the result, click Done, or revert to the original if you want to start over.

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How to apply filters in Photos app

In Photos, you have a series of nine filters designed to copy classic photography styles. Filters have been a part of taking photos — professionally and for fun — for generations before Instagram and Snapchat, so Apple made it easy to apply these with a few clicks.

Here’s how you apply a filter in the Photos app:

  1. Launch Photos.
  2. Find the photo you want to edit and double-click on it.
  3. Click Edit and go to Filters in the top toolbar.
  4. Choose from the Vivid, Dramatic, and Black & White options.
  5. Once you’re happy with the changes, click Done, or revert to try again.

Because you’ll probably edit your photos one or two at a time, you might not notice the duplicates your computer has accumulated over time. So, you should regularly use Gemini 2 to scan for copies of your pictures that are just wasting space on your hard drive.

How to edit photos with Mac’s Preview

Another way to make changes to photos using a native Mac tool is to use Preview. Although most people use it to view and make some changes to PDFs, it can also help make quick changes to images. It isn’t as feature-rich as Photos, but if you need a quick adjustment before sending or publishing a photo, it can get the job done. Let’s start with the basics: resizing an image.

How to resize an image with Mac’s Preview

Resizing an image doesn’t have to be a guessing game. Do the following to make a proportional resize and avoid the image looking squished or too stretched:

  1. Open the photo with Preview.
  2. Go to Tools in the Apple menu.
  3. Click Adjust Size.
  4. This will open a window where you can adjust the size of the pic either in pixels or in inches/centimeters.
  5. Make sure you keep the Scale proportionally box checked. That way, the image will preserve its original aspect ratio.
  6. Click OK when you’re done.

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To rotate a photo, there is a rotate button on the top toolbar of the app (it looks like a square with an arrow). Click once or more, depending on how many times an image needs rotating to get in the right position. From the Apple menu, click File > Save once you’re done.

If you want to undo any changes, click Edit, then select Undo. You can also revert to the original to start again before making further edits. To do that, go to File > Revert to > Last Opened.

Now, if you want to crop an image, that’s also easily done with Preview, although the app lacks the more robust options available in Photos.

  1. Click and drag your cursor on the area of the picture you want to crop
  2. Click the Crop button in the top right-hand corner
  3. Now click File > Save to save this image, or revert or undo to start again

And finally, you can also adjust the color using Preview. Here’s how:

  1. Click Tools in the Apple menu
  2. Go to Adjust Color
  3. A range of sliders will appear, giving you the tools to adjust any of the following: exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, temperature, tint, sepia, and sharpness. Although not quite as many options as Photos offers, this is a decent selection of edits that you can make quickly and easily without any third-party apps.

Edit photos with third-party Mac photo editors

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Of course, if you’re looking to do more advanced edits to your photos, there is no shortage of third-party apps for you to use. Apps like Lightroom that allow you to make lighting adjustments and do some minor cleanup to your photographs. Or Photoshop that will allow you to change the composition and create entirely new images. While apps like this aren’t necessarily cheap or easy-to-use, they are powerhouses for editing photos on your Mac.

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But between Photos and Preview, every Mac user has two robust, easy-to-use native photo editors to edit pictures to perfection before posting them online, sharing with friends and family, or sending to a client. You don’t have to spend weeks mastering Photoshop or other heavyweight photo editors — any change you need is a few clicks away.

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