The Best Video Editing Software of 2018 Whether you're a weekend GoPro shooter or a full-time video professional, you need editing software that's powerful but easy to use. Here's how the best. Asking which is the best pixel-based photo editor for Mac OS X may sound like a simple and straightforward question, however, it is a more complex question than it may at first seem. ‎Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Fotor Photo Editor. Download Fotor Photo Editor for macOS 10.9 or later and enjoy it on your Mac. ‎Fotor was mentioned as the 'lite Photoshop' by BBC and it will cater all your photography needs. Top 10 Best Free Video Editing Software in 2018 for Mac Users. Many people are looking of free Mac video editing software since they have tons of videos and are eager to edit the videos either for better presentation or preservation. Are there any free video editing software for Mac users that are really good? New version of award-winning photo editor created by Skylum team for Mac & PC. Order Luminar today and get an exclusive price for the most advanced image editing software. If you have Luminar 2018, you’ll get all updates for free. Workspaces give you instant access to powerful tools that work best for the photo style of your choice. With the best photo editing software for Mac 2018, it is actually possible to create perfect photos. Choose one of the photo editors above and you will not be disappointed. All of them come with free trial periods whose lengths differ from one to the other.

• Free Photo Editing Software Mac
• Best Photo Editor For Mac 2018
• What Is The Best Macbook For Photo Editing

What Kind of Photo Editing Software Do You Need?

Whether you merely shoot with your smartphone or you're a professional photographer with a studio, you need software to organize and edit your photos. We all know that camera technology is improving at a tremendous rate. Today's smartphones are more powerful than the point-and-shoots of just a few years ago. The same can be said for photo editing software. 'Photoshopping' pictures is no longer the exclusive province of art directors and professional photographers. Whether you're shooting from an iPhone XS or a DSLR, if you really care how your photos look, you'll want to import them into your PC to organize them, pick the best ones, perfect them, and print or share them online. Here we present the best choices in photo editing software to suit every photographer, from the casual to the professional.

Of course, novice shooters will want different software from those shooting with a $50,000 Phase One IQ3 in a studio. We've included all levels of PC software here, however, and reading the linked reviews will make it clear which is for you. Nothing says that pros can't occasionally use an entry-level application or that a prosumer won't be running Photoshop, the most powerful image editor around. The issue is that, in general, users at each of these levels will be most comfortable with the products that are intended for them.

Note that in the table above, it's not a case of 'more checks mean the program is better.' Rather, it's designed to give you the quick overview of the products. A product with everything checked doesn't necessarily have the best implementation of those features, and one with fewer checks still may be very capable, and whether you even need the checked feature depends on your photo workflow. For example, DxO Photolab may not have face recognition or keyword tagging, but it has the finest noise reduction in the land and some of the best camera- and lens-based profile corrections.

Free Photo Editing Options

So you've graduated from smartphone photography tools like those offered by Instagram and Facebook. Does that mean you have to pay a ton for high-end software? Absolutely not. Up-to-date desktop operating systems include photo software at no extra cost. The Microsoft Photos app included with Windows 10 may surprise some users with its capabilities. In a touch-friendly interface, it offers a good level of image correction, autotagging, blemish removal, face recognition, and raw camera file support. It can even automatically create editable albums based on photos' dates and locations.

Free Photo Editing Software Mac

Apple Photos does those things too, though its automatic albums aren't as editable. Both programs also sync with online storage services: iCloud for Apple and OneDrive for Microsoft. With Apple Photos, you can search based on detected object types, like 'tree' or 'cat' in the application (Microsoft Photos now offers this feature, too). Apple Photos also can integrate with plugins like the excellent Perfectly Clear, appeasing power users who lament the company's discontinuation of the prosumer-level Aperture program.

Ubuntu Linux users are also covered when it comes to free, included photo software: They can use the capable-enough Shotwell app. And no discussion of free photo editing software would be complete without mentioning the venerable GIMP, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It offers a ton of photoshop-style plugins and editing capabilities, but very little in the way of creature comforts or usability. Other lightweight, low-cost options include Polarr and Pixlr.

How to Edit Your Photos Online

In this roundup, we've only included installable computer software, but entry-level photo shooters may be adequately served by online photo-editing options. These are mostly free, and they're often tied to online photo storage and sharing services. Flickr (with its integrated photo editor) and Google Photos are the biggest names here, and both can spiff up your uploaded pictures and do a lot to help you organize them. They even approach the two entry-level installed programs here, but they lack many tools found in the pro and enthusiast products. The latest version of Lightroom CC includes a good deal of photo-editing capabilties in its included website, too. Other notable names in web-based photo editing include BeFunky, Fotor, and PicMonkey.

Best Photo Editor For Mac 2018

Image Editing for Enthusiasts and Prosumers

Most of the products in this roundup fall into this category, which includes people who genuinely love working with digital photographs. These are not free applications, and they require a few hundred megabytes of your disk space. Several, such as Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector, are strong when it comes to workflow—importing, organizing, editing, and outputting the photos from a DSLR. Such apps offer nondestructive editing, meaning the original photo files aren't touched. Instead, a database of edits you apply is maintained, and they appear in photos that you export from the application. These apps also offer strong organization tools, including keyword tagging, color-coding, geo-tagging with maps, and in some cases face recognition to organize photos by what people appear in them.

At the back end of workflow is output. Capable software like Lightroom Classic offers powerful printing options such as soft-proofing, which shows you whether the printer you use can produce the colors in your photo or not. (Strangely, the new version of Lightroom CC—non-Classic—offers no printing capability at all.) Lightroom Classic can directly share photos to sites like Flickr and SmugMug. In fact, all really good software at this level offers strong printing and sharing, and some, like ACDSee and Lightroom, offer their own online photo hosting.

The programs at the enthusiast level and the professional level can import and edit raw files from your digital camera. These are files that include every bit of data from the camera's image sensor. Each camera manufacturer uses its own format and file extension for these. For example, Canon DSLRs use CR2 files and Nikon uses NEF. (Raw here simply means what it sounds like, a file with the raw sensor data; it's not an acronym or file extension, so there's no reason to capitalize it.)

Working with raw files provides some big advantages when it comes to correcting (often termed adjusting) photos. Since the photo you see on screen is just one interpretation of what's in the raw file, the software can dig into that data to recover more detail in a bright sky, or it can fully fix an improperly rendered white balance. If you set your camera to shoot with JPGs, you're losing those capabilities.

Enthusiasts want to do more than just import, organize and render their photos: They want to do fun stuff, too! Editors' Choice Adobe Photoshop Elements includes Guided Edits, which make special effects like motion blur or color splash (where only one color shows on an otherwise black-and-white photo) a simple step-by-step process.

Content-aware tools in some of these products let you do things like move objects around while maintaining a consistent background, or remove objects entirely—say you want to remove a couple of strangers from a serene beach scene—and have the app fill in the background. These edits don't involve simple filters like you get in Instagram. Rather, they produce highly customized, one-off images. Another good example is CyberLink PhotoDirector's Multiple Exposure effect, which lets you create an image with ten versions of Johnny jumping that curb on his skateboard, for example.

Most of these products can produce HDR effects and panoramas after you feed them multiple shots, and local edit brushes let you paint adjustments onto only specific areas of an image. Affinity Photo has those features, but its interface isn't intuitive, and it lacks management and lens profile corrections. Capture One, Paintshop Pro, and Lightroom have those and even more precise tools for local selections in recent versions. For example they let you select everything in a photo within a precise color range and refine the selection of difficult content such as a model's hair or trees on the horizon.

Professional Photo Editing Software

At the very top end of image editing is Photoshop, which has no real rival. Its layered editing, drawing, text, and 3D-imaging tools are the industry standard for a reason. Of course, pros need more than this one application, and many use workflow programs like Lightroom, AfterShot Pro, or Photo Mechanic for workflow functions like import and organization. In addition to its workflow prowess, Lightroom offers mobile photo apps so that photographers on the run can get some work done before they even get back to their PC. Those who need tethered shooting (taking pictures in the software from the computer while it's attached to the camera) may want Capture One, which is offers lots of tools for that along with its top-notch raw-file conversion.

Photoshop offers all and more of the image editing capabilities in anything mentioned above, though it doesn't always make producing those effects as simple, and it doesn't offer a nondestructive workflow, as Lightroom and some others do. Of course, some users with less-intensive needs can get all the Photoshop-type features they need from other products in this roundup, such as Corel PaintShop Pro. DxO OpticPro is another tool pros may want in their kit, because of its excellent lens-profile based corrections and unmatched DxO Prime noise reduction.

Photoshop is also where you find Adobe's latest and greatest imaging technology, such as Content-Aware Crop, Camera Shake Reduction, Perspective Warp, and Detail Enhancement. The program has the most tools for professionals in the imaging industry, including Artboards, Design Spaces, and realistic, customizable brushes.

Another advantage of pro-level photo editing software is that you can take advantage of third-party plug-ins such as the excellent Nik Collection by DxO. These can add more effects and adjustments than you find in the base software. They often include tools for film looks, sharpening, and noise reduction.

Some users have taken umbrage at Adobe's move to a subscription-only option for Photoshop, but at $9.99 per month, it hardly seems exorbitant for any serious image professional, and it includes a copy of Lightroom, online services like Adobe Stock, and multiple mobile apps. It definitely makes the app more affordable for prosumer users, too, when you consider that a full copy of Photoshop used to cost a cool $999.

If you're an absolute beginner in digital photography, your first step is to make sure you've got good hardware to shoot with, otherwise you're sunk before you start. Consider our roundups of the Best Digital Cameras and the Best Camera phones for equipment that can fit any budget. Once you've got your hardware sorted, make sure to educate yourself with our Quick Photography Tips for Beginners and our Beyond-Basic Photography Tips, too. That done, you'll be ready to shoot great pictures that you can make better with the software featured in this story. Click the links below for to read the full reviews.

Best Photo Editing Software in This Roundup:

• Adobe Photoshop CC Review

  
  MSRP: $9.99
  

  Pros: Multitude of photo correction and manipulation tools. Slick interface with lots of help. Tools for mobile and web design. Rich set of drawing and typography tools. 3D design capability. Synced Libraries.

  Cons: No perpetual-license option. Premium assets aren't cheap. Interface can be overwhelming at times. Lacks support for HEIC.

  Bottom Line: Adobe continues to improve the world's leading photo editing software. The 2018 edition adds a new auto-select tool, raw camera profiles, loads of font and drawing capabilities, and support for the Microsoft Surface Dial.

  Read Review

• Adobe Lightroom Classic Review

  
  MSRP: $9.99
  

  Pros: Excellent photo management and organization. Camera and lens-based corrections. Brush and gradient adjustments with color and luminance masking. Face detection and tagging. Plug-in support. Connected mobile apps.

  Cons: Although improved, import is still slow. Initial raw conversion is slightly more detailed in some competing products.

  Bottom Line: Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom remains the gold standard in pro photo workflow software. It's a complete package, with top-notch organization tools, state of-the-art adjustments, and all the output and printing options you'd want.

  Read Review

• Adobe Photoshop Elements Review

  
  MSRP: $99.99
  

  Pros: Many powerful image-manipulation tools. Strong face- and geo-tagging capabilities. Excellent output options. Auto-tagging and powerful search options. Helpful guidance for advanced techniques.

  Cons: Large disk footprint. No HEIF support on Windows. No chromatic aberration correction or lens geometry profiles. Lacks many social sharing outputs. No local help system.

  Bottom Line: Adobe Photoshop Elements, our favorite consumer-level photo editor and organizer, adds AI-powered auto-curation, an open closed eyes tool, and new Guided Edits.

  Read Review

• DxO PhotoLab Review

  
  MSRP: $129.00
  

  Pros: Clear interface. Best-in-class noise reduction. Excellent autocorrection based on camera and lens characteristics. Haze remover. Geometry corrections. Powerful local adjustments.

  Cons: Few workflow tools. Highest noise-reduction setting can require long waits.

  Bottom Line: Though it's still not a complete photo workflow solution, DxO PhotoLab can deliver image results beyond what's possible in other photo software.

  Read Review

• Corel PaintShop Pro Review

  
  MSRP: $79.99
  

  Pros: Photoshop-like features at a lower price. Powerful effects and editing tools. Tutorials. Good assortment of vector drawing tools.

  Cons: Interface can get cluttered. Ineffective chromatic aberration removal. No face or object recognition. No Mac version.

  Bottom Line: Corel continues to add new photo editing possibilities to its PaintShop Pro software, making it a worthy Photoshop alternative at a budget-conscious, one-time price.

  Read Review

• CyberLink PhotoDirector Review

  
  MSRP: $99.99
  

  Pros: Friendly yet powerful interface. Effective noise reduction. Cool multiple-exposure and faux HDR effects. Body shaper and other powerful editing tools. Layer support. Cool AI styles. Tethered shooting support.

  Cons: Not enough lens-profile corrections. Inadequate chromatic aberration correction. No geotag maps.

  Bottom Line: Photo workflow and editing program CyberLink PhotoDirector offers a smooth interface and powerful capabilities. New in this version are multiple-exposure effects, more layer options, and a video-to-photo tool.

  Read Review

• Phase One Capture One Pro Review

  
  MSRP: $299.00
  

  Pros: Excellent raw file conversion. Pleasing interface. Fast import. Good photo-adjustment toolset. Keyword tagging tool.

  Cons: Some usability quirks. No online-sharing features. No face recognition. No panorama or HDR merging capabilities.

  Bottom Line: Phase One Capture One offers pro and prosumer digital photographers excellent detail from raw camera files, and local adjustments including layers, but it trails in organization tools.

  Read Review

• ACDSee Photo Studio Professional Review

  
  MSRP: $99.99
  

  Pros: Full set of image editing tools. Good performance. Lens-profile-based geometry correction. Face recognition and geotagging. Good skin-improvement tools. Responsive performance. Cloud storage integration.

  Cons: Interface not as polished as others. Lens-profile-based image correction tools less effective than the competition's. Weak noise and chromatic aberration tools.

  Bottom Line: ACDSee's pro-level tool offers many powerful photo organizing and editing tools, but it falls short of competitors in raw camera file conversion and usability.

  Read Review

• Exposure Review

  
  MSRP: $149.00
  

  Pros: Pleasing interface. Lots of nifty effects and filters. Fast image transfer. Layers and local adjustments. Good printing options.

  Cons: No auto-correction tools. Weak lens-profile corrections. No chromatic aberration correction. No face or geo-tagging.

  Bottom Line: Photo-workflow application Exposure is similar to Adobe's Lightroom. It boasts lots of filter effects, but it's missing some key capabilities, such as automatic image correction.

  Read Review

• Skylum Luminar Review

  
  MSRP: $69.00
  

  Pros: Pleasing interface. Good automatic photo fixes. Lots of filters. Local adjustments with brush and gradients. Curves. Multiple workspaces and catalogs.

  Cons: Some speed and reliability issues on Windows. No Library search. Some standard controls are buried. No face recognition or keyword tagging.

  Bottom Line: Skylum Luminar offers effective automatic photo enhancement, a modern interface, and some unique filters and adjustment tools. Its organization capabilities, however, fall short of the competition's.

  Read Review

Screenshots

Description

Fotor was mentioned as the 'lite Photoshop' by BBC and it will cater all your photography needs.
'I found Fotor to be simple and intuitive to use… I think many photographers will like Fotor Photo Editor.' – TUAW
'If you're looking for an easy to use photo editor with lots of editing options and effects, look no further than Fotor' -- Softpedia.com
'Fotor might be the perfect solution for many amateur photographs, which is completely free to download and use.' – Macreview.com
People everywhere are getting their edit on with Fotor’s solid photo editor for Mac!
*** #1 free photography app in more than 70 countries ***
*** In the top 5 free apps overall in more than 50 countries ***
【Portraits Touch Up】
No matter whether you want smooth skin, to reshape your face, or make the way you look in portraits more lifelike, the touch up function helps you with all of that—deftly, and in double quick time. With basic tools such as: Smoothing, Wrinkle Remover, Blemish Fix, Reshape, Clone and Red-Eye Remover, you can touch up portraits with a single click. With make up tools such as: Eye Tint, Eye Shadow, Eye Liner, Mascara, Eyebrow Pencil, Blush, Lip Tint, and Teeth Whitening you can have a whole range of makeup at your fingertips.
【Batch】
Quickly process dozens of photos to save time and efforts. Batch processing can help apply Scenes, Effects, and Borders with one click, and can also quickly complete Batch resizing, renaming, and file format conversion.
【Collage】
Versatile collage feature gives you a ton of flexibility to create and customize! Select from over 80 templates up to 9 photos at a time, or use Free Style to move photos around whatever you want with 26 unique backgrounds to choose from. Finish off your masterpiece with the border color that catches your eye, or select from 10 border designs. Even adjust border width, add a shadow effect or round off the corners.
【Photo Editing】
Fotor's state-of-the-art photo processing engine makes it easy to process high quality photos quickly. Adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, white balance, and saturation, sharpen/blur, highlights/shadows, HSL, add a vignette or film grain, remove red eye, reduce image noise, or crop, straighten, rotate, fix image distortion or correct lens distortion.
Flexible Text Editing Tool
Got something to say? You can now add text to any photo. Lots of options to adjust the font, size and color of your text till it looks perfect!
Sophisticated Photo Enhancement
Most photos aren’t taken in a controlled environment and often there isn’t time to adjust the settings on your camera. Enter the magic of Fotor. “Scenes” offers 15 1-tap-enhance options that have been configured for various photo capture conditions. Click now, adjust later.
Effects & Borders
Fotor comes loaded with over 150 effects, including Classic, Retro, Lomo, B&W, and new popular packs of Cinematic, Disposable, Mono, Filmatic, Lighting Leaking, Groovy, Mellow, Spring, Warm Winter, Solar and Serenity. Over 60 styles of frames, including Simple lines, Borders, Artico, Styled, Floral, Old School, Holiday, Lovers, Gallery and Stamp.
Textures
You can now apply different textures (up to 26) on images under variable shooting scenes just by a click.
Focus
Unleash your creative inspiration by using a mix of clear focus and selective blurring. Fotor’s Focus editor gives your images the depth-of-field normally seen only on professional-grade DSLR cameras.
***Fotor Pro***
- Unlimited premium assets like effects, borders, textures etc.
- keep adding new features
- Subscription of Fotor Pro: USD $ 4.99/month, USD $ 19.99/year
- Price may vary by location. Subscriptions will be charged to your credit card through your iTunes account. Your subscription will automatically renew unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. You will not be able to cancel the subscription once activated. Manage your subscriptions in Account Settings after purchase.

What’s New

Optimization of performance, increasing speed, stability and compatibility to some device.

pretty slick, especially as a free app

What few “problems' one has to solve to make this editor work (like how to save edited images) is far overcome by what it can do. The problems just take going online and asking; answers are available and solutions easy with instructions. But features like changing f stop settings on blurry pictures are very sophisticated and save a lot of otherwise trashable fast action shots (I saved almost 2 dozen rodeo shots on my first try that were otherwise too blurry to be any good). I haven’t even started to learn features like touch up. But once one gets into “adjust” and realizes that there are several ways to adjust lighting, sharpness, and other more subtle shadings to enhance or better yet to take what looks like a black picture and make it a beautiful shot makes this at least as useable as Photoshop Elements without the increasingly expensive monthly or annual fees for expensive film editors. I AM IMPRESSED!

Cannot save edited images?

August 2017 Review - What is going on? Do we have to pay for Pro to be allowed to save images from the Edit function? Suddenly I cannot export any edited images. No matter what edits are made it says “Failed to save image” when trying to save it to my computer. If this functionality is now part of a paid version, then this app is officailly useless.
December 2016 Review - This app used to be great, but the recent updates have made it infuriating and basically useless. Used to be able to drag and drop images from a folder into the app, albeit one at a time, which was silly but it worked. That feature has been removed. Each time you open a new image in Edit mode, the menu resets back to the beginning and you have to navigate to where you were. There is no way to store the prefered folder for saving images. Each time you open the app, the folder setting is cleared and has to be reset. When switching from Collage to Edit, the folder setting is also cleared. For the love of god Fotor, just make a permanent setting for this! And recently, the worst possible thing… every 3rd image edited or created, when you click on the browse button to select the folder that wasn’t saved the last time you selected it, the app freezes and stops responding. The only option then is to force quit, relaunch, reset all your settings, and start again. Seriously Fotor, get it together and hire some qualified people design your app and make it work. This isn’t rocket science.

Developer Response,

Dear user,
Sorry for the inconvenience. In order to solve this problem, could you please provide the following information:
1. the type of device you’re using
2. the device OS
3. the version of your Fotor
Meanwhile, I suggest that you could reinstall fotor.

I love this app!

I’m a food blogger and use this app for creating collages of my photos. My opinion may therefore be less useful because I’m not using Fodor's Edit or Design functions and I’m using just a handful of commands in the Collage function. I also don’t change the photos, unless it might be to zoom in on the food. But after the complexity and clutter of Lightroom, I find Fotor refreshingly simple and direct. I have my collages created and posted in minutes. It’s an enormous convenience to my workflow and I highly recommend it. I downloaded the app, so I don’t have much experience with the online interface, but I’ve seen it and it looks similar to the app, which is pretty easy to figure out and to use. Keep in mind, that this app is FREE! It’s an outstanding value for the price. Update: I’ve gone to the Pro version because it’s still so inexpensive and the program is of great value to me.

Information

What Is The Best Macbook For Photo Editing

English

• Family Sharing

  With Family Sharing set up, up to six family members can use this app.