Overall, Pixelmator is a great Mac photo editing software that can produce stunning results in the hands of the gifted artist. 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.
Photos are part of peopleâs lives in modern times. They can be taken from cell phones, computers & cameras. Organizing and fixing them according to personal tastes can be tricky. Luckily, there are many applications that can assist Mac lovers with these tasks.
Here below is a picture of 5 best tools in 2019, each of them with different features, which allow readers to choose according to their needs.
1. Photos
Photos is a photo management and editing app developed by Apple Inc. Its great characteristics are simplicity and ease of use. Income tax program for mac computer. Even its name is a beautiful and direct indicator of its usage.
This Mac photo editing software has been available since 2015 for OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, and since 2016 for tvOS v.10.
This app has several easy-to-use editing tools, such as filters and Smart Sliders. In addition, it has the Markup tool, which can add text, shapes, and create sketches and signatures. Other extra tools include Light, used to reveal hidden details; and Revert, used to compare with the original version.
However, where Photos surpasses all other Mac photo editing software is in its integration with iCloud Photo Library. This excellent facility allows users to fill in their libraries, and not their devices. This is done by keeping photos and videos in sync with other Apple devices, such as iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. This integration works in such a way that for example, a photo taken by an iPhone is immediately available on other devices.
As an organizer, Photos uses moments, which can be used to create collections and years. Moments are combinations of time and location metadata attached to the photo. Moreover, features such as face recognition, allow users to create groups by a person, and many more.
The editing and organizing abilities are wonderfully complemented by themes, which enable users to create calendars, photo books, and other creations.
The app also includes tools for professional quality printings. On the downside, many Apple fans have criticized the absence of some features, which were available in the previous iPhoto and Aperture.
Overall, this powerful and intuitive tool has been designed with the modern-user needs in mind: great integration, easy editing, and professional photo management tools. Definitely, Photos must be included among the best photo editing software for Mac.
2. 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. Itâs 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 Macâs 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.
5. 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. Tax program for mac canada. 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 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.
6. Adobe Photoshop Elements
Adobe Photoshop Elements is a raster graphics editor for entry-level users. For this, it has most of the features available in the professional version, but in a simplified manner.
The app can create collages, slide shows, calendars, scrapbook pages, and cards. It can also organize, manually or automatically, based on subjects like birthdays, cats, etc. Added to this, it lets the user share pictures via the main social Internet sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and more.
This Mac photo editing software lets users make changes varying from quick-one-click fixes to artistic creations.
In brief, Adobe Photoshop Elements is a great tool for those photo enthusiasts that donât want to get into very technical stuff.
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With macOS High Sierra, Apple improves its Photos app in several important ways. As with the rest of the OS, it's not a massive redesign, but rather one jammed with tweaks and feature additions that make the app more usable and more powerful. New tools for Live Photos from your iOS devices are among the app's new highlights, and there are other welcome interface updates and editing tools that any Mac photo enthusiast will appreciate. Photos also offers some excellent organization and sharing capabilities. It's an Editors' Choice for free photo editing software, but you may still want somthing more powerful, such as our photography workflow and consumer photo software top picks, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop Elements, respectively.
Getting Started
Photos comes installed on Macs running recent versions of macOS, so there's no installation to worry about. In fact, you can't uninstall it without taking extreme measures that include command-line operations. Furthermore, if you take the unwise move of uninstalling it, your system may behave erratically.
On my first run, a message box touting the new features appeared, and the new Photos app had to update my library. This only took a few seconds, since I only had about a hundred photos on my test system, a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 3.1GHz Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM.
Interface
The UI is clear and easy to navigate. For me, the best change in the High Sierra update is that your tools are always availableâboth the organizing left sidebar, and when you get into the editing interface, all the adjustments in the right-side toolbar. That sounds obvious, but in the last version, if you wanted the Levels adjustment, for example, you had to add it as an optionâevery time you opened a new photo.
The starting page of the app has four viewing modes, accessible from buttons across the top: Photos, Moments, Collections, and Years. The left rail menu is always present except when you're viewing a single image full screen, and even then you can push the cursor to the left to display it. That rail includes all your organization options, including Favorites, People, Places, Imports, Shared, Albums, and Media Types. So if you only want to view Live Photos you've applied the Loop effect to, it's right there in the rail.
Photo Info, accessible when you're viewing a single photo, appears as a dialog in the center of the image, not as a sidebar the way it does in Microsoft Photos. I find the sidebars more convenient, since the dialog covers part of the photo you're trying to look at. The info box shows details such as camera model, exposure settings, optional keywords, tagged faces, and a map if location data is available.
Easiest Photo Program For Mac
Full-screen view is nicely implemented, and, thankfully, in this update, you can zoom whether you're viewing or editingâanother seemingly obvious capability, but for some reason, you couldn't always zoom in with the previous version.
Import and Organize
When you stick a memory card into your Mac, Photos usually pops up its Import screen. It can handle raw camera files from popular digital cameras. The Photos page simply groups your images by date. You can zoom from years to months to days in what are called Moments (not to be confused with Memories, which I'll talk about below).
Your only option at import is to choose whether to delete images from the memory card after import, which I don't recommend, since you may want the photos on another system, the import may fail, and you can always format the card in your camera, a better option. If you want more options on importâsuch as keyword tagging, file renaming, or applying presetsâlook to a more powerful tool, such as Lightroom or CyberLink PhotoDirector.
There are a few ways to see your iPhone photos in Apple Photos on the Mac. You can sync your iPhone using iTunes, sync photos to iCloud, or plug the phone into the USB port, which reveals the Import button at top right. You could also use the separate Image Capture utility, but if you go this route, Photos isn't offered in the file's Open With list in Finder. Also, when I imported this way, my Live Photos were imported as stills. If you sync instead, you can edit Live Photos with the editing tools mentioned below.
Once you've imported your photos, the application offers respectable organization capability, much of which is automatic. You can apply ratings, keyword tags, and location to any photo, as well as designating favorites with a heart icon. The automatic organization is best exemplified in the Albums view, in which you find your photos grouped by People, Places, Screenshots, and Selfies. Of course, you can create your own Albums as well.
New Live Photos Tricks
The most fun iPhone users will have with the new Photos app comes courtesy of three very cool new effects that only work with that type of content: Loop, Bounce, and Long Exposure. The first two are actually video, or animated GIF-type effects. Loop does what its name implies, repeating the short video endlessly. But rather than just being a simple repeat, however, Loop adds transparency to moving objects between plays, for an affecting, ghostly look.
Bounce plays it forwards and backward, and is most fun with actions such as diving into a pool; it also looks great with fireworks. https://huntersyellow298.weebly.com/blog/free-landscape-drawing-program-for-mac. Long exposure has a couple of good uses: You can use it to blur background motion, such as car traffic, or to make a stream or waterfall look glassy. You can see examples of all these in my story iOS 11 Photo Tricks to Try Now.
You can now also trim the ends of a Live Photo, in case the beginning or end takes away from the main event. Unfortunately, this trimming doesn't apply to the effects detailed above. Finally, you can now choose which still image appears for a Live Photo when it's not being viewed with motion, for example, if you share it with someone who's not using Apple hardware. I've found that the Live Photo algorithms usually pick the best frame as the still, but I can see cases where you may want to change it.
Smart Search
Like Flickr, Google Photos, and Microsoft OneDrive, Apple Photos has the nifty capability of letting you search based on object categories. For example, type 'dog' or 'tree' to see all your shots of dogs or trees. Unlike Flickr and OneDrive, though, you can't view a page of all the categories detected with the automatically generated tags.
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The latest version of Adobe Photoshop Elements takes this concept even further, letting you, for example, view all your photos that contain dogs and trees. It's the same with tagged people photos: Elements lets you combine searches; Apple Photos doesn't. What's more, you can't search by file extension in Photos.
Editing Photos
Even before you start editing, you get choices of Rotate, Auto Enhance, Share, and Favorite (the heart icon) from the view of all photos. To get to the editing tools, you select a photo and click Edit. This is much more obvious than the last version, which had you click a less-clear icon with adjustment lines. When you tap Edit, a panel of tools opens on the right, and the background turns black, which is helpful for letting you concentrate on the image for editing.
Across the top of the editing screen are three main choices Adjust, Filters, and Crop. To the right are more quick-edit options, including Auto Enhance, Heart, Info, and Rotate. A three-dot icon lets you add external photo tools like Perfectly Clear and Picktorial, though the list of plug-ins isn't as extensive as what's available for Photoshop Elements. Once you finish with the external app, the photo corrections are preserved in Apple Photos.
The Enhance auto-correct tool is among the best I've tested. Auto-correct tools generally brighten most photos, but Apple Photos also knows when an image needs darkening, instead.
The Brilliance adjustment reduces highlights and pumps up shadows simultaneously, which can really help an image look better balanced. In addition to this, all the lighting tools I look for are present: Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Black Point. You no longer have to add controls for Definition Histogram, Levels, Noise Reduction, Sharpen, and Vignetteâthese always accessible from drop-down menus in the right panel. New for the High Sierra release is Curves, which offers a powerful way to adjust image tones that some photo fans can't live without.
All this brings the app into the territory of enthusiast photo editing software. Unfortunately, invoking them isn't sticky: You have to re-add them every time you want to use them. Noise reduction works as well as it does in most of the competition, effectively smoothing out graininess. But there are no parameters aside from strength; Lightroom adds luminance and chrominance controls. Missing is any chromatic aberration correction. For that, look to DxO Optics Pro.
Gone are the fancy color sliders of iPhoto's corrections for White Balance, but you still get the ability to use a dropper to set white balance based on neutral gray or skin tones.
A right-click option lets you create a duplicate of your current edit, which is helpful. I also like the Revert to Original option button and right-click choice, for those times when you just need to start over.
Crop also offers straightening, with an on-screen protractor for angle measurement. You get the standard aspect ratio presets like 1:1 and 16:9, and there's' even an Auto option, if you want to let the program decide how to crop and level your image. This gave me one funny result, where a person's head was parallel with the image edge, but everything else was skewed since he was leaning. But for most photos, it did a decent job, though the crops aren't as aggressive as some of Microsoft Photos or Photoshop Element's automated suggestions. Of course, you don't have to accept any program's auto-crop suggestion, but it can be useful to see what a program considers good options.
The program has completely new Filters. Of course, you could use Photos' light and color adjustments after applying a filter. The filters are meant to enhance the image rather than apply zany looks. You get Vivid and Dramatic, each with Warm and Cool choices, and three tasteful black-and-white filters. Unfortunately, (or fortunately, if you're a hands-off type) they're not adjustable at all, unlike Photoshop Elements' highly adjustable filters.
Blemish removal worked very well in my testing of the Retouch tool, though it's not as subtle as what you get with Photoshop Elements. Apple Photos' Red-eye correction continues the fine tradition of excellence familiar from iPhoto. Its automatic mode finds the eyes and yields well-delineated, jet-black pupils.
Memories
Automatic curation of albums has been appearing in photo software for a while. We've seen it in Microsoft Photos, Google Photos, and now Apple Photos. I have to say I'm initially disappointed so far in Apple's implementation, though this kind of tool requires a span of a few months to really see how it's working.
Microsoft Photos has created some duds for me, but it's also created some gems, and most importantly, it offers excellent customization options and easy online sharing. I'm amazed, however, that with Apple Photos you can't even add or remove photos from a Memory, or change the banner images. Google Photos, too, does a much better job with auto-galleries, letting you add and remove images to taste.
Tagging People
Apple claims that Photos, which scans your pictures without your asking, uses better face-recognition technology, but it still thought a Samoyed dog's face was human. Face recognition has improved in all the apps I've seen that use it, but I feel it will never be foolproof. We are, however, past the days of software thinking a pattern in a bush's leaves is a face, I'm glad to say.
Once you've identified some people in the app, they appear in Albums > People. You can choose favorites, and confirm additional faces. Each person even gets his or her own page, similar to the program's Memories pages, showing a cover image, what the program considers the best four shots of the person, related people, and a map if there are any geotagged images with the face. You can actually add a tagged person to a Memory, too.
iCloud Libraries and Sharing
Photos offers a good selection of sharing possibilities. The standard up-arrow sharing icon can send images directly to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, as well as to Apple services like Messenger and Mail. But what Apple really wants you to do is to save all your photos to iCloud Photo Library. It's part of Apple's push to move all your data to iCloud. But for many users, including myself, this means doling out a monthly fee for storage. You only get 5GB's worth free.
Fee aside, however, it's a very good service, especially for people committed to the Apple ecosystem. It makes all your photos from all you iDevices available from all the others, automatically. You get a choice of downloading full image file sizes or compressed files to reduce the drain on your hard drive. It's also what enables iCloud Photo Sharing, which creates persistent albums that you and those you share with can add photos at any time. Unfortunately, only Apple products can view the shared iCloud albums, and the email view of a Memory is inferior, just a batch of photos, some of which appeared upside-down in one email inbox.
For physical output, the application offers respectable printing options, with Contact Sheet and custom aspect ratios, though it's not as advanced as Lightroom's print options, which include soft proofing and custom layouts. Apple's book-printing capabilities, on the other hand, are top-notch, along with its custom cards and calendars. You access these from the Projects menu, which also offers slideshows and prints. Softcover books start at just $9.99. And if that's not enough the app now offers an API letting third-party print outfits like Shutterfly and Mpix integrate with the Create menu.
Photo Power, the Apple Way
Apple has fixed a lot of the issues I had when I last tested Photos, especially when it comes to the way the interface works. The program feels like a well-oiled machine now, and I experienced only one unexpected program shutdown in many days of testing. The one thing still missingâand it's not hugeâis an ability to customize the automatically created Memories galleries. That one feature trails similar features found in both Google Photos and Window 10's included Microsoft Photos app.
Apple Photos is more than adequate for most photography novices, and it offers enough editing tools to satisfy those looking for a bit of extra control. iPhone shooters, in particular, will love its Live Photo special effects. For all this, Apple Photos has now earned a PCMag Editors' Choice. Those who want more editing options can buy fellow Editors' Choices Adobe Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, and even to the highly rated CyberLink PhotoDirector, all of which offer Mac versions. But Apple Photos is free, and it offers everything many Mac users need.
Apple Photos (for macOS)Picture Program For Windows
Bottom Line: Apple's desktop photo editor gets some nifty effects for iOS Live Photos, solid interface tweaks, and new power-editing tools.
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