P
Peter Cohen
You've probably looked at a few of your digital photos and said, "That's nice. But it could be just a bit better if I tweaked it somehow." If that's the case, then you need an image editor in your arsenal. Here are the best ones you can get for the Macintosh.
Your Mac comes with iPhoto, which is adequate for organizing and sharing photos and even doing some editing: red eye reduction, cropping and straightening, even color adjustments. But if you've run the gamut (no pun intended) with what you can do with iPhoto, you're probably in need of something a bit more sophisticated.
Acorn 4
Flying Meat developed Acorn as an easier-to-use alternative to some of the more expensive and complex apps out there (like Adobe's Photoshop). It's very quick, sports features like layer support and non-destructive filters, curves and levels. Acorn even lets you lay in text over your images, along with multiple drawing tools so you can add shapes and objects to your heart's content, including vector-based objects.
For the more sophisticated user, Acorn also sports advanced support for Automator, AppleScript and JavaScript to help support really complicated automated workflows. In short, don't let the price fool you — Acorn is only $30, but it's got a huge amount of power under the hood. But with a lot of built-in help and tutorials, you won't get overwhelmed.
A demo version is available for download if you'd like to give it a try before buying.
- $29.99 - Download now
The GNU Image Manipulation Program — GIMP for short — has long been lauded by open source advocates as the open source alternative to Photoshop. It has many of the requisite features you'll need to get your photos looking better, plus a lot of other stuff besides. It also has the virtue of being free, so if you're on a very strict budget and can't afford anything else, that's something to consider.
GIMP's functionality is similar to what you can do with Photoshop, though its interface may throw you. If advanced image editing functions are a mystery to you, GIMP may be a bit daunting — I might recommend Acorn or Photoshop Elements instead.
It used to be that to use GIMP on OS X you had to first install X11, a Unix windowing system. They've changed it so you don't have to anymore, which is a little less kludgy. You won't lose anything but time and bandwidth to download GIMP and give it a try.
- Free - Download now
Adobe's Lightroom won't replace a full-blown image editor, but it's an excellent adjunct to having an image editor. Lightroom's real strength is in photo cataloging and organization, but Adobe has built in a lot of functionality that make it possible to make your photos look a whole lot better without resorting to other tools. What's more, Lightroom does most of them non-destructively, so you can easily revert back to the original file without any hassle.
The latest major update to Lightroom, version 5, sports an advanced healing brush to get rid of dust, splotches and other aberrations that make your images look bad. The new Upright tool simplifies photo straightening, too.
If you're a photographer who works with photo metadata extensively, that's where Lightroom shines. You can organize and search tens of thousands of photos easily with Lightroom not even breaking a sweat, and you can edit some of that data just as easily.
PhotoLine
PhotoLine sports a pretty heavy set of features: 16-bits-per-channel processing, ICC profile color management, IPTC and EXIF data handling, extensive image processing features, filters, correction tools, batch conversion support, and much more.
PhotoLine is positioned as a less expensive alternative to Photoshop, but it's clearly aimed at the same users - people who already have a lot of image editing and manipulation experience. Its user interface is a bit wonky, although its feature list is impressive. Don't expect to dive into this app and know what you're doing without having a good handle on the fundamentals of image editing tools, however.
A demo version is available for download from the PhotoLine web site, so feel free to check it out and judge for yourself.
- €59 - Download now
The king of image editing on the Mac. What can I say about Photoshop that hasn't been written a million times about before? Photoshop has been the gold standard for raster image editing for decades thanks to Adobe's relentless marketing, its architecture which supports third-party filter plug-ins and its constant reinvention with steady development to aid in new feature design and deployment.
Certainly Photoshop isn't for everyone — it's an incredibly daunting tool that can be very confusing if you don't know what you're doing. But if you do, you can crate some beautiful images with it.
Adobe offers Photoshop CC as a subscription-based application for as little as $9.99 per month. That nets you not only the applications but the regular updates that Adobe releases for it, along with Adobe's companion Lightroom application — a supremely useful photo cataloging and non-destructive photo editing tool in its own right.
A free trial is available for download from Adobe's web site.
- $9.99 per month - Download now
If the idea of subscribing to software fills you with dread, and if your needs are more modest than full-blown Photoshop, you should consider Adobe's consumer-friendly Photoshop Elements application. Photoshop Elements includes myriad tools to help your photos look better, with an interface that isn't quite as daunting as Photoshop's.
Photoshop Elements makes it much easier to do things like move objects in photos, enhance color, correct not just red eye shots but also those weird glowing eyes you see in your pet photos, fixing, straightening and creating panoramic images; keeping track of photo data and organizing photos too.
Adobe makes both Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Elements Editor, the latter which is available for purchase from the Mac App Store. Photoshop Elements Editor eschews search, organization and sharing functionality included with the "regular" version, which you can download from Adobe directly.
Photoshop Elements Editor:
- $79.99 - Download now
Photoshop Elements:
- $99.99 - Download now
Pixelmator supports a large variety of image formats, sports tons of filters, has vector tools and excellent color correction tools. The black interface is prescient — Apple's offering a dark interface for Yosemite, but Pixelmator had it long before.
Its most recent update (as of this writing) reworked its image editing engine to be faster. It also sports non-destructive Layer Styles, an all-new repair tool, 16-bits-per-channel support and other handy features and capabilities. There's been a lot written comparing Acorn to Pixelmator. I find Acorn a bit easier to use, but I'm always impressed by Pixelmator's power and flexibility.
If you'd like to kick Pixelmator's tires before buying it, you can download a free trial from its web site before ponying up at the Mac App Store.
- $29.99 - Download now
If you're curious why I didn't include Apple's Aperture on here, it's because Apple announced in June plans to move away from both Aperture and iPhoto in favor of a new app called Photos. We'll find out more about Photos' functionality and capabilities in the months to come, since it's expected out in 2015. But without knowing what Apple's upgrade path will be from iPhoto or Aperture to Photos, it's kind of tough to recommend two products that are clearly coming to the end of their runs.
There are a lot of great tools to choose from, so hopefully there's something on this list that meets your needs and your budget. What did you go with? Let me know in the comments.
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