Polarr Photo Editor Pro
An image editor destined for great things
Polarr’s developer has chosen to follow Adobe into the world of subscription software
Free, or optional pro subscription (about £18 per year) FROM Polarr, polarr.co needs OS X 10.10 or later
Photo editing apps are so common on the App Store and internet that an extra problem has been added to that of making a good app in the first place – standing out. Polarr has a lovely dark interface, with the tools spread around its edges, and a vast number of features – but you might not get to try them all.
Polarr’s developer has chosen to follow Adobe into the world of subscription software. It’s quite open about why it’s done it – there’s a long page on its website explaining it, and it boils down to continued development and improvement. You can download the app for free, but spending $23.99 (around £18) a year gets you a lot more features to play with. The ability to alter detail levels, crop, dehaze, fix lens distortion, retouch skin and add basic filters almost makes it worth a spot on your desktop when compared to the multitude of other free photo editors. At least here you get to do it from within the app’s clean interface, which puts the focus squarely on the image you’re editing.
Buying a sub gets you a lot more in the way of masking, noise reduction, additional filters, layer blending, the ability to use Polarr as a Photos extension and compatibility with dual-camera iPhones’ portrait modes (including depth masking). There’s a lot there, and if Polarr’s way of doing things works for you, it’s well worth the money – there’s a free trial available for you to find out. A Pro account also unlocks cross-platform access, so you’ve got the same app on Mac, iOS and other operating systems, with up to five users.
It’s an app that really benefits from a larger screen, so that Overlays can be faded away, brushed out and otherwise manipulated to create wonderful new skies, weather conditions or even double exposures. Layer masks make it easy to blur the background of an image so it looks as if it was taken on a DSLR camera (or an iPhone X), while gradient masks allow you to edit the sky in an image without affecting the foreground.
This kind of middle-ground image editor – more than Photos but less than Photoshop – is such a hotly contested sector of the App Store it can be hard to know what’s best without trying them all. However, Polarr is heading in the right direction, as the app allows a great many artistic edits and, with its tips and tutorials, teaches you how to use them. It can be a little intimidating at first, but time spent with it will be repaid in glorious images.