Transform your photos into unique, high-resolution artwork—with BeCasso’s powerful combination of artificial intelligence, neural networks, and artistic photo filters. BeCasso is a professional high-quality, high-resolution picture editing app that allows you to transform your snaps and photos into. Read next: Best cheap photo editing software for Mac. How to use hidden paint app on Mac: Open Preview. The Paint-style features in Preview are most obviously useful for making simple annotations. Apple’s Photos (Built-in app) Apple’s Photos app is included for free on all recently released Macs.
- 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)
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)
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.
9. PhotoScape X (Free)
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.
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If you've been using PCs all your life and have recently switched to a Mac, you wouldn't miss a lot. But you've probably felt that there is one missing program which has inadvertently won the hearts of PC users worldwide — Microsoft Paint.
It's true that objectively MS Paint is not the best raster graphic editor around. It's clunky, slow, not accessible to beginners, and at the same time doesn't offer enough for pro-level users. Still, Windows Paint might be the most widely used graphic software around. And lots of people wish there was Paint for Mac as well.
Is there Paint for Mac? Well, not really. Official Microsoft Paint for Mac doesn't exist. But there are in fact more accessible alternatives that allow you to do better things and present much less of a learning curve at the same time. One of them is already installed on your Mac by default, only that its toolkit is hidden inside the app called Preview.
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Best MS Paint Alternatives For Mac
Since its inception, Mac has been the operating system of choice for creative enthusiasts and professionals around the globe. So it's no wonder that macOS is the primary destination for the best new drawing, painting, image and video editing, and sketching applications.
As mentioned above, beginning your journey with Preview will cover all your basic needs that Windows Paint used to do. To get a specific result, you can try apps with more to offer, such as Tayasui Sketches for painting or Capto for working on images.
Annotate and edit images with ease
Not everyone knows that Mac's default Preview application is not only an image viewer but also provides a basic painting and annotating toolkit that's just enough for it to be a decent substitute for Microsoft Paint for Mac. Here's how to access it.
- Right-click on any image and choose Open With > Preview
- Locate the marker icon in the upper-right corner of the app window
- Click on it to open all available tools
All the tools in Preview are fairly close to what you used to see in MS Paint. There are three broad functionality groups separated by vertical dividers: selection, creation, and modification.
Using Preview is just as intuitive as it was with MS Paint. Let's say you want to draw a circle around an object on one of your images to bring someone's attention to it:
- Select the Sketch tool (third from the left)
- Simply draw around the object. By default Preview will autocomplete the shape you've drawn, getting it to a perfect oval, square, or triangle. You can, however, choose to keep the line freehand by selecting such option from a small pop-up menu.
- If you want to modify your line, choose Shape Style (fourth from the right) to pick the appropriate line thickness and Border Color (third from the right) to alter the color of the line itself
- And yes, Preview has the bucket tool as well. If you've drawn an enclosed shape, you can select the Fill Color tool (second from the right) and choose to fill your object with any color.
Just like that feel free to explore all the other tools Preview has to offer, such as Shapes, Text, Sign, Adjust Color, etc. We guarantee you won't miss MS Paint one bit.
But why limit yourself in the first place? Since you're switching to a new platform altogether, pick the tools that will serve you in any situation, such as producing a high-quality tutorial, for example. For this, you'd need a more powerful app, such as Capto.
Unlike Preview and Windows Paint, which offer bare-minimum functionality in terms of annotating your images, Capto is the top app for recording your screen, whether it's just grabbing a screenshot or making a video, and modifying all the resulting files afterward.
Starting with Capto couldn't be easier:
- In the app's Organizer window, where all Capto's images and videos are kept, you can either grab a new screenshot using the tools in the top bar (Screen, Area, Window, etc.) or import any image you already have on your Mac just by dragging and dropping it onto the app's window.
- To modify an image, double-click on it to open
- Choose the tool you need from the left-side bar. Beside the basic tools you might be familiar with from MS Paint and Preview, Capto features more advanced ones, such as Spotlight, Numbering, Blur, and Callout.
- To use a Numbering tool, for example, simply select it from the menu, choose the Type, Style, and Color, and leave the sequence of numbers on your image by clicking on the appropriate locations
Try any other features offered by Capto in a similar way. This app is indispensable in nearly any line of work when we think about the easy ways of explaining to our colleagues how to do something. Taking 45 seconds to create a quick tutorial on Capto can save you hours of walking around the office or endless instant messages.
One of the best features of Capto, and one of the ones you wish Microsoft Paint for Mac would have, is its extensive sharing capabilities. As the app is mostly used to show someone how to do something, you also need an easy way to send the explanation to them.
To share your creation with Capto:
- When you're done with your image, click Share in the top-right corner of the app's window
- By default, you have a selection of Mail, Messages, or AirDrop. Choose one of these or click Configure for more options.
- In the new menu, select one of the options you'd like to set up, from Dropbox to your own server, and follow the login instructions on the right. Now you'll be able to share images from Capto through your favorite platform in no time.
Finally, don't forget that Capto goes beyond images and lets you record, edit, and share video tutorials as well. The process is largely the same. Just choose Record from the top menu bar to start, use the same tools to edit, and share in the preferred way you've set up above.
Paint at any level right from the get-go
When it comes to drawing and painting, a lot of people are used to MS Paint mostly for the lack of accessible alternatives. Macs, on the other hand, have plenty. And one of them is Tayasui Sketches.
Tayasui Sketches is a lot more than just Microsoft Paint for Mac. It combines natural drawing experience you're so used to with a near unlimited selection of beautiful digital brushes and colors.
Starting with Tayasui Sketches is just as easy as picking up a pen in real life — simply choose the paper type, select one of the tools in the left sidebar, and begin to draw.
Quickly you'll realize how none of the MS Paint's artistic brushes can compare to the flow and realistic beauty of the tools available in Tayasui Sketches. At the same time, the app doesn't require you to go through lengthy workshops and spend hours in settings, which positively distinguishes it from other professional alternatives.
It's likely that Tayasui Sketches will serve you for many years to come. It remains an indispensable tool for lots of professional artists. And even if you decide to switch to a different professional drawing app in the future, the foundational functionality would probably remain the same.
Pick the right tool for the job
As you can see, there is no need to try to download Microsoft Paint for Mac as soon as you discover there is no exact counterpart within macOS. There are plenty of tools that copy and even surpass both the functionality and ease of use that MS Paint used to offer.
Sometimes you might be using Preview for the simplest tasks around. More likely, you might find yourself relying on Capto more and more, as its diverse toolkit is able to perform the majority of annotating and editing tasks at the highest level in no time. Finally, when you feel really creative, you can easily switch to Tayasui Sketches and really express that creativity with beautiful pens and watercolors.
Best of all, these apps are not going to set you back financially at all. Preview is already installed on your Mac by default, and Tayasui Sketches and Capto are both available for a free trial through Setapp, a platform of over 150 useful apps and utilities for any scenario. Let your creative side shine!
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
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