ColorStrokes is probably not one of the best photo editing software for mac if you are looking for a professional piece of software. However, if you are a beginner and look for a photo editing tool that allows you to play around with colors, presets and other features, without the hassle of learning a difficult photo edit program, for $4.99 ColorStrokes can be yours.
There are dozens of free photo editors out there, so we've hand-picked the very best so you can make your pictures look amazing without paying a penny.
We've spent hours putting a huge range of photo editors to the test, and picked out the best ones for any level of skill and experience. From powerful software packed with features that give Photoshop a run for its money to simple tools that give your pictures a whole new look with a couple of clicks, there's something for everyone.
Many free photo editors only offer a very limited selection of tools unless you pay for a subscription, or place a watermark on exported images, but none of the tools here carry any such restrictions. Whichever one you choose, you can be sure that there are no hidden tricks to catch you out.
1. GIMP
The best free photo editor for advanced image editing
No ads or limitations
GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the best free photo editor around. It's packed with the kind of image-enhancing tools you'd find in premium software, and more are being added every day.
The photo editing toolkit is breathtaking, and features layers, masks, curves, and levels. You can eliminate flaws easily with the excellent clone stamp and healing tools, create custom brushes, apply perspective changes, and apply changes to isolated areas with smart selection tools.
GIMP is an open source free photo editor, and its community of users and developers have created a huge collection of plugins to extend its utility even further. Many of these come pre-installed, and you can download more from the official glossary. If that's not enough, you can even install Photoshop plugins.
2. Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 2019
Fuss-free photo editing with automatic optimization tools
Fine manual controls
If you've got a lot of photos that you need to edit in a hurry, Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 2019 could be the tool for you. Its interface is clean and uncluttered, and utterly devoid of ads (although you'll need to submit an email address before you can start using it).
Importing pictures is a breeze, and once they've been added to the pool, you can select several at once to rotate or mirror, saving you valuable time. You can also choose individual photos to enhance with the software's one-click optimization tool. In our tests this worked particularly well on landscapes, but wasn't always great for other subjects.
If you want to make manual color and exposure corrections, there are half a dozen sliders to let you do exactly that. It's a shame you can't also apply the same color changes to a whole set of pictures at once, but this is otherwise a brilliant free photo editor for making quick corrections.
For more advanced editing, check out Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 7 – the premium version of the software with enhanced optimization tools.
3. Canva
Professional-level photo editing and templates in your browser
Includes free cloud storage
Canva is a photo editor that runs in your web browser, and is ideal for turning your favorite snaps into cards, posters, invitations and social media posts. If you're interested in maintaining a polished online presence, it's the perfect tool for you.
Canva has two tiers, free and paid, but the free level is perfect for home users. Just sign up with your email address and you'll get 1GB free cloud storage for your snaps and designs, 8,000 templates to use and edit, and two folders to keep your work organized.
You won't find advanced tools like clone brushes and smart selectors here, but there's a set of handy sliders for applying tints, vignette effects, sharpening, adjusting brightness, saturation and contrast, and much more. The text editing tools are intuitive, and there's a great selection of backgrounds and other graphics to complete your designs.
4. Fotor
One-click enhancements to make your photos shine in seconds
Batch image processing
Fotor is a free photo editor that's ideal for giving your pictures a boost quickly. If there's specific area of retouching you need doing with, say, the clone brush or healing tool, you're out of luck. However, if your needs are simple, its stack of high-end filters really shine.
There's a foolproof tilt-shift tool, for example, and a raft of vintage and vibrant colour tweaks, all easily accessed through Fotor's clever menu system. You can manually alter your own curves and levels, too, but without the complexity of high-end tools.
Fotor's standout function, and one that's sorely lacking in many free photo editors, is its batch processing tool – feed it a pile of pics and it'll filter the lot of them in one go, perfect if you have a memory card full of holiday snaps and need to cover up the results of a dodgy camera or shaky hand.
5. Photo Pos Pro
Advanced photo editing tools packaged in a simple interface
Beginner and advanced modes
Photo Pos Pro isn't as well known as Paint.net and GIMP, but it's another top-quality free photo editor that's packed with advanced image-enhancing tools.
This free photo editor's interface is smarter and more accessible than GIMP's array of menus and toolbars, with everything arranged in a logical and consistent way. If it's still too intimidating, there's also an optional 'novice' layout that resembles Fotor's filter-based approach. The choice is yours.
The 'expert' layout offers both layers and layer masks for sophisticated editing, as well as tools for adjusting curves and levels manually. You can still access the one-click filters via the main menu, but the focus is much more on fine editing.
6. Paint.NET
Looking a little dated, but still a dependable all-rounder
Plugin support
More is not, believe it or not, always better. Paint.NET's simplicity is one of its main selling points; it's a quick, easy to operate free photo editor that's ideal for trivial tasks that don't necessarily justify the sheer power of tools like GIMP.
Don't let the name fool you, though. This isn't just a cheap copy of Microsoft's ultra-basic Paint – even if it was originally meant to replace it. It's a proper photo editor, just one that lands on the basic side of the curve.
Paint.NET’s interface will remind you of its namesake, but over the years, they’ve added advanced editing tools like layers, an undo history, a ton of filters, myriad community-created plugins, and a brilliant 3D rotate/zoom function that's handy for recomposing images.
7. PhotoScape
Raw image conversion, batch processing and much more
Great selection of filters
PhotoScape might look like a rather simple free photo editor, but take a look at its main menu and you'll find a wealth of features: raw conversion, photo splitting and merging, animated GIF creation, and even a rather odd (but useful) function with which you can print lined, graph or sheet music paper.
The meat, of course, is in the photo editing. PhotoScape's interface is among the most esoteric of all the apps we've looked at here, with tools grouped into pages in odd configurations. It certainly doesn't attempt to ape Photoshop, and includes fewer features.
We'd definitely point this towards the beginner, but that doesn't mean you can't get some solid results. PhotoScape's filters are pretty advanced, so it's if good choice if you need to quickly level, sharpen or add mild filtering to pictures in a snap.
8. Pixlr X
A comprehensive browser-based photo editor for quick results
Stylish design
Pixlr X is the successor to Pixlr Editor, which was one of our favorite free online photo editors for many years.
Pixlr X makes several improvements on its predecessor. For starters, it's based on HTML5 rather than Flash, which means it can run in any modern browser. It's also slick and well designed, with an interface that's reminiscent of Photoshop Express, and a choice of dark or light color schemes.
With Pixlr X, you can make fine changes to colors and saturation, sharpen and blur images, apply vignette effects and frames, and combine multiple images. There's also support for layers, which you won't find in many free online photo editors, and an array of tools for painting and drawing. A great choice for even advanced tasks.
9. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor
A convenient way to correct lighting and exposure problems
Stylish design
As its name suggests, Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is a trimmed-down, browser-based version of the company's world-leading photo editing software. Perhaps surprisingly, it features a more extensive toolkit than the downloadable Photoshop Express app, but it only supports images in JPG format that are below 16MB.
Again, this is a Flash-based tool, but Adobe provides handy mobile apps for all platforms so you won’t miss out if you’re using a smartphone or tablet.
This free online photo editor has all the panache you’d expect from Adobe, and although it doesn’t boast quite as many tools as some of its rivals, everything that’s there is polished to perfection. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is a pleasure to use. Its only drawbacks are the limits on uploaded file size and types, and lack of support for layers.
10. PiZap
A fun photo editor for preparing your pictures for social media
Templates for social media
Free online photo editor PiZap is available in both HTML5 and Flash editions, making it suitable for any device. You can choose to work with a photo from your hard drive, Facebook, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Search, or a catalog of stock images. This is an impressive choice, though some of the stock images are only available to premium subscribers, and you'll need to watch out for copyright issues if you use a pic straight from Google Images.
piZap’s editing interface has a dark, modern design that makes heavy use of sliders for quick adjustments – a system that works much better than tricky icons and drop-down menus if you’re using a touchscreen device.
When you’re done, you can share your creation on all the biggest social media networks, as well as piZap’s own servers, Dropbox and Google Drive. Alternatively, you can save it to your hard drive, send it via email, or grab an embed code. You can only export your work in high quality if you’ve opened your wallet for the premium editor, but for silly social sharing that’s unlikely to be a problem.
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How do you choose the best photo editing software? We’ve picked the best paid-for mainstream photo editing programs that will work on both Mac and PC, and we’re looking for ease of use, quality of results, versatility or pixel-crunching power. There are also free, mobile or online photo editors out there but we’ll keep those for another guide.
The answer to the best photo editor question used to be easy – get Photoshop. It’s become clear, though, that photographers and enthusiasts want more than Photoshop can offer. It doesn’t catalog your growing photo library and it doesn’t give you ideas and inspiration to feed your creative vision. Basically it’s just a big box of spanners.
So we’ll kick off with the complex little ecosystem that is Adobe’s subscription-based Photography Plan, then look at alternatives that deliver better quality, better organisation, better inspiration or just better value.
These are not in any particular order since each program has its own particular strengths, so make sure you keep going to the end of the list, because there’s something here for everyone.
Best photo editors in 2019
1. Adobe Photoshop CC
It’s the most powerful photo editing application in the world and there may be times when nothing else will do
Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: No | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: No | Image layers: Yes | Plug-in version: No
Photography plan (20GB)
$9.99
Photography plan (1TB)
$19.99
Complex layers-based editing
No cataloging
Photoshop is still the go-to image-editing tool for artists, illustrators and designers, but photographers have a different bunch of needs that might be better met these days by a cataloguing/enhancement tool like Lightroom or an effects tool like Alien Skin Exposure X3. Photoshop’s layering, masking and retouching tools are still the standard by which all others are judged, but it’s designed for painstaking work on single images, or multi-layer composites, rather than quick day-to-day editing. The only way to get Photoshop now is via an Adobe subscription. The regular Photography Plan is best value and also gets you Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic as well.
2. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC
Things just got confusing. The ‘new’ Lightroom is a stripped-down tool based around cloud storage
Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: Yes | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: Yes | Image layers: No | Plug-in version: No
Photography plan (20GB)
$9.99
Photography plan (1TB)
$19.99
Streamlined interface
Missing some tools
Where Photoshop is for detailed manipulation, Lightroom concentrates on image organisation and regular photo enhancements. Now, though, there are two versions. The ‘old’ one has been rebranded Lightroom Classic (see below) while the ‘new’ Lightroom CC offers a streamlined interface and integrated cloud storage. You can get Lightroom CC and 1GB storage for the same price as the regular Photography Plan, but you don’t get Photoshop, which is a significant drawback. Lightroom CC is super-slick to use, but it’s missing a couple of tools in Lightroom Classic and it doesn’t support plug-ins and external image-editors except for Photoshop. If you want Lightroom and Photoshop AND 1GB storage the plan costs twice as much… ouch.
3. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC
It’s the ‘old’ Lightroom with a new name, and sticks to regular desktop-based image storage
Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: Yes | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: Yes | Image layers: No | Plug-in version: No
Photography plan (20GB)
$9.99
Photography plan (1TB)
$19.99
Powerful image adjustment
Interface could be better
Lightroom and Photoshop are the perfect double-act. One takes care of organising and enhancing your photos while the other handles any more complex layers-based image manipulation. Lightroom Classic is the old ‘full fat’ version of Lightroom. It feels a bit more ponderous and complicated than the cloud-based Lightroom CC, but it is more powerful and does support plug-ins. You get both Photoshop and Lightroom CC/Classic as part of Adobe’s subscription-based Photography Plan and, to be honest, this combination is good value and takes some beating. For many, though, the idea of paying a subscription to use software is just too much to swallow, which is why we’re going to move swiftly on to the rest of our list.
4. Phase One Capture One Pro 12
Expensive but beautiful, Capture One is a direct rival to Lightroom and pitched firmly at professionals
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Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: Yes | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: Yes | Image layers: No | Plug-in version: No
Pro-grade tethering
No mobile version
Capture One covers almost exactly the same territory as Adobe Lightroom Classic, offering cataloguing tools, seamless raw processing, manual image enhancement tools alongside preset effects and a non-destructive workflow that means you can revisit your adjustments at any time. Its raw conversions are sharper and less noisy than Adobe’s, but it doesn’t support such a wide range of camera raw formats or as large a number of lens correction profiles. It doesn’t have Adobe’s mobile apps and online synchronisation options either, but it does offer professional-grade ‘tethering’ tools for studio photographers capturing images via a computer. It also has a better system for applying local adjustments, using adjustment layers and masks. It’s expensive, but very, very good.
5. Serif Affinity Photo 1.6
If you want Photoshop but don’t want Adobe’s subscription plan, this is the answer!
Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: No | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: No | Image layers: Yes | Plug-in version: No
Great HDR tone mapping
No cataloguing
Serif built its reputation off the back of low-cost Windows versions of professional graphics tools, but with its new Affinity line it’s shaken off its budget past for good. Affinity Photo might have a budget price, but it’s a full-on, full-powered Photoshop rival for professionals, that can even teach its Adobe equivalent a trick or two. Its layering, masking and retouching tools are as powerful as Photoshop’s, its filter effects can be applied ‘live’ and its HDR tone mapping and workspace tools are excellent. Like Photoshop, though, it’s focused solely on in-depth, technical image manipulation. It doesn’t have its own browsing and cataloguing tools and it doesn’t do instant preset effects. Affinity Photo will bring the tools, but you have to bring the vision.
6. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019
Aimed squarely at beginners, Elements 2018 does a decent job but is starting to look dated
Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: Yes | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: Yes | Image layers: Yes | Plug-in version: No
Novice friendly interface
Looking a bit dated
On paper, Elements 19 ticks all the boxes, just like previous annual releases. It offers quite a lot of the photo-editing power of Photoshop wrapped up in a novice friendly interface with quick fixes, guided edits and an Expert mode for more experienced users. It also comes with its own Organizer application for storing, organising and searching your photos. But while it’s fine for beginners who want to stay beginners, its family-friendly interface could become annoying, and while the Elements Editor will give you a head start if you upgrade to Photoshop, the Organizer is a bit of a dead end that’s nothing like Lightroom, so if you do move on up to Adobe’s Photography Plan you’ll have to learn Lightroom from scratch. The 2019 version adds Adobe Sensei AI tech to suggest new ways to use your pictures, and there are some more Guided Edits too.
7. Alien Skin Exposure X4
Trying to recapture the romance of analog images? Exposure X3 combines retro looks and regular editing
Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: Yes | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: Yes | Image layers: No | Plug-in version: Yes
Good image adjustment controls
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No thumbnail preview importing
Exposure X4 offers blends old analog 'looks' with contemporary photo enhancement tools. It has a large catalog of antique and modern film effects that simulate fading, cross processing, grain, light leaks, vignetting, borders and a whole range of traditional films and processing techniques. These are all built using tools that can also be used for regular image enhancements, including curves, colour adjustments and more. But while it offers adjustment layers for ’stacking’ and blending corrections, you can’t combine images. What you do get, though, is a fast and effective folder-browsing system for organising your photos with all the power of filtering and keyword searches without the fuss of importing them into a catalog. Version 4 adds smart albums, transform tools, movable light effects and improved raw processing.
8. Skylum Luminar 3
Now with Libraries for image organisation, Luminar is developing fast
Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: Yes | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: Yes | Image layers: Yes | Plug-in version: Yes
Quick instant 'looks'
Now with Libraries
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Luminar takes an interesting approach to photo editing, offering a collection of preset effects organised into categories for those who just want to apply an instant ‘look’. These are made using a collection of filters which you can combine at will to create presets of your own. It also introduces the idea of custom workspaces which you can set up for specific image types, like Black and White or Portraits. The raw conversions don’t quite match the quality of the big three – Adobe Capture One, DxO – but they do the job and they’re backed up by some great editing tools. Luminar supports both adjustment layers and image layers, so you can create Photoshop-style composite images. The big news is that Luminar 3 – a free update for Luminar 2018 users – adds image cataloguing tools via Libraries and fully non-destructive editing so that you can go back and change any edit, any time.
9. ON1 Photo RAW 2019
Free Photo Editing For Mac
An all-in-one tool that does just about everything. Like Luminar and Exposure X3, it’s come a long way, very fast
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Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: Yes | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: Yes | Image layers: Yes | Plug-in version: Yes
Great value
Raw processing could be better
ON1 Photo RAW started out as ON1 Perfect Suite and has quickly evolved into a more modern, integrated program rather than a collection of plug-ins. It can still work as a plug-in for Lightroom and Photoshop, where you can browse the huge library of preset effects and manual adjustment filters to create ‘looks’ that the host programs can’t, but ON1 Photo RAW also works as a standalone program, complete with its own image browsing/cataloguing tools. In fact, this could be the only photo editing tool you’ll ever need – though the interface text is quite small and the raw conversions don’t match the quality you get from Capture One and DxO PhotoLab. For power, value and spectacle, though, ON1 Photo RAW 2019 is terrific, and version 2019.2 adds AI-powered image masking and cutouts.
10. DxO PhotoLab 2
The name has changed, the software has moved on, and PhotoLab is now a very serious contender indeed
Platform: Mac and PC | Image-editing: Yes | Cataloguing: No | Raw conversion: Yes | Preset effects: Yes | Image layers: No | Plug-in version: No
Brilliant lens correction
Some tools cost extra
DxO Optics Pro, famous for its lab-derived lens correction profiles and awesome raw conversions, has evolved. Last year DxO bought the Google Nik Collection (which it intends to develop separately) and integrated the control point adjustment tools to bring out PhotoLab. The big difference between PhotoLab and Optics Pro is that you can now apply powerful localised adjustments to your images. PhotoLab doesn’t have its own cataloguing tools, though it does have a basic folder browser, and to get the full benefit of its raw tools, perspective corrections (DxO ViewPoint) and film ‘looks’ (DxO FilmPack) you need to pay extra. It doesn’t support Fujifilm X-Trans files, either. PhotoLab’s raw conversions and lens corrections are, however, quite sublime. Version 2 adds a 'PhotoLibrary' feature with an autofill search tool, but this feature still feels fairly limited.