Open Source Manual For Photo Editor Mac Adobe's Photoshop has been the dominant force in image editing for a quarter of Pixelmator is arguably the best photo editor on a Mac. Inkscape is an open source editor for vector graphic illustrations, comparable to Adobe Illustrator. Vector graphics are not based on a grid of pixels like the bitmap graphics used in GIMP and Photoshop.
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Adobe’s Photoshop is now 25 years old and is arguably the pinnacle of photo editing. But, at £8.57/month, it’s also much more expensive than most people can afford, so here are 25 alternatives for 25 years of photoshoppery.
The five best …
Pixelmator - best for Mac
£22.99 - OS X
Pixelmator is arguably the best photo editor on a Mac. It handles even the largest photos with ease, replicates as many Photoshop tools as are generally required, as well as Photoshop file support, and has an excellent heal tool that can interpret what’s around it and fill in detail.
Excellent for quick touching up of photos to detailed manipulation for novices and pros alike. There’s even a very capable £7.99 iPad Pixelmator app with many of the same tools and ease of use that make the Mac app great.
Paint.net – best for Windows
Free - Windows
Paint.net started life as a simple replacement for Microsoft Paint, but evolved with new features such as multiple layers and more advanced photo editing tools. Today it is one of the fastest free photo editors for Windows, with a capable feature set that stops just short of some of the professional manipulation tools.
Excellent for quick edits, crops and the majority of daily photo editing. Best of all, it’s free.
Adobe Lightroom - best for bulk-managing photos
£99 - Windows, OS X
Arguably the best photo manager, Adobe Lightroom has enough tools, even for professionals, to avoid having to open up a separate image editor, including some of Photoshop’s healing and manipulation tools. It also has a solid collection of batch processing and automated correction tools based on lighting, lens and camera models, which makes it fast for most jobs.
Aviary Photo Editor - best for mobile
Free - Android, iOS
Aviary is a solid image editor with very capable image touch-up and resizing tools, now owned by Adobe. It’s straightforward interface makes it easy to use and has more to offer than most mobile editors obsessed with Instagram-style filters.
Autodesk Pixlr - best in the browser
Free - Windows, OS X, Android, iOS and web
Pixlr is a free jack of all trades photo editor with a solid tool set for almost any project. The web app is one of the most fully featured, while its mobile and desktop apps are also solid. Some of Pixlr’s most advanced features require a $15 a year subscription, but it has the backing of Autodesk, making of some of the best computer-aided design tools.
The best of the rest …
Professional Photo Editor For Mac
PaintShop Pro
£48 - Windows
Photoshop’s long-standing rival. PaintShop Pro is cheaper than its juggernaut of a rival but similarly specified. It lacks some of Photoshop’s most advanced features, and is bettered by some of its newer often-free competitors, but is still a capable editor.
Serif PhotoPlus X7
Forensic hex editor for mac osx. £79.99 - Windows
PhotoPlus is a solid all-round image editor for Windows from the company that created Affinity Photo for OS X. It has a decent set of tools, including lens correction tools and other favourites of photographers. The only downside is that many of the advanced tools require more manual manipulation than some other programs and therefore it isn’t as beginner friendly.
Photoshop Elements
£79.10 - Windows, OS X
Photoshop’s cut-down cousin Elements has improved dramatically over the last couple of years from a tool to avoid to a photo editor for everyone else. It has many of the same tools as its bigger brother, save for the advanced Content Aware Fill and a few other professional tools. Solid for most tasks, although free or cheaper tools with similar features are available.
Acorn 4
£22.99 - OS X
Another excellent image editor for OS X, Acorn is billed as the “image editor for humans”. It’s packed with advanced tools and filters but has a stripped back, simplified user interface that is designed to be familiar to Photoshop users and easy to pick up for notices.
Affinity Photo
Free - OS X (in beta)
Polarr makes advanced free online photo editor, also available for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows with professional photo editing tools. Pacetune photo editor for mac mini is free online.
Affinity Photo attempts to be Photoshop on a budget, but not dumbed down. It’s fast, packed with advanced tools and is aimed at professionals. Part of that tool set is end-to-end CMYK 16-bit per channel editing, RAW processing and a Photoshop Content Aware Fill-like tool called Inpainting.
Gimp
Free - Windows, OS X and Linux
Despite the unfortunate name – GNU Image Manipulation Program – Gimp is one of the most capable free open-source photo editors available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It has some very powerful tools, but isn’t as user friendly as some others.
Aperture
£59.99 - OS X
Apple’s long-standing photo organiser and editor, Aperture is one of the most efficient ways of tweaking groups of photos, and making and reviewing small adjustments. The magnifying loop tool is particularly effective. It’s simpler to use than many of its competitors and can be used in conjunction with iPhoto.
Apple Photos
Free - OS X
Photos is Apple’s replacement for both iPhoto and Aperture, which will be available in the spring. A preview was made available of the app, which is fast, with enough tools to make photo management and tweaks easy.
Picasa
Free - Windows, OS X
Picasa is Google’s photo manager and editor. It plugs into Google+, but is a solid simple organiser and can be accessed through the app or on the web. It has enough tools to quickly tune photos, with a few fancy filters thrown in.
ACDSee Pro 8
$99.99 - Windows
ACDSee is an Adobe Lightroom analogue with photo management at its heart. It is fast and effective, but has limited metadata sorting and no automatic correction based on lens profiles. It has enough editing tools to improve the odd photo, but some of it can be a clumsy mix of destructive and non-destructive editing.
The cheaper ACDSee 18 lacks some of the more advanced features but could be a good option for photo management.
Preview
Open Source Photo Editor For Mac Os
Free - OS X
Apple’s built-in image and document viewer for OS X is a bit of a dark horse. Underneath its simple viewing exterior hides a fast and effective image editor that’s perfectly capable of cropping, resizing, reformatting and simple touchups. It is particularly good at editing a bunch of images at once.
Microsoft Paint
Free - Windows
Microsoft’s original image editor. It’s changed a bit in recent years and is still a solid, basic image editor. It’s worth a go for nostalgia’s sake at the very least, or for simple cropping and resizing jobs that really don’t require something as powerful as Photoshop.
Sumo paint
Free - web
A Photoshop facsimile in the browser, the free Sumo Paint is an excellent quick photo editor. Many of the advanced tools are only available in a $19 pro version, but for straightforward touching up of images, resizing and similar the free editor does the job.
PicMonkey
Free - web
PicMonkey is free, browser-based image editor with a solid feature set for simple photo touchups, adding text to images and adding frames. Images can be taken from a computer or various cloud services, including Dropbox and Flickr. A paid-for upgrade removes the ads and gives access to more fonts and effects.
FotoFlexer
Free - web
Billed as “the world’s most advanced online image editor” it has numerous features for most types of editing. Image manipulation tools are just a simple click and drag-a-slider away, but most tools have little in the way of guidance so beginners might struggle. Those looking for more powerful fill features will need to look elsewhere.
Ribbet
Free - web
Ribbet, despite it’s odd name and frog logo, is a quick and easy-to-use online image editor that does most of the editing for you, making it excellent for beginners or simple jobs. A few advanced tools are available, but better options are out there.
Fotor
Free - Windows, OS X, iPhone, Android and web
Photo Editor Mac Open Source
Fotor is a free image editor that’s available on just about any platform either in app or web app from. It has a good selection of tools, each with an easy-to-use sliding scale of effect. Batch editing is a bonus, as are the filter tools.
BeFunky
Free - Android, iOS and web
A quick and easy-to-use image editor that apes Instagram on the iPhone and Android, but with a few more tools. The web app is similarly simple, and solid for quickly customising photos before sharing them.
Snapseed
Free - Android, iOS
Snapseed is Google’s mobile image editor that’s been sidelined after it was acquired to be integrated into Google+. But the app still works and its tools, filters and easy-to-use touch controls are still some of the best around.
Photoshop Touch
£3.99 to £7.99 - Android, iOS
Photoshop Touch is Adobe’s touchscreen focused mobile variant, but it isn’t nearly as powerful or feature rich as its namesake. It has a selection of photo filters and some decent touchup tools, but it’s biggest selling point is integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which is useful for desktop Photoshop users.
Free Photo Editor For Mac
Adobe’s lighter Photoshop Express is also available for free with very basic tools.
Adobe Photoshop may be dominant among industry professionals, but the software can be daunting for beginners and amateurs who just want to touch up the occasional photo. There are many simpler, easier-to-use alternatives to Photoshop, some of which offer features the latter does not. Plus, many image editors don't have the hefty sticker price of Adobe products.
See also: 10 Excellent Video Editing Apps
We rounded up nine free image editors that range from basic programs with plenty of filters to near professional-grade software for pixel-to-pixel editing. Check out the gallery and let us know if we missed any of your favorites in the comments below.
Photo Editor For Mac
Image: Flickr, Marty.fm.