Best alternatives to Photos

Expand your digital darkroom toolset with these third-party apps

The Photos app’s Retouch tool is a bit hit and miss when it comes to removing complex objects. You can’t use Photos to create layered composites or collages. These third-party apps offer ways to expand your pixel-pushing muscles both on your Mac and on the go…

£9.99 per month (includes Photoshop CC) FROM adobe.com

The original and best imageediting app continues to add powerful content-aware tools to its repertoire. You can select complex objects in a click and combine them creatively with other layers (and refine the selection’s edges with masks). It’s Camera Raw editor lets you apply lens profile corrections to iPhone DNGs – something you can’t do in Photos.

Adobe Lightroom Classic

£9.99 per month (includes Photoshop CC)

FROM adobe.com

Lightroom Classic has long been the ‘go to’ app for professional photographers as it performs classic darkroom techniques such as dodge and burn and graduated edits. It was one of the first apps to let you clone Raw format files. It also provides powerful asset management tools so you can keep track of thousands of shots on multiple external hard drives.

Luminar Neo

£59

FROM skylum.com

Luminar Neo boasts a host of machine learning (ML) assisted tools that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, such as removing unwanted cables in a click or quickly and seamlessly replacing a boring sky with something more exciting and dramatic. You can revisit and tweak any edit, even when working with Raw files. Creates eye-catching images quickly!