May 01, 2019 If you're getting into video editing, you need a good software to help you do that professionally. In this video, I listed the 5 best video editing software out there for this year. 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,.
- January 02, 2020
- 18 min to read
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 2020 (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.
- How to edit photos in Photoshop or alternative tools like it?
- How to quickly adjust the brightness of a photo, blur faces, or add mosaic effects in a photo?
- What is the best photo editing software?
- ...
Well, if you have encountered a question or trouble as the above, then, a professional yet easy to use photo enhancer can help you get out of these troubles soon.
In fact,
There are lots of photo editor software on the market, and Adobe Photoshop can be treated as one of the most popular photo editing software among designers, and professionals. However, it is not suitable for a beginner or people who're looking for a photo editor with simple functions like text writing, adjust transparent, etc.
So, in this post, I'd like to introduce you 10 advanced photo enhancer to help you edit & enhance an image on your Mac, PC, iPhone or other mobile phones. You can compare them and decide which one is better according to your own needs.
[Attention] This list is not limited to providing image editor for beginners, professional photo editor or photo editor with text editing or effects can also be found.
Now, let's start picking up your individual photo editing software as follows:
Top 10 Best Photo Enhancer for Beginners & Professionals
1. Lightroom
The battle between the Photoshop and the light room is always an epic battle. It was the first to be introduced and still being at the top and it is the first choice among the users who are looking to edit their image. But, then the Adobe lght rOOM comes with some cool and fantastic features seemed similar but also different than Photoshop. Light room has always been striven to improve their photos to the next level by developing them at anywhere cropping, tinning, toning, saturating, and of course can edit the photo like a new image or like an old vintage picture with the effects and edits.
Pros:
- You can process RAW files and presets.
- There is an efficient workflow and easier to learn.
- There is little top editing software for video as well as for photo editing that will help you make your images so professional with the way you edit.
Cons:
- The retouching application doesn't found.
- There is no advanced image manipulation.
2. Adobe Photoshop CC
It is perhaps the most popular picture enhancer tool in the market and with good reason. Adobe is constantly improving Photoshop CC with better and more advanced features introduced with every update. It also has a very wide set of tools that can enhance an image in more ways than any other photo enhancer in the market.
Pros:
- It has a slick user interface that can be easy to navigate once you get a hang of it.
- It is significantly faster than most other photo enhancers.
- as video editing and 3D capabilities.
- Has a wide range of photo enhancement tools to choose from.
Cons:
- There is no way to purchase a life-time license of the program and monthly subscriptions can be costly.
- It has a steep learning curve especially for the beginner.
Download Adobe Photoshop >>
3. CyberLink PhotoDirector 8 Ultra
This program is another easy to use and feature-rich image enhancer program you can use to manage and edit photos. Among its greatest assets are the multiple filters and layer options.
Pros:
- Has a simple to use interface despite all its advanced functionality.
- It has multiple HDR effects and other editing tools.
- You can easily export photos directly to Facebook and Flickr.
Cons: It lacks a lens-correction feature and the chromatic aberration correction feature is inadequate.
Download CyberLink >>
4. Corel PaintShop Pro
Corel PaintShop Pro offers a wide range of basic photo enhancement apps although it may lack some of the more advanced tools you’d find in Photoshop or Filmora. It does however work very well for the beginner user. With the help of this photo enhancer, you can enhance picture quality with ease.
Pros:
- It is considerably priced as compared to other similar programs.
- Has powerful editing features and effects.
- It comes with a cool face recognition feature.
- Offers a wide-range of tutorials to help beginners.
Cons: The interface is a little cluttered and some operations may be slow.
Download Corel PaintShop >>
5. DX0 OpticsPro 11
This is a program that you can use to improve digital SLR images and comes with surprising features for a program of its price. It is however not ideal when you are looking for a good way to organize photos.
Pros:
- It has a very clear user interface that makes it easy to find its numerous features.
- It can be used to directly export photos to Facebook and Flickr.
Cons:
- It lacks brush tool and has very few workflow tools.
- It doesn’t support some of the newer cameras.
Download DX0 OpticsPro 11 >>
6. Microsoft Photos
This free image quality enhancer that comes pre-installed on most PCs has quite the arsenal when it comes to simple video and photo editing capabilities. It is however not a tool we’d recommend if you want more advanced photo enhancement capabilities.
Pros:
- It is free to use and has a very responsive simple user interface.
- Make organization of photos and videos very easy by automatically creating albums.
- It has quite a few image correction tools and very col video editing features.
Cons: It lacks some of the more advanced photo enhancement features including 3D effects and panorama stitching.
Download Microsoft Photos >>
7. ACDSee Ultimate
This photo enhancement tool offers a wide range of video and photo enhancement capabilities all of which can be accessed without having to pay the subscription fee.
Pros:
- It has a lot of good adjustable effects and enhancement features.
- It also has great sharing options.
Cons:
- The interface is a little cluttered.
- It lacks a face recognition feature.
Download ACDSee Ultimate >>
Free Photo Editing Software For Mac
8. GIMP
Another very popular free photo enhancement program, Gimp offers a wide range of features that rival even the best paid programs in the business. It has some of the best image-enhancing tools you’ll find in Photoshop and has a simple user interface that makes it easy to learn and use to enhance photo quality.
Pros:
- It is completely free to use with no ads and limitations.
- It comes with a simple to use interface that is much like Photoshop in many aspects.
- It has numerous advanced options with many added regularly.
Cons: It has a steep learning curve particularly for those who’ve never used photo enhancer software before.
Good Photo Editing Software For Mac
Download GIMP >>9. Photos Pos Pro
It may not be as well-known as gimp or Photoshop, but this free photo enhancing program offers top quality features. Its layout may remind you a little of Photoshop and there is a paid version with more advanced tools.
Pros:
- It has a smart user interface with beginner and advanced modes.
- Offers a wide range of editing tools.
Cons: The exported file’s resolution is limited
Download Photos Pos Pro >>
10. Fotor
One of its main strongest points is its tilt-shift tool that has been praised as one of the best in the business. With it numerous tools, Fotor is the free photo enhancer you should choose when you need to make more vibrant changes to your images.
Pros:
Photo Editing On Mac
- It has many premium-level filters.
- Supports batch image processing.
- Has a lot of vibrant features that create artistic finishing.
Cons: It has no plugin support.
Download Fotor >>
Photography Editing Software For Mac
Want to Edit Photos in A Video? Try Filmora Video Editor
Have loaded some pictures into a video, and want to edit the image in a video editor? Well, Filmora Video Editor is here to help you solve this issue. With it, you can easily cut, rotate, and edit an image within few simple clicks. Now, let's have a brief look on the main features of this powerful tool:
Filmora Photo Video Editor
Best Mac Photo Editing Software
If you are looking for an advanced video and photo enhancer that makes it easy for you to enhance and share photos and videos. Filmora Video Editor for Mac (or Filmora Video Editor for Windows) offers a great solution for the question on how to enhance a photo. It comes packed with great advanced features that can edit all aspects of the photo or video and it is quite easy to use.
- It has advanced features including the ability to edit both audio and color on a video.
- Importing and exporting video and photos is quite easy.
- You can create a video using your images.
- It offers the option to purchase a life-time license to the program.
Good Photo Editing Software For Mac
Now, let's check the video tutorial to see how easy the program performs.