Best photo editing software for Mac

Macworld

If you’re a professional photographer or designer you need editing software that provides precision and control over your images, as well as support for editing RAW files and multi-layer editing tools.

The popularity of selfies and smartphone photography in recent years has given rise to dozens of affordable photo-editing programs aimed at amateur photographers. While these free (or low-cost) apps are great for people who simply want to smarten up their selfies or holiday snaps, they may not offer the features pro photographers need to edit photos.

If you want to edit your photos like a pro – or you are a pro photographer, designer, web developer, graphic artist or other creative professional, then you may wish to consider one of these pro photo editors.

If you don’t quite consider yourself a pro, or you are just looking for a free or really cheap Photoshop alternative then check out our round up of free photo editing software for Mac.

That’s not to say we won’t be considering some excellent alternatives to Photoshop here.

Photoshop has always been the king of the photo-editing market. The sheer depth and range of Photoshop’s editing tools are still unrivaled, with the latest version boasting new artificial intelligence features that can actually change the expression on a person’s face, or even make them look older (and balder).

However, Adobe’s decision to move its professional software products to a subscription payment system a few years ago antagonized many users and opened the door to rival photo-editors that still just require a simple one-off payment, without committing you to a long-term subscription.

Rivals such as Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Photo can provide impressive editing tools for less, and while they may not match the sheer scope of Photoshop they will be more than adequate for many professional users and more serious amateur photographers. And don’t forget that most of these professional-level editing programs also provide a free trial – ranging from one week to a whole 90 days in some cases – so you can take your time deciding which program best suits your needs and your budget.

If you are also considering buying a new Mac read our guide to the best Mac for photo editing and our guide to the best Mac.

Read on for our guide to the best pro photo editors for Mac, including some excellent Photoshop alternatives.

Updated: April 2024 to add a review of Acorn.

Best photo editors for Mac






Adobe Photoshop





















Price When Reviewed:

23,99 €/mois




Best Prices Today:



€23.99 at Adobe





Back in the mists of time, Adobe’s Photoshop was the killer app that gave the Mac credibility in a world of Windows PCs, and established the Mac as the favored tool of creative users. So it’s apt that Adobe was quick to release a native version of Photoshop designed for M1 Macs when the M1 models arrived in 2020. Adobe stated at the time that many filters and other effects run up to 50% faster on M1 Macs.

Photoshop’s selection of filters and creative tools is unrivaled, with the ability to quickly and easily select and replace objects within an image, versatile masks and layers for creating composite images, and – following the fashion for AI technology – a number of neural filters that can alter color within scenes, repair blemishes and even alter someone’s expression or make them look older. You can even remove the sky from a scene if you don’t like it and drop a new sky into the background.

Admittedly, Adobe’s insistence on monthly subscription fees for using Photoshop and other Adobe software has opened the door to rivals that simply charge a one-time fee, but Photoshop still rules the roost when it comes to the sheer depth, precision and creative freedom that it provides, and with plans starting at $9.99/£9.98 per month it’s pretty competitive. There’s also a free 7-day trial available.

Paying that monthly fee also ensures that users get instant access to new features and updates as soon as they become available, with the most recent update including a new super-resolution feature for increasing the resolution of RAW image files while maintaining clarity and detail, according to Adobe.

There are various ways to get Photoshop on your Mac. You can subscribe to Photoshop on its own ($20.99/£19.97 including 100GB cloud storage), or as part of a bundle. You can pay upfront for one year, pay monthly for a year, or pay slightly more a month but cancel at any time. There are also Students & Teachers or Schools & Universities deals. We cover the best pricing and deals for Adobe Creative Cloud separately.

The Photography Plan is the best deal. It includes Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC (for web and mobile), and Lightroom Classic CC (for desktop). All that costs $9.99/£9.98 a month (you have to sign up for a year). You get 20GB storage included (there’s a 1TB storage option that costs about $10/£10 more a month). Sign up on Adobe’s website.

Alternatively, you can get the single Photoshop app for $20.99/£19.97 a month if you sign up for a year, or $31.49/£30.34 a month if you just pay on a monthly basis (which will mean you can cancel within the year). Sign up on Adobe’s website. There’s also a Business option where you can get a single license for $33.99/£25.28 (ex VAT) a month. Read about the ways you can buy Photoshop in our separate article.

All the Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat, cost $54.99/£51.98 a month. Sign up on Adobe’s website. We also advise on How to get the best deal for Adobe Creative Cloud.

You may also want to consider Adobe Photoshop Elements, which we review here: Adobe Photoshop Elements review.

For more information read
How to get Photoshop on a Mac

Read our full

Photoshop review





Affinity Photo





















Price When Reviewed:

54,99 € (offre spéciale 27,99 €)




Best Prices Today:



€54.99 at Affinity





Serif’s Affinity Photo was updated to version 2.0 at the end of 2022 and has had a number of point updates since, for example, the 2.1 update in May 2023 added some additional features including usability enhancements to guides, and 2.4 in February 2024 added new States Panel options for layers and more.

Affinity Photo is part of a wider suite of creative tools, alongside Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, with all three apps being available for macOS (10.15 or later), Windows and iPad. That allows the Affinity apps to provide an affordable alternative to Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscriptions for creative users who need a complete suite of design tools.

Affinity Photo 2.0 brought an improved New Document window with new presets for creating a variety of documents suitable for different devices and applications, such as web pages, social media, or even the screen of an Apple Watch.

Like its predecessor, version 2.0 allows you to work with a number of different ‘personas’, which are really just specialized workspaces that provide groups of tools for different tasks. The Develop persona is for importing RAW image files, and version 2.0 provides non-destructive editing with the ability to link or embed RAW files within documents created in other Affinity apps. The Liquify persona provides powerful and precise mesh-based distortion tools, which are a lot of fun to experiment with, and there’s a new Live Mesh Warp that allows an image to be distorted so that it follows the surface of an underlying object or template. This could be really useful for packaging designs where you need to wrap images around surfaces such as boxes or book covers.

The Photo persona provides the program’s main photo-editing tools and will seem familiar to anyone that’s used Photoshop in the past, with palettes providing layers, masks and color adjustment features. There are a number of new masking tools in v2.0, including ‘live masks’ that are automatically updated when you make changes to the underlying image. And, as well as using masks on specific parts of an image, you can also create masks that are applied to specific colors or hues.

The power and variety of editing tools in Affinity Photo means that it’s definitely not for beginners, but it’s a good option for professional users who can cope with the program’s rather dense interface. It’s good value too, even with version 2.0 rising in price to $69.99/£67.99. You can also buy it along with Affinity Publisher and Designer for a one-time fee of $164.99/£159.99 which includes all versions of the apps for Mac, Windows and iPad. There’s also a 30-day trial available too, so you have plenty of time to explore Affinity Photo before deciding if you want to buy the full version.

Read our full

Affinity Photo review





Photomator





























Photomator comes from the Pixelmator Team who, of course, are the developers of the popular Pixelmator Pro for the Mac (below). And, if Pixelmator Pro is a rival to Adobe Photoshop, with its powerful and precise editing tools, then you could perhaps think of Photomator as being more like Adobe’s Lightroom, which focuses more on quick and easy adjustments to the overall look of your photos.

The app is available for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, although the Mac version only runs on macOS Ventura. It’s designed to link to the Photos app on your Apple devices and then shows your photos in its own Browser window, which allows you to further organize photos in folders and albums for different projects.

You can just double-click on any photo to switch into editing mode, which displays a simple row of tools across the top of the editing window. There’s an automatic Enhance tool that applies quick adjustments to lighting and color, a Clone brush, Crop tool, and a Repair brush that can remove blemishes or tidy up the background of an image. And, like all recent apps, Photomator has a number of AI tools, such as its Super Resolution option, which can increase the resolution of an image.

These automatic tools are quick and easy to use, but if you need more fine control then there’s a Colour Adjustment menu that provides a long–and rather daunting–scrolling list of controls for settings such as brightness, contrast and exposure. There’s also a Workflows menu, which allows you to apply a series of commands to a photo all at once, such as a color adjustment followed by cropping and then converting the photo into a particular file format. It’s also possible to batch-edit photos by applying workflows to an entire group of photos simultaneously. This is where Photomator gets a bit more complicated, though, as it sometimes just lists features without really explaining how they work. We soon found ourselves searching through the Help files on the Photomator website, so the developers could perhaps provide a bit more help for beginners directly within the app itself.

Photomator is free to download, though, with a demo mode that allows you to edit and save a limited number of photos before you buy the full version. You can either buy it outright for $99.99/£99.99 for a lifetime license (with a discount for existing owners of Pixelmator), or pay a subscription fee of $4.99/£4.49 per month, or $29.99/£29.99 annually.






PixelMator Pro





















Price When Reviewed:

21,99 €




Best Prices Today:



€21.99 at Pixelmator





Pixelmator Pro is a popular and affordable alternative to Adobe’s heavyweight Creative Cloud apps – not least because it’s available as a one-time purchase that doesn’t require a monthly subscription.

It’s a little tricky keeping track of the Pixelmator range, as the developers at Pixelmator Team have a tendency to keep changing the name, and also producing multiple versions of the app for Macs, iPhone and iPad. The older Pixelmator Classic for Mac now seems to have been discontinued, leaving just Pixemator Pro on the Mac. And, on the mobile side, the iPhone and iPad versions of the app have merged into a single app that is simply called Pixelmator. And, just to confuse things further, Pixelmator Team recently launched an entirely new photo-editing app called Photomator that runs on Macs, iPhone and iPad (see above).

But, on the Mac side of the fence, the current version of Pixelmator Pro does provide an impressive range of editing features, including AI-powered tools that can simplify tasks such as removing blemishes or unwanted details from an image. It even has an option for removing the background of an image entirely – which we often find very useful when preparing product photos for our own reviews on Macworld.

Rather than getting a major update every year or so, Pixelmator Pro tends to release regular updates that add a few new features every few months. Version 3.0 focused mainly on adding lots of new templates and mock-ups for creating different types of documents and projects, while v3.1 added full compatibility with Ventura. However, v3.2 was a bigger update that introduced the ability to import and adjust the appearance of video files as well as static photos.

Our only real complaint is that Pixelmator does tend to just throw features onto the screen and then leave you to figure out how everything works. There are lots of tutorials and Help files on the Pixelmator website, but we can’t help thinking that Pixelmator Pro needs something similar to the Guided Edits that are found in Photoshop Elements, which provide simple step-by-step instructions for using some of that program’s complex tools and features. Even so, there’s no doubt that Pixelmator Pro’s powerful array of editing tools represents excellent value for money, and there’s a seven-day free trial also available as well.

Read our full

Pixelmator Pro review





Adobe Photoshop Elements





















Price When Reviewed:

99,60 €




Best Prices Today:



€99.60 at Adobe





If you want some of the features of Adobe Photoshop without the monthly subscription outlay one option to consider is Adobe Photoshop Elements. It isn’t the cheapest photo editor available for the Mac, but it’s good value for money thanks to the inclusion of professional Photoshop features and powerful editing tools. Plus, the user-friendly interface makes it easy for amateur photographers to achieve impressive results.

The latest edition is Photoshop Elements 2024. Photoshop Elements 2024 proves to be one of the biggest updates the program has received in quite a few years. There are a number of new AI features, but the program’s interface and layout have also been redesigned too. Like the full version of Photoshop, Elements now has both Light and Dark modes, as many experienced photographers prefer working in Dark mode, while other people simply find it easier on the eyes. The various fonts and icons used in the main interface have also been updated to improve visibility too. These interface changes are more than just cosmetic, though, with other useful features such as the new Quick Actions panel, which is now available within the program’s Quick editing mode. The Quick Actions panel gathers together a number of existing editing tools, but also gains new AI features, such as the ability to quickly select or change the background or sky in an image, or to smooth out fuzzy artefacts in compressed JPG files.

One of the headline features in Photoshop Elements 2024 is Match Color, which is available within the FX panel in both Quick mode and Advanced mode for experienced users. In Quick mode you can simply choose a number of presets that allow you to quickly change the colors and tonal balance within a photo, while Advanced mode also allows you to import your own photos and copy the color settings from one photo to another. When you’re working in Advanced mode, you can use a new Search tool to browse through Adobe’s library of free stock photography to find images that you can use in your own work.

The 2024 update also gains a new Guided Edit called Add Text, which makes it easier to use the program’s text tools and effects. You can quickly add horizontal or vertical text, apply text to a selection, or make text follow a path that you draw with a freehand pen. You can add drop shadows, graduated colors and other effects with a quick click of your mouse, and even change the angle of lighting that you apply to the text. And, for social media mavens, there’s a new Photo Reels tool, which is similar to an old-fashioned slide-show that flicks through a series of photos, but is very much focused on social media and provides a series of templates for use on Instagram, Tiktok and other services. When you create a Photo Reel you see a simple timeline view that allows you to arrange photos in sequence, adjust the size and aspect ratio of each photo. You can also adjust the playback speed of the photo reel, and add text, graphics and filter effects.

These updates extend Adobe’s collection of Sensei artificial intelligence tools added in the 2022 edition. The Sensei tools help users automatically perform editing tasks that might normally require hours of work. New edit options added in Elements 2023 mean that as well as applying animated overlays to a photo (such as falling snowflakes, autumn leaves, or flickering flames to your photos), you can create moving elements that animate a specific section within a photo and then save the result as a video clip. The 2022 Photoshop Elements update added artistic effects that mimic a variety of artistic styles, such as cubist and post-impressionist. You can, for example, apply the artistic effect to the entire photo, or just to the subject or background.

Photoshop Elements also includes Guided Edits to help use some of the powerful tools and a new Search tool introduced in the 2023 edition helps you to quickly locate the Guided Edits you need by searching for keywords such as crop or sky. A guided edit introduced in the 2022 version was the ability to alter the aspect ratio of a photo by extending the background of a photo–so you could turn a square photo into a wider landscape shot, for example. There’s also a guided edit for refining photos of animals–including removing glare from their eyes.

Some of our favorite guided edits introduced in earlier versions include the Perfect Landscapes guided edit that helps you change the sky or background on a landscape photo for greater dramatic effect. We also like the one that can be used for a group shot with one person standing off to the side – you can select that person and bring them closer to the rest of the group. You can even adjust the angle and tilt of their face.

There are also mobile apps for iOS (and Android) and a web app. The mobile apps allow you to upload photos and videos from your smartphone or tablet, and provide you with 2GB of free online storage.

You can buy Photoshop Elements from the Mac App Store, but it’s worth noting that if you buy directly from Adobe ( Adobe UK / Adobe US) you can save a few pounds and also get a two-pack that includes both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements (for video-editing) for $149.99/£130.36. These are one-time purchases, no subscription options here.

Read our full

Adobe Photoshop Elements review





Adobe Lightroom





















Price When Reviewed:

Dès 11,99 €/mois




Best Prices Today:



€11.99 at Adobe





Photoshop has long been the colossus that dominates the professional photo-editing market, but for many photographers – professionals and keen amateurs alike – Adobe Lightroom is probably the best place to start.

Lightroom provides a simple and straightforward workflow that is based on a number of modules. You start with the Library module, which allows you to import your photos and organize them into Collections, such as landscape photography, portraits, or files used for specific work projects. You can also organize your photos by editing their metadata, assigning ratings, or using tags to help you search for the right photos.

You’ll do most of your editing work in the Develop module, which includes slider controls that allow you to adjust settings such as brightness, contrast and clarity, or use the app’s built-in presets to quickly make complex adjustments with a single click. The most recent update to Lightroom added a number of new features that use Adobe’s AI technology (called Sensei). The Denoise tool can improve the clarity of your images by removing digital noise and is particularly effective for low-light shots. There’s also an option called Curves In Masking, which allows you to precisely adjust tone and color in specific parts of an image. You can even adjust the texture or color of a person’s beard, using the Select People tool, which uses AI to focus on individual people within a photo.

It’s worth clarifying, though, that there are actually three separate versions of Lightroom that are designed for different users and workflows, and which require different subscription plans from Adobe. Lightroom Classic is the best option for owners of desktop Macs and PCs, who want to work locally, with all their photos and work files stored on their computer’s own hard drive. There’s also Lightroom Mobile, which as the name suggests, is essentially a mobile version of Lightroom Classic for iOS and Android devices.

And, floating somewhat awkwardly in between, there’s plain old Lightroom, which primarily uses online cloud storage for all your photos. If that online approach suits you then you can opt for the Lightroom 1TB plan, which costs $9.99/£9.98 per month and includes copies of both Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile, along with 1TB of online storage.

If you also want to use Lightroom Classic for your desktop or laptop Macs, then you’ll need to opt for one of Adobe’s Photography subscriptions. These start at $9.99/£9.98 per month and include all three versions of Lightroom, as well as Photoshop and 20GB of online storage. You can also upgrade to 1TB of online storage for $19.99/£19.97 per month. Thankfully, though, there’s a seven-day free trial available, so you can explore all three versions of Lightroom and decide which version(s) suit you best. Sign up on Adobe’s website.

Read our full

Lightroom review





Acorn 7




























Best Prices Today:



$39.99 at Flying Meat





Acorn isn’t as well-known as some of its photo-editing rivals, but it provides a powerful set of editing tools at a competitive price – which is normally $39.99/£39.99, although it was on sale at the time of this review for $29.99/£29.99. You can buy it from the Mac App Store – where it’s currently sitting in the Top 10 in the Graphics & Design category – but there’s a 14-day trial version available on the developer’s own website (the oddly-named flyingmeat.com).

The program’s interface is fairly straightforward, although it does assume a little experience with photo-editing and doesn’t provide the same help and guidance as more expensive rivals such as Photoshop Elements. The main toolbar sits on the left-hand side of the workspace, and selecting a tool then activates an Inspector palette on the right-hand side that provides additional controls and settings for each tool. So, if you click the Text tool in the toolbar, the Inspector will show options for adjusting the font, size and spacing, as well as settings such as fill, stroke and opacity.

Acorn has all the basics covered, with tools for Selection, Crop, Zoom and creating layers. There are Pen and Paintbrush tools, and you can draw simple vector shapes such as circles, rectangles and arrows. The Text tools work well too, with options for running text on a path or in a circle. The program goes beyond the basics too, with many tools offering additional features, such as the Crop tool, which includes an option for adjusting perspective distortion. And, as you’d expect, Acorn includes a wide variety of filters and effects, which can displayed in the Inspector palette

This is where things can get a little tricky, though. Many of the filters and other tools require some existing knowledge of photo-editing, and it’s not always obvious how they work. The program does have a clever Search tool – rather like Spotlight on the Mac – which allows you to type a term, such as Zoom, and see what options are available for that tool. But showing you where to find a tool isn’t the same as explaining how it works, and while there are a lot of online help files on the Acorn web site we’d still like to see a bit more help for new users right within the program itself.

If you already know the basics of photo-editing, then Acorn provides plenty of editing power at a much lower price than many of its rivals (and no subscriptions!).






DxO PhotoLab