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• Mac Photo Software Reviews

• January 02, 2021
• 18 min to read

What is the best photo recovery software for Mac? Top 5 completely free data recovery software for Mac: 1. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free; 2. Exif Untrasher; How can I recover permanently deleted photos from my Mac for free? To recover permanently deleted Mac photos, follow these methods: Method 1. Recover permanently deleted pictures on Mac. This is a photo stitching software that can be used best on Windows operating system and apart from the free editor version, you have to pay $28.5 to get the advanced version. This software can be used to add and crop images as well as videos and thus provide a panoramic view of multiple images and an additional layover of multiple videos.

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.

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 2021 (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)

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.

We have all grown “photo crazy” these days thanks to growth of social media sites and technology around the globe. Talk about the likes of Instagram and those memes on Facebook and Twitter that we all love. No wonder, photo editing apps are now a norm around as everyone wants to be part of the “photo revolution”. That said, you may want to crop or edit your photos on your mac and you are perhaps wondering which apps you can use. Well, this article is just for you as we will be teaching you how to crop photos on mac for free using a number of cool options built into your mac. Start taking some notes!

How to crop photos on Mac online

It is frustrating that you want to upload your photo to social media like Instagram or Facebook, but your photo is oversize. At that moment, Wondershare PixStudio may do you a favor. It provides you a fixed-size canvas for Facebook or Instagram, you can start your design at your will, and you do not need to crop your photo repeatedly.

How to crop photo easily

Step 1: Go to PixStudio and choose the target design. If I were going to post my photo to Instagram, I may choose Instagram Post.

Step 2: Upload the photo that you want to crop, and then drag the photo to show the part that you want to present. Choose your fancy effect you would like to have, and then try to drag 'Intensity' to adjust the effect to your favourite.

Step 3: Now you can get the resulting image and you can download it for free.

How to crop photos with Photos App on Mac

For starters, you can crop and edit your photos on Mac using a Photos App for Mac. You will simply need to update your mac to any Mac OS X from Yosemite and later to use this amazing native app.

This is an app that can help you keep your photos organized while you can also edit your photos in a non-destructive fashion. As for the former, photos app for mac organizes your photos, videos, memories, favorites, people, and more in a library.

You can also do more with the photos app for mac including playing slideshows, sharing photos (via iCloud, mail and social media) and editing your photos.

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Talking of editing, let’s look at some of the crop maneuvers you can do with this free photo editing app for mac.

How to Crop a Photo As a Rectangle on Your Mac

Cropping your photos using the Photos App for Mac is quite easy. Just double click on the photo you want to edit and click on Edit on the upper right corner of the app’s window. If you want to edit a photo in another folder, then you will simply need to import the photo by clicking on File>Import to open the photo. Once you have clicked on Edit, you will get a range of editing options. Make sure the crop Icon located at the left part of the editing panel is set to square or a rectangle. If it is not a rectangle or a square just click on the arrow on the arrow next to the box to toggle.

Then click on any part of your photo and you will get a rectangular or square outline-drag into expand depending on the area you want to be covered in your new photo. You can resize using the blue dots that appear at the corners and sides of your cropping outline and once you have got your area, click on the Crop button at the top of the menu and you are good to go.

How to Crop a Photo into a Circle on Your Mac

Cropping your photos into a circular shape is pretty much the same as doing in a rectangular way. The only tweak, in this case, is to select Elliptical Selection in the Crop Icon. Again, after selecting this, click on your photo drag your cursor around the photo. A crop outline will appear in a circular shape having blue dots that you can use to resize the crop area any way you want to.

How to crop photos with Preview App on Mac

Apart from using the Photo App for Mac to crop photos, you can also use the underrated Preview App to crop your photos. This tool is available for any mac users so even the earliest versions of Mac owners can use it. Let’s look at how you can crop your photos using the preview app for Mac:

Step 1: Open Your Image

The first thing you would want to do is open the image you want to edit on the preview app

Step 2: Crop Your Image

• Start editing your image by clicking on the Editor Toolbar found on the right side of the toolbar as shown:
• Pick the type of selection type you want, be it Rectangular Selection, Elliptical Selection, Lasso Selection or Smart Lasso.
• Draw your desired shape on the photo then scale to fit in with the part you want to crop
• Once you are happy with the selection, click on command+ K or simply go to Tools>Crop

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Step 3: Save Your Photo

The last step is to save your photo to your desired location. Click on the File menu and choose Save or Save As. It’s that simple!

If you are editing lots of photos then you would want to use shortcuts to speed up the process. Check out how the steps get simpler with shortcuts:

Steps to Crop Images on Preview Using Keyboard Shortcuts

• Select the image you want to edit in finder then hit Command+O. (NB: This will work of Preview is the default image app)
• Your section tool will automatically be active so just draw the rectangle and resize to cover the area you want to crop
• Again, just click on Command+K
• Lastly, Save using Command+S

Steps to Crop Images Using Photos For Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

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You can also simplify the process of editing photos on Photos app for Mac

• Press on Return to open your photo in editing mode
• Adjust the photo using cropping
• Press on C or Command-3 to crop the photo

Wrapping Up

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You do not necessarily need to go for the third party apps to crop and even apply some edits to those coveted photos on your Mac or phone. Mac already has some inbuilt photo editing apps you can take advantage of. It’s just a matter of knowing how to use them and you can start enjoying them for free!

Mac Photo Software Reviews