Program Similar To Photoshop For Mac
- Program Similar To Photoshop For Mac
- Best Photoshop Software For Mac
- Free Program Similar To Photoshop For Mac
- Free Software Similar To Photoshop For Mac
- Best Photoshop Programs For Mac
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 …
Photoshop is used by many if not all graphic/photographic professionals, maybe theres a feature that you want but don't know is there? If you ask, maybe someone can help you. Incase you are thinking of buying Photoshop, Adobe will be releasing the Creative Suite 2.0 in the coming months/weeks. The software comes with a full toolset that rivals much of what Photoshop has to offer, and while the interface is a little different to that of Adobe’s software, there’s a modded version of.
- GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program is a very feature rich photo editing and creative tool that can do almost everything that Photoshop can, and brings in everything from the popular Adobe software to a free and open-source software.
- The Best 10 Free Software Alternatives Like Photoshop. For many of us, Adobe Photoshop is the default image editor. But the tool multifunctionality does not demonstrate its practicability in specific situations.
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 …
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
£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
Program Similar To Photoshop For Mac
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)
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
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.
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PicMonkey
Free - web
Best Photoshop Software For Mac
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
Free Program Similar To Photoshop For Mac
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.
Adobe’s lighter Photoshop Express is also available for free with very basic tools.
Now that Adobe has made Photoshop CC the linchpin of its Creative Cloud subscription strategy, photo enthusiasts are more than ever seeking alternatives to the engine that has driven the modern image-editing industry for more than 20 years.
Subscriptions to Photoshop via Creative Cloud cost $50 per month and are popular with a certain segment of Adobe users, mostly the cadre of commercial artists, graphic designers, Web developers, and photographers who use multiple apps for high-end professional work.
To sweeten the deal for photographers, Adobe is now offering a special photo-oriented subscription package targeted to previous users that includes Photoshop and Lightroom for $10 per month (based on a year’s commitment), until December 31. A similar offer targeting everyone else, regardless of past Photoshop ownership, runs until December 2. The upshot is that for photographers who considered $50 a month excessive for purchasing programs they will not use, there’s a less expensive option available until the end of the year.
But a subscription is still a subscription. And even some Creative Cloud cheerleaders may now be pausing to reconsider this path, especially in light of recent issues with Adobe security. That, added to general consumer opposition to subscription software, may play a role in an accelerated quest for a Photoshop alternative.
Even when Photoshop was available as a perpetual license, the $699 standard edition price tag was steep, as was the $350 upgrade price, though a hefty portion of enthusiasts were willing to fork over that amount for the best image editor money could buy. Adobe continues to sell Photoshop CS6, the last presubscription version.
Free Software Similar To Photoshop For Mac
We poked around and found nine good prospects that would be suitable for most amateurs and photo enthusiasts. Some of those alternatives, not surprisingly, come from Adobe itself, while others emerge from familiar vendors like Apple and Corel, as well as more recent players in the software marketplace. Note that prices can vary, and those below are the latest from the vendor's websites.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 ($100)
Photoshop Elements is a full-featured photo-editing package, a light version of Adobe’s flagship Photoshop CC. While it lacks certain high-end professional features such as support for four-color separation, as well as other advanced controls, its price is about 1/7 of the pro version. Photoshop Elements specifically targets hobbyists and advanced amateurs with a consumer oriented approach to image editing, such as Quick, Guided, and Expert modes. Elements ships with an Organizer app (shared with its companion video program, Premiere Elements) that tracks and organizes photos and videos and facilitates creation of artistic projects. Features such as Pet Eye editing (related to red eye in humans), Instagram-style photo effects, textures, auto smart tone, and content aware move make Photoshop Elements a strong contender for hobbyists at all levels.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 ($149)
Lightroom is a true crossover app that straddles the shifting line between advanced amateur and professional photography. While Lightroom is available via Creative Cloud subscription, it’s also available as a stand-alone license-based application for non-subscription purchase. While primarily a photo manager on par with Apple’s Aperture, Lightroom offers a high degree of editing functionality. Hobbyists with advanced knowledge of editing techniques or who shoot Raw may well find Lightroom an acceptable substitute for Adobe’s high-end editor. Lightroom has an agreeable one-window interface that’s easy to work with. Advanced new features include Upright, which offers four options for straightening images with a mouse click; smart previews for working on images when originals aren’t available; advanced healing brush to correct irregular shapes; and a radial gradient tool that directs the viewer’s focus within an image.
Apple Aperture 3.5 ($80)
Aperture has long been a Mac photo-imaging favorite, on par with Adobe Lightroom. While it bills itself as more photo organizer than editor, like Lightroom, it has a great many image- editing features that hobbyists and enthusiasts can rely on. Newer versions of the app fully support Mac Retina displays and join together the databases of both the Aperture and iPhoto libraries to promote the smooth transition back and forth between the different photo editors. A new white-balance tool, an enhanced shadow-highlight editor, and an improved auto enhance feature balance the app’s concentration on photo editing. Add fast browsing and full-screen operation into the mix alongside integration of Faces, Places, and Photo Stream features, and you get a full set of sharing and syncing options to top off the Aperture package.
Apple iPhoto 9.5 ($15)
More consumer-oriented than Aperture, and simpler to use than Photoshop Elements, iPhoto for Mac is the hub of Apple’s iLife suite. With iPhoto, you can add special effects to images, correct exposure, remove red‑eye, remove unwanted objects, and fix images with an assortment of sophisticated controls. Use effects to convert photos to black and white, add vignettes, blur edges, and more. The photos you take on your iOS devices can automatically appear in iPhoto via Photo Stream, ready for sharing. Slideshow themes enhance the look and sharing options for your photo collection. When you’re done with an iPhoto edit, you can also get something to show for it. Right from the app, you can order professional prints, photo books, cards, and calendars. This 64-bit app shares a unified database with Aperture, which offers even more advanced image-editing opportunities.
Flying Meat Acorn 4.1 ($50)
Best Photoshop Programs For Mac
Acorn caters to photography enthusiasts seeking a wide range of nondestructive image- editing options. This 64-bit, lightweight but full-service image-editing tool offers all the standard features such as text, vector tools, filters, layer masks, compositing, PSD import and export capability, and an array of sophisticated functions that could yank you out of your Photoshop nostalgia. A multilayer editing function that includes layer groups and cool filters accompany Acorn’s smart crop tool and Web export features. Acorn also supports masks, alphas, curves and levels, multistop gradients, and more, and is optimized for Retina displays. All these convenient features are wrapped in an agreeable, easy to use interface.
Pixelmator 3 ($30)
Pixelmator has, over time, filled in many of the missing elements to make it a true Photoshop alternative. As a full-service image editor like Acorn, it offers all the traditional, recognizable tools that most photographers would need to tweak images. It also features a number of special effects that you can choose to make visible or not. Like Acorn, it works only in the RGB color space, but the new version has added Liquify tools and layer styles designed to compete with Photoshop’s famous features. Enhanced multiple-display support offers more flexibility. Add to that a slew of other easy-to-use drag-and-drop and slider-based editing functions such as painting, retouching, shapes, text tools, color adjustments, and 64-bit architecture.
Corel AfterShot Pro ($25)
Corel has aimed AfterShot Pro at the professional playing field alongside Photoshop, Aperture, and Lightroom, as both an image editor and photo manager. It has a great number of photo-editing options as well as organizational features that will give you perspective on new ways to edit your images. A full view of your photo library and various ways of previewing your images help you choose good prospects. An assortment of familiar controls lets you apply levels and curves, sharpening, color cast correction, and a host of other edits to your photos. AfterShot Pro includes selective editing cursors, healing and cloning tools, and the ability to manage multiple versions of a photo. As an image manager, it lets you access photos anywhere on your hard drive without having to import them into the program, which will certainly be advantageous for some workflows.
CyberLink PhotoDirector 5 ($60)
CyberLink, which arrived on the Mac from Windows in the last couple of years, offers a respectable all-purpose image-editing package with lots of cool extras for one-click image editing and styling. A compact, well-organized application frame holds a wealth of information about your photos. A tabbed layout gives you the option of viewing your library, selecting a photo and making manual or preset adjustments—and editing for anything from object removal to beautifying the faces of your subjects, creating a slideshow, or printing. The Auto Lens Correction feature removes barrel and perspective distortions, vignetting, and chromatic aberration—a handy pro-level feature. PhotoDirector is fun to use and has some sophisticated controls that rival Photoshop’s. At the same time, it also has an Instagram sensibility via its collection of built-in and downloadable presets. PhotoDirector offers the best of both worlds.
GIMP 2.8 (Free)
GIMP, short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a free, open-source image editor with many of the same deep capabilities as Photoshop. That means it has a dizzying number of controls available to fine-tune and fix your photos, such as the clone tool, the healing tool, channel mixer, in addition to context-sensitive tools, dockable windows, and a full-screen mode. You can also fix lens flaws such as barrel distortion and vignetting. One look at its extensive preferences and menus reveals a setup that Photoshop users might find somewhat familiar. GIMP doesn’t always behave the way you’d expect a Mac app to, for example, sometimes edits paint their way onto the window, as opposed to just smoothly transforming the image. Newer versions of GIMP have become more intuitive, and as a free app, it’s definitely worth a look.