Photo editing apps for Mac
Six go head-to-head in the battle of the best essential apps for photographers
Editing your photos isn’t just a good way to make use of your Mac – it can be satisfying too. It’s the final step in a chain that began when you spotted a photo opportunity and raised your camera.
It doesn’t matter if you’re shooting with an iPhone, Canon G7 X or Nikon D4s, almost any image can be improved with a crop, a little tweak to the colours or the removal of an unwanted object from the frame.
When choosing an image-editing app, it’s a good idea to consider your needs rather than plump for the most expensive or the famous name. If your primary camera is an iPhone, you don’t need a raw image processing workflow, but you might want something that works smoothly with iCloud. Any app can use a Dropbox or OneDrive folder to sync photos to a mobile, of course, and anyone wanting to use an iPad as a large, bright, high-res photo frame to show off their skills will be able to use any of these apps.
Other photographers may want more organisation and the ability to decode and tweak raw image files produced by DSLRs and high-end compacts – these are catered for, too.
The big name hanging over the world of image editing is Photoshop, and if you make money from pictures then the latest version of Creative Cloud is going to interest you. It’s only available through Adobe’s stillcontroversial rental payment model, however, where you pay a fixed monthly fee to use the app (currently £8.78 for the photographer’s bundle that nets you Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5), but you lose access to it when you stop paying.
This group test isn’t concerned with pro-level apps though, but with those you can pick up for less than £80 and only pay for once (one’s even free!). We’ve included iPhoto because, despite its looming obsolescence as Apple gears up to launch Photos for Mac, it’s an accomplished app that should (but don’t quote us on that!) live on after its supposed death.
These aren’t all prolevel apps, but ones you can pick up for less than £80 and only pay for once