Great Mac apps to boost your photos
Look beyond iPhoto for some easy ways to make your photos shine!
Snapheal (£12.99) lets you quickly and easily remove people, background objects and overhead cables – just paint over them and Snapheal plugs the gap. It’s also endowed with a full range of sliderbased adjustments for correcting brightness, saturation, detail and more. By default they’re applied to the whole image at once, but you can make adjustments by painting a mask onto the frame.
You can’t use it to combine multiple photos, so it’s not a direct replacement for Photoshop, and it doesn’t have the organisation tools of iPhoto or Aperture either, but it is a cheap and highly effective editing tool that lets you achieve some impressive results with minimal effort.
As easy to use as iPhoto
If you have an extensive library, then look towards Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (£59), our top tool for not only editing but also cataloguing our shots. Don’t let its pro credentials put you off: it’s as easy to use as iPhoto, with adjustments controlled by dragging sliders and the results updating in real time so you can see what you’re doing. It’s well supported by a wide range of third-party plugins and has more powerful sorting and organising skills than iPhoto. It works with your Mac’s native folders rather than bundling all of your shots into a single large library. If you also have the iPad edition, you can sync selected folders and edit your shots on the go. You can start slowly, and learn to use more of its features over time. It isn’t expensive, either, considering what you’re getting for your money.
You can boost Lightroom’s features by using onOne’s Perfect Photo Suite plug-ins (from £48 to £107). With filters, effects, smart cropping tools, powerful black and white processing, portrait enhancers and more, Perfect Photo Suite is the most comprehensive suite of adjustment tools going. Adjustments can be applied on layers, each of which has its own opacity control so you can tweak how much it affects the underlying frame. The masking tool, meanwhile, makes it easy to crop out tricky subjects like hair and fur with greater accuracy and in less time than you would in Photoshop.
A bespoke layers component lets you combine multiple images and selectively remove parts from each, which greatly simplifies the process of adding the sky from one shot to the foreground of another and thus improving the apparent weather within the scene.
Available as a stand-alone app or plug-ins for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture, it really is the only editing suite you need, with a comprehensive, flexible set of tools for the more ambitious photographer.