The Best Photo Editing Software for Macs in 2026
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Buying Guide: The Best Photo Editing Software for Macs in 2026
How Should You Choose Photo Editing Software?
When you are considering Mac photo editing apps, look for a clean, well-designed interface with lots of help and tutorials. Beyond that, be aware that different types of apps specialize in different parts of the photo editing process.
Some applications (like Lightroom and Lightroom Classic) excel at workflow—the whole set of steps from importing, organizing, correcting, enhancing, and outputting your photos. They often use modes, which simply means you select an interface layout for a particular stage of work. For instance, separate modes might handle importing and organizing, adjusting and correcting, and exporting. Additionally, some workflow software lets you organize images by faces using AI and location using GPS data.
Non-workflow apps, by contrast, give you all of their tools all the time but don’t help you import and organize your photo collection. Photoshop and Skylum Luminar are examples of non-workflow photo editing software. These programs offer layers for overlaying edits and effects. They usually have text and drawing tools, too.
What’s the Best Photo Editing App for Macs?
Adobe Photoshop is the undisputed leader in photo editing software, thanks to its unmatched and ever-increasing set of state-of-the-art tools. It excels at layer editing, meaning you can overlay many levels of image content and effects. It’s also the best at automatically selecting areas and subjects within your image to choose where an effect applies. You get plentiful drawing and typography features in Photoshop, too. Its newer Generative Expand, Generative Fill, and Generate Image tools use Firefly AI to create new image content, while its Neural Filters take advantage of AI image analysis for some mind-blowing effects.
What’s the Best Free Photo Editing Software for Macs?
Our top pick for the best free photo editing software for Mac is Apple Photos. It’s free in the sense that it comes with the purchase of any Mac. Another excellent choice is the web-based Photopea, which provides standard Photoshop-like tools for free or generative AI features and cloud storage for $5 per month.
Google Photos excels at organization and provides up to 15GB of cloud storage for your photos. It syncs photos from both Android phones and iPhones, offers a decent set of editing tools, and even uses AI to suggest edits and creations. If you’re trying to decide between Apple’s and Google’s entry-level photo software, check out our comparison between the two.
Polarr is another excellent photo app with a free option. It has both mobile and desktop versions, though it does offer in-app purchases. The open-source Photoshop wannabe GIMP raises its unlovely interface in every discussion of free photo software, but it’s quite powerful if you can get past that downside.
What Can Mac Photo Apps Do?
Photo editing software must be able to import and organize your digital photos. After that, you need tools to crop the pictures and adjust their color, lighting, and detail (adding sharpness or removing noise, for example). Then comes the fancy stuff: artistic effects, black-and-white, colorization, overlays, and pixel manipulation—things like removing unwanted objects or creating selection masks. Finally, you have to output the image to the destination and in the format of your choice.
Some tools perform nearly all these functions, including Adobe Photoshop Elements, Apple’s recently acquired Pixelmator app, CyberLink PhotoDirector, and ON1 Photo RAW. Other products specialize in one or the other. For example, DxO PureRAW and Topaz Photo AI focus on reducing image noise and lens distortions. DxO ViewPoint gives you unique ways to correct perspective and geometric distortions in photos.
The most famous photo application of all, Adobe Photoshop, does image adjustment and manipulation—adding text, compositing, corrections, effects, layers, selections, and so on. It’s not for importing and organizing your photo collection, however. Affinity is comparable with Photoshop in that regard, though it lacks Adobe’s advanced tools and polished interface.
Some tools focus solely on organizing and importing: Adobe Bridge, Mylio, Photo Mechanic, WidsMob, and the open-source digiKam. A good way to organize your photo collection is to use an online photo storage service.
Editing Raw Camera Files on a Mac
If you use a DSLR or mirrorless camera, you’re best off shooting in a raw camera file format rather than using JPG. With raw, you can get a lot more out of the image at the editing stage in terms of lighting and color adjustment. That’s important when you’re trying to retrieve detail from a very dark or light part of an image. In particular, a shadows slider helps bring out detail in a dark area, while a highlights adjustment can reveal the blue and clouds in an otherwise bleached-out white sky.
Adjusting raw files also lets you change the white balance you chose at the time of shooting. For example, if a photo looks overly warm—toward the red, orange, and yellow side of the spectrum—you can restore it with more true-to-life colors.
Most of the higher-end software now includes automatic corrections based on your camera model and lens, such as corrections for lens geometry distortion (think warped edges on a wide-angle shot), vignetting (dark edges), and chromatic aberration (color fringes). Make sure the software you choose has profiles for your equipment.
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Other tools you want in your photo software involve adjusting the fine details, such as sharpness and noise reduction. Related useful tools include clarity, dehaze, and micro contrast (called Texture in Lightroom).
For more creative editing, look for blemish repair, filter, mask, text overlay, and selection tools. Photoshop and Luminar Neo now let you reshape a face, while CyberLink PhotoDirector goes a step beyond that with full body-reshaping tools. Some software supports LUTs (aka CLUTs—color lookup tables); these are filters that create moods by shifting color. The motion picture industry has long used LUTs to give a shot a sunny, dreamy effect or to simulate nighttime even if the shooting took place during the day.
A couple of programs with good selections of effects and filters are Luminar Neo and ON1 PhotoRAW. Some (like PhotoDirector and Photoshop) even use AI to let you transform your photo so that it takes on the style of an artist like Picasso or van Gogh. The latest fad is for generative AI tools in these applications that create or extend images based on your text prompts. Luminar Neo, PhotoDirector, and Photoshop now include such tools.
What Output Options Do Mac Photo Apps Support?
Finally, you want flexible output options. All the software in this list lets you output from raw format to JPG, which is universally usable, especially online. Adobe and other developers now support HDR image editing and output, too, which can involve editing in and exporting to new file formats, such as AVIF and JPEG XL. Some programs let you optimize images for social networks and directly upload them. Many, such as Lightroom and Photopea, include online galleries for your work, to which you can upload from inside the app.
If you need to print, look for a program with soft proofing, which shows whether your printer can print all the colors in your image. For book output, Google Photos and Lightroom Classic include excellent layout options and let you order custom photo books directly.
Make Sure You Have the Right Camera
If you’re a beginner to digital photography, make sure you have some good photography hardware. Phones have better and better cameras these days, but they still can’t beat a dedicated model. For help choosing one, see our list of the best digital cameras.
