- January 02, 2020
- 18 min to read
Most free photo editors available on the App Store are quite basic, offering just a limited number of filters and allowing you to easily and quickly liven up your photos before posting them on social media.
But if you’re an aspiring or professional photographer, you probably need a more powerful app with a broader set of tools to use your creativity to the fullest. Besides, you probably use your Mac for photo editing because working on a large screen makes it possible to adjust the slightest details.
1. Apple’s Photos (Built-in app)
To get to the Photos Repair Library tool on your Mac, follow these steps: If Photos is open, close the app. Then, while you click to open Photos, hold down the Command and Option keys at the same time. High Sierra upgrading is common because it is one of the most widely installed Mac operating systems at present. The problem is that it comes with some pretty significant changes. These changes don't seem to be going down too well with Mac devices, or Mac users for that matter.
Apple’s Photos app is included for free on all recently released Macs. It does a good job at organizing your photos, but its collection of photo enhancement tools leaves much to be desired. Hopefully, our selection of the best free programs for photo editing on Mac will help you choose the right app to suit all your creative needs.
2. Luminar (7 days trial)
Luminar is another full-featured photo editor that’s popular with both Mac and Windows users. It can work as a standalone app as well as a plugin for such popular programs as Apple Photos.
Luminar uses Artificial Intelligence to enable sophisticated yet quick photo enhancements. Among these AI features are Sky Enhancer, which adds more depth and detail to the sky in your photos while leaving other areas untouched; Accent AI, which analyzes a photo and automatically applies the best combination of different effects to enhance your image; and Sun Rays, which allows you to place an artificial sun and adjust the lighting to your liking or make the sun rays already in your photo look even more incredible.
Luminar has over 60 filters you can apply to your photos to enhance them in a moment. Luminar also provides a set of powerful tools for cropping, transforming, cloning, erasing, and stamping, along with layers, brushes, and many more incredible features. Luminar supports the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, making photo editing even more effortless and pleasing.
3. Photolemur 3 (Free Version with watermark)
Photolemur is a relative newcomer on the photo editing market but it has all the chances to win the favor of beginner photographers and hobbyists. Running on Artificial Intelligence, Photolemur is a completely automatic photo enhancer, meaning that it does all the editing for you in no time. It has the simplest interface, with only a few buttons and sliders to adjust the enhancement to your liking and view the before and after results.
All you need to do is choose a photo (or a few) that you want to improve, drag and drop or import them using the Import button, and let the program make enhancements. After it’s done, you can compare the edited version with the original image by using the before–after slider and, if you want, adjust the skin tone or even enlarge the eyes using additional sliders. Pretty easy, huh?
Photolemur also offers a number of impressive styles to touch up your photos and give them a sophisticated and professional look. With this app, you don’t need to stuff your head with photo editing nuances and terms. Just run Photolemur and watch the magic happen!
4. Aurora HDR (14 days trial)
As you probably can tell from the name, Aurora HDR is designed to help photographers enhance their HDR photos, making them even more detailed and beautiful. It’s an ideal tool for editing your photos, with an extensive collection of more than 20 tools including details, tone, mapping, color, glow, and vignette. Each tool has its unique selection of controls to adjust its effects.
Aurora HDR enables you to work with brushes, layers, and masks, and provides a number of automatic AI tools for recognizing and removing noise, enhancing colors, lighting, and details, improving clarity, and adding contrast to dull areas while leaving other areas untouched.
Aurora HDR does a great job dealing with difficult lighting situations and creating full-of-life images while being easy to use.
5. Pixelmator (Trial 30 Days) https://dlxivzu.weebly.com/blog/mac-airbook-server-app.
Pixelmator is a photo enhancer beloved by many Mac users, as it offers a good combination of a modern and simple interface, the ability to work on multiple layers, and powerful features that take photo editing to a whole new level. With so many editing tools, brushes, and effects, you can enhance your photos to your liking. You can choose between two versions of Pixelmator – standard and pro – depending on your needs. The standard version is great for basic photo editing with its selection of essential tools and filters, while the pro version is packed with extra brushes, tools, and effects that let you push your creativity to new boundaries. You can decide which version is suitable for you according to what features you’re looking for in a photo editing app.
6. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 (Trial link)
Photoshop Elements isn’t as affordable as other photo enhancers for beginner photographers. But luckily there’s a trial version available, so you can check it out before deciding whether this app is worthy of your money. Photoshop Elements acquired many powerful features from Photoshop, only Elements is simplified for amateur photographers and enthusiasts. It includes a good number of effects and filters, plus automated editing options for improving lighting, color balance, and exposure, and even opening closed eyes and reducing the effects of camera shake.
In addition to all of these awesome features, Photoshop also offers editing modes for beginners, intermediate users, and experts. Beginners will probably prefer Quick mode, as it focuses on essential tools to quickly enhance your photos by improving color, lighting, and other basic settings. Guided mode provides intermediate users with step-by-step guidance with more professional features like artistic effects, skin tone correction, and background replacement. Expert mode gives you full access to the app’s really powerful editing features and is ideal for creating stunning images.
7. Affinity Photo (Free Trial)
Affinity Photo’s interface may seem overwhelming at first, especially for novices, but when you come to grips with it you’ll find that the app is just what you’ve been looking for. Its numerous professional tools, effects, and filters encourage you to get creative with your photos. Among the coolest features Affinity Photo has to offer is a before and after view to compare the original photo with its edited version.
Affinity Photo works with 15 file types, including common ones like PDF, PSD, JPG, and GIF as well as some less popular ones. The app amazes with its abundance of basic and top-notch editing tools, allowing you to tweak your photos using all possible kinds of instruments. Affinity Photo allows you to edit HDR photos, apply artistic filters and effects, play with masks and layers, and create breathtaking compositions by combining several images in one. If you find its interface a bit much and are afraid of getting lost in all those advanced tools, you should probably look for something more suitable for your level. But Affinity Photo is worth mastering.
8. Google Photos
Google Photos is a popular cloud storage service for photos and videos. It can’t boast countless masterly tools like other photo enhancers that we review in this article, but it includes some fundamental features like filters, color adjustment sliders, and transformation tools.
Although Google Photos may not be that helpful when it comes to editing photos, it does a pretty good job at storing high-resolution images and videos with 15GB of free online storage, compared to iCloud’s mere 5GB (which you can upgrade to 50GB for a monthly fee). If you’re planning to go on a trip and take plenty of photos, then it might be smart to sign up for Google Photos to use that extra storage space when you come back.
![Photos Photos](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134210833/493430138.jpg)
9. PhotoScape X (Free)
![Mac high sierra 10.13 Mac high sierra 10.13](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134210833/763881493.jpg)
A relatively new photo editing app, PhotoScape X has been gaining popularity with many Mac and PC users since its release in 2008. Its interface is simple but unconventional, with a number of tabs running along the top of the window. Each is responsible for a specific stage of editing. The Viewer tab allows you to browse and organize your photos. After you pick a photo, you can switch to the Editor tab, which includes a broad set of instruments, filters, and effects and a useful feature that enables you to compare the adjusted photo with the original.
The next tabs, including the Batch tab, mainly concentrate on editing and renaming multiple photos at once. The GIF tab allows you to easily create an animated GIF from a group of selected photos.
The downside of PhotoScape X is a lack of selection tools, so all changes are applied to the whole image rather than to a selected part.
10. Gimp (Free)
Gimp is a free open-source photo editing app that has been on the market for over 22 years and is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux. Unlike many free apps, Gimp doesn’t have any ads or in-app purchases. Its grey interface might seem a little old-fashioned and it may be a bit sluggish when it comes to complex effects, though.
Gimp offers a vast collection of advanced tools that hardly any free photo editor can boast. It has numerous enhancement options such as clone and heal brushes, layers and channels, accurate selection tools, a number of transformation instruments, and, of course, color adjustment controls. Gimp is one of the most powerful tools for enhancing photos and is beloved by so many users for its price (free) and versatility. But if you can’t come to grips with Gimp’s interface, it may be worth paying some cash for a more user-friendly program.
Summary: This article includes best Mac photo recovery solutions which can help you recover missing iPhoto/Photos pictures after macOS update or any other photo recovery situations.
By Katrina | Posted to Mac Data Recovery Tips, updated on Mar.26th, 2019 |
Nowadays, many of us don't have physical photo albums like we did decades ago, as everything is now digital and is stored online or on our computers and smart devices. Photographs and images aren't just there to entertain us, they're there to record history. Many of life's greatest moments are captured on camera from a fantastic holiday abroad, to a child's first steps. If anything were to happen to these images, we would feel as if we'd lost a part of ourselves.
Sadly, some people unfortunately lose important images thanks to modern technology, which is what we're looking at today. Losing iPhoto images is tough, but there is a solution in the form of deleted photo recovery software, and we're going to share that solution with you today.
Note: Since OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, the photo library app iPhoto has been replaced with Photos.
Common problems
First up, we're going to share a few common photo recovery problems that our customers have encountered, before giving you a solution. Here is a recent email that we received from a concerned customer who feared that they'd lost close to 2000 iPhoto images.
Hey guys, I hope you can help as I'm desperate. I had around 1,900 iPhoto photographs saved. While some of these were boring images I hadn't gotten around to erasing yet, many of them were images of my son as a baby. In these images, I could swipe through and literally watch him grow older right before my eyes. Now I can't find them anywhere. After I upgraded to Mojave/High Sierra I only had 224 photos left, and could not find them anywhere. Worst of all is that the ones I do have left are typically the ones that I would quite happily have deleted if I'd thought to do so. They're also not on the cloud as that was the first place I checked. The images have gone from all of my devices, and I'm at my wits' end.
I was reading up on your recent guide to recover deleted photos and came across your site. I hope you can help? I've also been reading up about High Sierra upgrades and it seems as if this is a fairly-common problem as well. If you can help me get these images back I will be eternally grateful to you.
As you can see, the customer in question was clearly distressed as she was emotionally attached to the images that just randomly decided to disappear after she upgraded to macOS High Sierra. High Sierra upgrading is common because it is one of the most widely installed Mac operating systems at present. The problem is that it comes with some pretty significant changes. These changes don't seem to be going down too well with Mac devices, or Mac users for that matter. This is because many Mac users have sadly lost their videos, images, and other important documents after upgrading to macOS High Sierra. Missing iPhoto images is a particularly common problem, which is why we're looking at deleted photo recovery in today's article. The aim of this article is to help you retrieve your iPhoto images after upgrading to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra.
What is High Sierra?
First, we'll take a quick look at what High Sierra is. macOS High Sierra is the 13th Operating System for the Apple Macintosh computer. It was released back in late 2017 and was named after the High Sierra region of California. As beneficial as High Sierra was, the main issue that Mac users had was the fact that, after upgrading from macOS Sierra, many users found that their iPhotos were randomly going missing from their iPhoto photo libraries for no obvious reasons.
Deleted photo recovery solutions
If your iPhotos have done the disappearing act on you after you upgraded, and you aren't quite sure why, try any of the following solutions and with any luck, your photos should be back in your iPhoto library in no time at all.
Solution 1: Recover missing iPhoto pictures from Time Machine
Mac High Sierra 10.13
The first photo recovery solution we're going to talk to you about today involves the use of Time Machine. No, we're not talking about the use of an actual time machine, although that would sure come in handy. No, the time machine we're talking about today is the Time Machine backup. You see, if you created a backup via Time Machine before you upgraded to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra, you can simply use Time Machine restore missing or deleted data including documents and iPhoto images. Here's a step by step rundown of how to do precisely this:
Step 1: Connect the backup drive to the Mac computer.
Step 2: Open iPhoto folder.
Step 3: Click the Time Machine icon in the top left menu bar and select Enter Time Machine.
Tips: Did you know how to show Time Machine icon on the menu bar?
- Click Apple icon at the top-right corner.
- Select System Preferences… and then click on Time Machine.
- Check Show Time Machine in menu bar.
Step 4: Browse the items in the backup folder by using on screen up/down arrows or using the timeline at the edge of the screen. If you want to find files of older version, using timeline to navigate the files is faster. You will be able to see a lot of snapshots of this whole folder and how the folder changes.
Step 5: Select an item and prese Space bar or double-click it to preview it.
Step 6: Select the photo you want to restore, and then click Restore.
Solution 2: Switch from iPhoto to photos
Next up, we're going to quickly walk you through how you can switch from iphoto iPhoto to Photos. You see, on the newer operating systems, the photos Photos app has been updated to have many more features that the iPhoto app doesn't have. Any changes that happen to be made in iPhotos won't be included in photosPhotos, and vice-versa. If you can't find the images you want in the iPhotos library, quit the application and open up the photos Photos library instead. To do so, just follow the upcoming steps:
With any luck, the images that you thought were gone forever will instead be found here.
Solution 3: Enjoy recently deleted photo recovery with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac
If the other two solutions haven't provided you with any real luck, it's time for you to break out your secret weapon. When it comes to deleted photo recovery software, if the other solutions haven't restored your precious images, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is your last chance. It has been generating a lot of positive feedback lately, and as more and more people discover how effective it really is, this number is only going to grow.
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is professional data recovery software that is very effective for recovering lost iPhoto images after upgrading to Mojave/High Sierra. Whether you're looking to retrieve images, videos, audio files, texts, documents, or anything else, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is surely your best chance, especially in the absence of a successful backup. Best of all is the fact that using this piece of software is incredibly easy, and can be achieved, literally, with a few clicks. Here is a step by step guide on how to recover lost iPhoto pictures after upgrading to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra.
Step 1: Free download, install, and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software. This software is completely free to download, and can be installed and launched in a matter of seconds.
Step 2: Once you've downloaded and launched the free online deleted photo recovery software, your next step is to select the drive/partition in which the photos went missing. Now click ‘next' in order to scan for any lost files located on the drive/partition. This process should not take very long at all.
Step 3: Now it's time for you to preview the initial scanning results. Preview the scan results to see which photos you wish to recover. Once you see the images you wish to recover, you simply click on the ‘recover' Recover' button.
More about iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac
There are countless examples of free Mac data recovery pieces of software out there for you to choose from, but some are unfortunately not very reliable, nor are they that effective. Finding a reliable and trustworthy piece of free data recovery software is essential, which is why iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac comes so very highly recommended. It is considered by a number of users to be the absolute best free data recovery software option on the market today. This software is ideal, in that it supports the recovery of deleted photos, videos, documents, emails and music files and much more.
These can be recovered from external hard drives including: USB drives, SD cards, memory cards, pen drives, and more. What's more, the software is even able to recover lost data from APFS formatted SD cards, corrupt SD cards, unmountable SD cards, inaccessible external hard drives on various MAC models, and much more besides. It is simple to use, very effective, and best of all is the fact that the software can be downloaded and installed completely free.
High Sierra Photos
Relatred articles:How to take and recover screenshots using Mac?
Why should you choose iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac?
There are many benefits associated with utilizing iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software. While we won't list each benefit, we are going to look at some of the main reasons why so many users all over the globe are choosing iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac as their go-to photo recovery application.
It supports APFS drive data recovery
One of the main reasons why iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is proving to be so popular is because of the fact that it supports APFS drive data recovery. In fact, many consider it to be the best APFS drive data recovery software because it enables users to recovery Time Machine backups from APFS disks. Not only that, it also allows us to retrieve any lost data which we may have incurred, after deleting an APFS container. In fact, as far as APFS drive data recovery goes, there's plenty of options. These include:
- Recover lost data from encrypted APFS drive
- Recover lost data from formatted APFS drive
- Recover lost data from unmountable APFS drive
- Recover lost data from inaccessible APFS drive
- Recover lost data from APFS Volume
- And more..
Preview recovered data
Another benefit of this particular data recovery software is the fact that it enables users to preview recovered data before they decide whether they wish to permanently restore it as it once was. This is useful because it allows users to preview all unique file formats supported by Apple. These include: image, audio, video and file. This is useful because it helps save time and ensures that you don't accidentally restore the wrong files by mistake.
Deep scan and quick scan modes
How to delete apps on launchpad on mac. The third benefit of this particular piece of data recovery software is the fact that it provides users with both: a deep scan mode, and a quick scan mode, allowing them to save time, or to search deep within the Mac device for the data that they happen to be searching for.
Highly compatible
Download Mac Os High Sierra
Finally, the last benefit of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software that we're going to be looking at today, is the fact that it is so highly compatible. As well as being able to recover lost data from the APFS drive, it will also recover lost data from:
- File systems: APFS, encrypted APFS, HFS+, FAT32, exFAT
- Storage devices: hard drives, external hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, etc.
- Mac operating systems: macOS 10.14, 10.13, 10.12, 10.11,10.10, 10.9, 10.8, 10.7
Still have questions?