- Free Editing Software For Mac
- Free Software For Photo Editing For Mac
- Best Mac Photo Editing Software
- Best Free Photo Editing Software For Mac
- Free Software Photo Editing Mac Download
- Free Software Photo Editing Machine
- Free Photo Editing For Mac
For many photographers and designers, Adobe Photoshop is the standard in image editing. While it’s complex software and covers a lot of areas, Photoshop can be unpractical in specific situations. It’s more natural to use a photo editor suitable to your needs than buying the most complicated product available. GoToAndLearn presents a comprehensive list of programs that constitute a viable alternative to the leading products on photo editing market.
Free Editing Software For Mac
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. Darktable is an open-source, free RAW photo editor available for Linux, Mac / macports, BSD, Windows, and Solaris 11 / GNOME. It’s designed to be a virtual darkroom and allows you to view negatives through a zoomable lighttable. Gimp is a popular open-source photo-editor that has been available for many years, and which runs on Macs, Windows and even Linux (its full name is GNU Image Manipulation Program, named after the. Photo editing software for mac free download - WinZip Mac, PhotoPad Free Photo Editor for Mac, WavePad Masters Edition for Mac, and many more programs.
1. Apple Photos
Apple Photos is the built-in alternative to Photoshop. It raised a lot of expectations and many users were slightly disappointed after its release, but it’s free and ready to use from the moment you buy the device. It even has a version for iOS.
Photos replaced two older applications and marked the beginning of a new era in software collaboration and synchronization. You can keep your photos and videos stored in iCloud and access them from all your Apple devices. It’s well-balanced and trustful, provides intuitive image organizing tools, and has a lot of cool features.
Apple Photos offers image manipulation and editing tools for beginners and advanced users. Among its features are lighting effects, automatic image enhancement, filters, drawing tools to add text, shapes, and sketches to your photos, and tools to transform your pictures in videos. Photos provides basic image adjustments such as saturation, tone, and contrast, black and white conversion, curves and levels for color control, clarity, and vignettes.
It gives you the possibility to choose between three usage levels. Each level reveals more complicated tools and features. For example, the lowest level provides three automatic tools controlling exposure, brightness, shadows, contrast, etc. The more advanced levels provide histograms, color levels, noise reduction, white balance controls, and more.
You can return to the original file or adjust specific parameters at any time. Apple Photos doesn’t offer batch processing, but it allows you to copy all the changes you’ve made and transfer them to other pictures.
For people used with Photoshop and Lightroom, Photos may seem a bit unusual. Still, in many cases, its capabilities are up to 95% of what other editors can do.
2. Photolemur (free with watermark)
Photolemur is an automatic photo editor that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to enhance your pictures. It has a free version that gives you access to all its functionalities. The only drawback is a watermark applied to images at saving.
Photolemur provides Face Finish technology, dedicated features for skin and face retouching. It’s able to automatically smooth skin and remove imperfections, enhance the eyes, and whiten the teeth. Moreover, it uses powerful algorithms that recognize and enhance the sky and the foliage. Photolemur supports RAW files, fixes exposure, and recovers colors. It offers presets for special styles and batch processing.
3. Luminar (free trial)
Luminar isn’t actually a free photo editing software for Mac but it offers a free trial you can use to edit your photos. Luminar is one of the best editors and the free trial includes all its features. In addition, it’s so straightforward and easy to learn that the 30-days trial will be enough to finish your projects.
Luminar provides automatic tools powered by AI and allows you to enhance and perfect your photos using just sliders. It’s able to recognize people and faces and applies different adjustments for portraits and other types of photos. It also provides over 70 instant Looks that give you the stylish photos you need. You can fine-tune any style and filter and save custom Looks for later use. You can also apply the same style to multiple images as Luminar supports batch processing.
Luminar works with layers and masks and allows you to mix several filters and blend them together for unique results. Among its best filters are Accent AI 2.0 for image enhancement, Sun Rays for adding sunrays into your images, Sharpening for clear pictures, and Golden Hour for warm sunlight effects and romantic mood.
The latest version of Luminar includes digital assets management and the future version is announced to have amazing new features. So even if it’s for a limited period of time, Luminar deserves a look.
4. Fotor
Fotor may be one of the best photo editors for Mac. It’s free, provides a considerable set of filters, and can successfully compete with other free Photoshop alternatives such as VSCOcam and Snapseed. But advanced users like Fotor for other reasons: it provides support for publishing photos, crops all existing pictures in a folder, and saves the changes conveniently. For example, it can take a folder with 1000 high-resolution photos, reduce the size of all of them to FullHD, and apply a filter to all the pictures.
5. Pixlr
If you are looking for a free image editing app for Android and iOS that has good reviews and includes more than 600 effects, overlays, and frames– try Pixlr. It allows you to crop and resize photos, fix the red-eye effect, and even whiten teeth in a few seconds.
Pixlr is an online image editor that provides versatile drawing tools, image retouching tools, exquisite filters for style and atmosphere, and a neat workflow.
6. Affinity Photo (free trial)
Free Software For Photo Editing For Mac
Despite what some may think, it’s not a clone of the famous vector editor Affinity Designer for Mac. Affinity Photo is the one of the best Photoshop alternative and an independent product. It has replaced older programs developed by Serif like Serif PhotoPlus X7 and added many new functionalities and a modern look. But this makeover came with a price: Affinity Photo is no longer free like its predecessors. Still, it has a free trial version you can check out.
Affinity Photo is designed to cover all Photoshop’s features. It provides RAW editing, HDR merging, batch processing, multi layering, professional image retouching, and even PSD files editing.
7. DxO OpticsPro 10
The main functionality of DxO OpticsPro 10 is to process RAW and JPEG files. It provides a default preset that automatically corrects your images as soon as you open them. In addition, it offers the DxO Optics Module that provides corrections based on camera/lens combinations.
8. Acorn (free trial)
Acorn has been launched in 2007 and has won the hearts of many artists since then. In 2015, Acorn was awarded Mac App Store Best. It provides a lot of photo editing features and the latest version added an improved interface, nondestructive filters, several opacity options for Clone tool, crop improvements, and feathering selections. It’s definitely on the right path.
9. PhotoScape X
Best Mac Photo Editing Software
PhotoScape X is a free photo editing software for Mac and Windows that provides quick and fun functionalities. It allows you to cut out pictures, create collages and GIFs, process RAW files, make screen captures, and add a wide variety of filters and effects. Among its best features are MagicColor, an effect that enhances colors, film effects and light leaks, more than 200 figures and 1000 patterns to add to your photos, and more than 40 textures and 20 lens flares.
PhotoScape X also provides drawing tools such as brushes, paint bucket, drawing functions, objects and stickers, and batch processing.
You can find a lot of tutorials and videos on their website. PhotoScape X is a fun editor that can be used by amateurs to create holiday photo albums or by professionals to create fun products.
10. Gimp
Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source photo editing software for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It has almost all the features of Photoshop and even the interface looks a lot like Photoshop. Nevertheless, it’s free, fast, and efficient and can be successfully used by photographers, designers, and artists.
Gimp provides high quality photo editing tools. It works with layers and masks, offers a lot of filters and effects, and allows you to retouch and manipulate photos. It also provides tools for creating icons, graphical design elements, and artworks and color management tools.
It’s frequently updated and improved. If you want to add your own features, you can get the source code and customize it.
11. Pinta
Pinta is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s free and dedicated mostly to drawing but it provides image editing tools too. Among its features for image editing are 35 adjustments and effects, layers, and history tracking.
12. Image Tricks
Image Tricks is a fun image editor that helps you transform common pictures in unique products. It’s a free image editing software for Mac and provides a lot of filters (over 100), photo frames, and image masks.
Image Tricks offers a wide range of filters, from image enhancing to special effects. You can use it to adjust exposure, shadows and highlights, color, tone, and contrast. Filters are customizable and can be mixed using 35 Quartz Compositions. Image Tricks also provides image generators to create random backgrounds and textures.
If you want to create frames for your photos, you should know that Image Tricks offers 20 customizable frames. Fine-tune them to create unique artwork.
13. Darktable
Darktable is an open source image editing software, available for Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, and Solaris. It’s designed as a virtual darkroom and lighttable for photographers and provides tools for managing negatives in a database, professional color management, and non-destructive editing. Darktable supports many file formats and offers smart searching tools. It also has powerful export options and allows you to use Lua to create scripts for repetitive tasks. It even supports live view for some camera brands.
Darktable isn’t just an image editor; it’s an entire virtual studio. It works with layers and masks, offers presets and filters, and provides all the image enhancing tools you might need. Darktable is a great image editor for both digital and analog camera enthusiasts.
14. Polarr
Polarr is an online photo editor that provides artistic tools and effects for image retouching and manipulation. You can apply weather and flare effects, create filters and share them, retouch portraits based on face detection features, create overlays and double exposure effects, and change your photos’ appearance using sliders and simple controls.
Among its features are automatic enhancements, geometric transformations, spot removal, color controls, light effects and filters, vignettes, color curves, borders, and custom filters. Polarr offers a monthly subscription that gives access to advanced features such as LUTs, tools for removing noise, additional blending modes and masks, batch processing, and premium filters.
15. Topaz
Tobaz Labs develops several editing tools for Mac but only five of them can be used for free. They are Adjust AI, Gigapixel AI, Denoise AI, Sharpen AI, and JPEG to RAW AI. All tools use AI algorithms to provide automatic functionalities.
For example, Adjust AI offers automatic image enhancement. It adjusts colors, shadows and highlights, details, and other parameters in a single step. Gigapixel AI enlarges photos up to 600% while preserving image quality and JPEG to RAW AI converts JPEG files to high-quality RAW files. Denoise AI is dedicated to noise removal and aims to recover all the details, while Sharpen AI covers shake reduction and creates sharp images in seconds.
While these tools don’t cover all the requests of a photographer, they are really good at their job and can save you a lot of time and energy. So if you have a precise task to do, give them a try.
Current Stable Version
The current stable release of GIMP is 2.10.22 (2020-10-04).
Pssst... want to check out the GIMP 2.99.4 development release?
Get it on our development downloads page.
Get it on our development downloads page.
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Show downloads for GNU/Linux | OS X | Microsoft Windows | All
GIMP for Unix-like systems
If available, the official package from your Unix-like distribution is the recommended method of installing GIMP!
The flatpak build is new and has known limitations, though it will likely provide faster updates, following GIMP releases closely.
Therefore choose your installation medium according to your needs.
Therefore choose your installation medium according to your needs.
Flatpak build available in: x86-64, ARM and AArch64.
Flatpak additional instructions
The flatpak link above should open your software installer and prompt you to install GIMP. Yet it may not work out-of-the-box on some platforms since the flatpak technology is new. If that is the case, ensure flatpak is installed and if clicking the link still does not prompt to install GIMP, then manually install by command line:
Best Free Photo Editing Software For Mac
flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakref
Once installed, it will be made available exactly the same way as other applications (menus, desktop overview, or any specific application launch process used by your desktop).
If this is not the case, we suggest to report a bug to your desktop or distribution asking for proper support of flatpak. In the meantime, you can still run it by command line (not as the recommended method, only a workaround):
If this is not the case, we suggest to report a bug to your desktop or distribution asking for proper support of flatpak. In the meantime, you can still run it by command line (not as the recommended method, only a workaround):
flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP//stable
This installation will also provide regular update. You don't have to come back on this page and install again (it will not work!) when a new version of GIMP is released. Instead if your distribution and/or desktop has a good support for flatpak, it should propose to perform updates.
Once again, if your distribution does not have proper support, you can always fall back to using the following command line:
Once again, if your distribution does not have proper support, you can always fall back to using the following command line:
flatpak update
Systems without flatpak support
Free Software Photo Editing Mac Download
GIMP can also run on Solaris and is available for the BSD family of systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Please refer to the documentation for your Unix-like system on the installation of software.
GIMP for macOS
Updated on 2021-01-31: GIMP 2.10.22 DMG revision 3
Performance improvements on Big Sur and on previous macOS versions
Performance improvements on Big Sur and on previous macOS versions
The download links above will attempt to download GIMP from one of our trusted mirror servers. If the mirrors do not work or you would rather download directly from our server, you can get the direct download here.
Supported OS: macOS 10.9 Mavericks or over
Since the 2.8.2 version, GIMP runs on OSX natively. No X11 environment is required.
Native build
The official GIMP 2.10 DMG installer (linked above) is a stock GIMP build without any add-ons. Just open the downloaded DMG and drag and drop GIMP into your 'Applications' folder.
The SHA256 hash sum for
gimp-2.10.22-x86_64-3.dmg
is: 844dc06731cbd8ccaa6ffd4e0c74ad49ed1ecb6ae65db71988102acb6c219d56 Check it on VirusTotal: gimp-2.10.22-x86_64-3.dmg
Older Downloads
Previous installers for OSX can be found here: download.gimp.org.
Macports
An easy way to compile and install GIMP and other great Free software on your Mac is by using Macports. The installer allows you to choose from a large directory of packages. To install gimp using Macports, you simply do
sudo port install gimp
once you have Macports installed. Last we checked, the GIMP port file pointed to the current stable release and we have reports from people who've built GIMP successfully this way.
Homebrew
Homebrew is similar to Macports and provides packages (aka formulas) to install, either by compiling them from source or by using pre-made binaries. There are indications that there is now a formula for GIMP, installable with:
brew tap homebrew/cask && brew cask install gimp
. NOTE! Please be aware that it was announced recently that Homebrew is using analytics. To turn this off in homebrew then run:
You can read more about this on Brew Analytics.
brew analytics off
You can read more about this on Brew Analytics.
Fink
Fink is a package repository that offer mostly precompiled binaries. It provides the apt-get command known to e.g. Debian and Ubuntu users, and installing GIMP is as easy as
If there's no binary package, then
sudo apt-get install gimp
once you have installed the Fink installer. If there's no binary package, then
fink install gimp
will compile GIMP from source. Disclaimer: we haven't been able to determine if it is possible to install or build recent GIMP from Fink. Last we checked, GIMP 2.6.12 appears to be the most recent GIMP package that is offered there.
GIMP for Windows
The download links above will attempt to download GIMP from one of our trusted mirror servers. If the mirrors do not work or you would rather download directly from our server, you can get the direct download here.
Supported OS: Windows 7 or over
These links download the official GIMP installer for Windows (~200 MB). The installer contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of GIMP, and will automatically use the appropriate one.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing system. It works by downloading GIMP from a distributed network of BitTorrent users, and may improve download speed dramatically. Choosing this option will download the torrent file for the GIMP installer. You may need to install a torrent client to make use of this file. Learn more...
Hash Sum
The SHA256 hash sum for
gimp-2.10.22-setup.exe
is: f7851c348584ce432dfd8e69b74a168c7dec33ebfddc29c96ad2d6b83aded083 Check it on VirusTotal: gimp-2.10.22-setup.exe
Older Downloads
- Previous v2.10 installers for Windows can be found here: download.gimp.org.
- Previous v2.8 installers for Windows can be found here: download.gimp.org.
GIMP User Manual
These links download language-specific Windows installers for GIMP's local help. By default, they will place the help files with your GIMP installation.
Note: GIMP uses online help by default. If you want to use this local help offline, you will need to change GIMP's help settings.
- In GIMP, select [Edit] > [Preferences] > [Help System]
- For 'User manual', select 'Use a locally installed copy'
- Under 'Help Browser', you can choose between your system's web browser and GIMP's help browser plugin (if available).
See the online help for more settings.
- Chinese Simplified (39 MB)
- Catalan (40 MB)
- Danish (39 MB)
- Dutch (39 MB)
- English (39 MB)
- English (United Kingdom) (39 MB)
- Finnish (39 MB)
- French (41 MB)
- German (41 MB)
- Greek (38 MB)
- Italian (43 MB)
- Japanese (39 MB)
- Korean (40 MB)
- Norwegian Nynorsk (35 MB)
- Portuguese Brazilian (40 MB)
- Romanian (39 MB)
- Russian (40 MB)
- Spanish (40 MB)
Source for version 2.10 (Stable)
GIMP releases available from gimp.org and its mirrors contain the source code and have to be compiled in order to be installed on your system.
For instructions, how to build GIMP from source code, please see this page.
GIMP 2.10.22 is now available at https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/v2.10/. You may want to read the Release Notes for GIMP 2.10.
Free Software Photo Editing Machine
To allow you to check the integrity of the tarballs, here are the hashes of the latest releases:
- gimp-2.10.22.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 2db84b57f3778d80b3466d7c21a21d22e315c7b062de2883cbaaeda9a0f618bb
- gimp-2.10.20.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- e12f9f874b1a007c4277b60aa81e0b67330be7e6153e5749ead839b902fc7b3c
- gimp-2.10.18.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 65bfe111e8eebffd3dde3016ccb507f9948d2663d9497cb438d9bb609e11d716
- gimp-2.10.16.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- cbf9fe9534b913a9487b00cd9710cbc569bfd71fdd2f8c321547701a7d70cbeb
- gimp-2.10.14.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- df9b0f11c2078eea1de3ebc66529a5d3854c5e28636cd25a8dd077bd9d6ddc54
- gimp-2.10.12.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 7d80b58e0784120d57d327294f6a1fda281ff51a61935c2cd764da281acaac71
- gimp-2.10.10.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 12d1f243265c7aee1f2c6e97883a5c90ddc0b19b4346cf822e24adbb6c998c77
- gimp-2.10.8.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- d849c1cf35244938ae82e521b92b720ab48b8e9ed092d5de92c2464ef5244b9b
- gimp-2.10.6.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 4ec8071f828e918384cf7bc7d1219210467c84655123f802bc55a8bf2415101f
- gimp-2.10.4.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- ffb0768de14a2631b3d7ed71f283731441a1b48461766c23f0574dce0706f192
- gimp-2.10.2.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 1cb0baaecdefe44d371a15f2739a1bcbce4682336b4ccf8eb7b587ce52c333eb
- gimp-2.10.0.tar.bz2 (sha256):
- 7fcc96fb88cb0a0595d2610f63a15dec245bb37bf9db527d37a24fb75e547de2
GIMP help files are available at https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/help/.
Please consider using one of the mirrors listed below.
Development snapshots
We now have a separate page for development versions of GIMP.
Want to check out the GIMP 2.99.4 development release?
Get it on our development downloads page.
Get it on our development downloads page.
FTP and Web Mirrors
We had a server move a while back that caused us to lose our existing mirrors (moved from physical to virtual server and to an environment that doesn't allow FTP access). On the plus side, we are now able to offer rsync access to download.gimp.org.
If you are running one of the existing GIMP mirrors, or want to create a new one, please contact us to get your rsync credentials.
Free Photo Editing For Mac
- https://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- ftp://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- rsync://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- Denmark
- https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/
- rsync://mirrors.dotsrc.org/gimp/
- Finland
- https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/
- ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/
- rsync://rsync.nic.funet.fi/ftp/pub/mirrors/ftp.gimp.org/
- France
- http://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/
- rsync://ftp.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/gimp/
- Germany
- https://ftp.fau.de/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.fau.de/gimp/gimp/
- rsync://ftp.fau.de/gimp/
- https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/grafik/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/grafik/gimp/
- https://artfiles.org/gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- Greece
- https://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/gimp/
- Japan
- http://www.ring.gr.jp/pub/graphics/gimp/
- Netherlands
- https://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/gimp/gimp/
- Philippines
- http://mirror.rise.ph/gimp/
- ftp://mirror.rise.ph/gimp/
- Poland
- https://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/
- rsync://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/graphics/gimp/
- gopher://ftp.icm.edu.pl/1/pub/graphics/gimp/
- Sweden
- https://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp
- rsync://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/gimp
- Ukraine
- https://gimp.ip-connect.info/gimp/
- rsync://gimp.ip-connect.info/gimp/
- ftp://gimp.ip-connect.info/mirror/gimp/
- https://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/
- rsync://mirror.klaus-uwe.me/gimp/
- United Kingdom
- https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- rsync://rsync.mirrorservice.org/ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/
- United States
- https://mirror.jaleco.com/gimp/gimp/
- https://mirror.umd.edu/gimp/gimp/
- http://gimp.cp-dev.com/
- ftp://devhost.cp-dev.com/gimp
- rsync://gimp.cp-dev.com/gimp
- https://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/
- rsync://mirrors.syringanetworks.net/gimp/
- https://mirrors.xmission.com/gimp/gimp/
- ftp://mirrors.xmission.com/gimp/gimp/