Your iPhone and iPad can capture amazing photos, but you can make them look even better with some editing. Tons of apps let you perform professional-level image-editing quickly and conveniently. They’re a great companion for camera apps to add some finishing touches to your photos and develop your skills. Take your pick from these best photo editing apps for iPhone and iPad.
1. Photoshop Express Photo Editor
Tweak Photos is a batch editing app that offers plenty of features to optimize and enhance your images. The app is simple to use thanks to the intuitive layout and breaks it all down in easy-to-follow steps: add photos, apply the desired effects and select your Save options. Pixlr is the Best Mac Photo Editing app for Mac OS Based Entirely Online. Pixlr is an online photo editing app with fast and simple functionality and has enough features to make it a viable option for low- to mid-level photo editing tasks. Create new images using Pixlr, and upload, or grab a photo directly from a website or URL location. Photos on Mac features an immersive, dynamic look that showcases your best photos. Find the shots you’re looking for with powerful search options. Organize your collection into albums, or keep your photos organized automatically with smart albums. Perfect your photos and videos with intuitive built-in editing tools, or use your favorite photo. Easily edit your photos with Canva's photo editor! Add filters, frames, text, and effects with our free online photo editing tool!
Give free rein to your creativity with this renowned photo editor app that’s trusted by millions. It brings professional-level editing tools and capabilities to your iPhone while also being easy-to-use.
It functions as a complete digital studio and offers a full range of photo effects and features. So whether you want to enhance photos, create collages, or add text, you can’t go wrong with this app.
Price: Free (In-app Purchases start from $4.99)
2. PicsArt Photo & Video Editor
Have fun playing around with this feature-packed app that lets you create visual treats. The stickers, collages, doodles, fonts, effects, and tons of other options will surely appeal to your imagination.
You can also make collages and experiment with tools like background blur, blended layers, etc. Moreover, it also doubles up as a versatile video editing app that lets you create engaging content for social media like Facebook, TikTok, Reels, and IGTV.
Price: Free (In-app Purchases start from $2.99)
3. Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor
Adobe Lightroom photo editor is a favorite for Instagrammers because it gives you the power to create a unified aesthetic for your photos by using presets. These consist of filters with unlimited customization options.
Add to this the easy-to-use sliders that make it a breeze to precisely adjust your photos’ colors and brightness. You can strive for perfection by experimenting with versions of your images and then picking your favorite.
Price: Free (Premium Monthly 40GB – $4.99)
4. PicJointer Photo Collage Maker
Make your cherished memories all the more special with the vibrant filters, frames, stickers, fonts, and more in this collage maker app that’s great for Instagram!. You can create masterpieces that will stand out from the crowd on social media in just a few taps.
Easily zoom, mirror, pan, and rotate your images to create unique combinations, just the way you like. Further, there are hundreds of stylish layouts to play around with and customize in fun ways.
Price: Free (Weekly Premium Access – $0.99)
5. VSCO: Photo & Video Editor
Here’s a photo editor for iPhone and iPad that’s become a trendsetter online. It is especially well-known for the analog film effects that lend a vintage look to your photos. Further, you can tinker with tons of settings such as crop, skew, contrast, and saturation to instantly make your images pop.
A notable aspect is the Montage feature that lets you make a moving collage by layering images, shapes, and videos. The app offers ten free presets and over 200 when you upgrade to the paid membership.
Price: Free (Yearly VSCO Membership – $19.99)
6. MOLDIV
Rated as number one photo and video app in 110 countries, MOLDIV is not just a powerful editor but also a top-notch photo collage maker for your iOS device. The 180 filters in 12 themes offer you more options to design your pics to your best liking.
You can choose from different background patterns to enhance the look of photos. There is also a wide range of stickers to give images an adorable look. It lets you combine up to 16 pictures in a collage. More importantly, you can collage your photos like an album, magazine, or even a poster.
Price: Free (In-app Purchases start from $0.99)
7. TouchRetouch
This one’s a unique app that you’ve probably wished for multiple times. It helps you quickly remove unwanted objects from an image while still retaining a natural look. For instance, you can get rid of telephone wires in the background, trash cans, photobombers, etc.
Moreover, you can even touch up faces and remove blemishes or pimples. It’s one of the easiest tools out there to eliminate distractions from photos. Once you start editing, you won’t be able to stop fixing all your images! There’s also a handy tutorial to help out.
Price: $1.99
8. Darkroom: Photo & Video Editor
If you’re a casual photographer but want a power-packed editing app, here’s an ideal option for you. It’s got all the tools to make your photos look just right. You can edit RAW and Portrait images as well as Live Photos,
Best App For Editing Photos On Mac
The most distinctive features include user-friendly tools for Curves and Selective Color. You can even play with your Portrait images’ foreground and background separately to customize the amount of blur, brightness, saturation, and contrast.
Price: Free (In-app Purchases start from $3.99)
9. Afterlight — Photo Editor
Tv on mac app. With high-quality filters and precise editing tools, this app checks all the boxes to give your photos that special touch. Transform images in an instant by choosing from the range of effects and filters.
If you prefer advanced tinkering, achieve precise results with the multitude of adjustment tools, curves, grain, etc. There are also film emulation techniques like changing RBG channels using the Color Shift tool, Chroma tool, and Double Exposure.
Price: Free (Monthly Afterlight Membership – $2.99)
10. Snapseed
This photo editor app from Google offers 29 filters and tools to customize your photos. You can save your favorite edits and conveniently apply them to other images later. It’s especially useful for beginners thanks to the tutorial full of tips and tricks.
Adjust color and exposure to ensure that the correct details stand out in any image. Remove unwanted elements with the Healing feature selectively retouch factors such as brightness and warmth that can truly transform a picture.
Price: Free
11. Superimpose X
As the name hints, this app gives you the power to combine images using multiple layers, blending, and effects. This results in the most imaginative creations that are sure to wow everyone around you.
The interface is incredibly user-friendly, and all your works get saved in a handy session area so that you don’t lose your current project when shifting to another one. With multiple adjustments, brushes, and other tools, this is an excellent app for graphic designers.
Photo Apps For Mac
Price: $4.99
12. Lens Distortions
Create stunning cinematic images using the advanced visual techniques available in this app. It lets you use layering to finetune your compositions into unique works of art. Use gorgeous light and overlays to create visual treats.
Further, you can use over 400 photo effects and tools like masks, gradients, Grain, Shadow, Highlight adjustments, etc. Moreover, the precise techniques ensure that your edits seem natural and never look obvious.
Price: Free (LD Unlimited Monthly Member – $2.99)
Summing Up
Go ahead and experiment with these best photo editing apps on your iPhone and iPad and let us know which amazing creations you make. Share your favorite ones in the comments below.
You may also like to read these:
I have been writing about tech for over 10 years now. I am passionate about helping people solve their tech problems with easy and practical solutions. At iGeeksBlog, I write and edit how-to guides and accessory reviews for all things Apple. My work has previously appeared in Live IT and Woman’s Era magazines. When not working, I love reading and traveling.
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People love photos. We are more visual now than ever. With most of us using smartphones and digital cameras to share with the world everything from what we had for dinner to holiday and birthday memories. We snap, share and print more than ever before.
All of this makes our choice of editing tools something worth thinking about. If you asked any Mac user what they use their computer for, editing photos would come near the top of the list.There are, of course, many tools you can use to edit photos on a Mac, including Apple's own Photos.
Photos is a useful tool, with numerous features that make it easy to resize and retouch an image, or even a batch of images. But it is quite basic, compared to some of the other tools on the market. At the other end of the spectrum is the heavy-duty suite of Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) tools, such as Lightroom and Photoshop. However, not everyone needs something so robust, or has the time to learn. Not every Mac can handle the system requirements either.
A happy medium is to look into a range of photo editing apps. We have included and cover several in this article, connecting them to various aspects of the photo editing process. This way, you get a feel how an app performs when undertaking something you do often when editing, or something you know you need help with. However, Setapp includes all best tools to take your photo editing to the next level photo. Discover some of the best apps in the market, with mentions throughout of strengths and weaknesses.
How to edit pictures on macOS?
You can make your photos look better without diving into any third-party software. Apple’s native Photos and Preview apps have the basic functionality that could save you lots of trouble. You can take a picture and instantly enhance it in Photos – crop, adjust color, or apply filters.
The Preview app has an in-built Markup toolbox with some solid photo editing capabilities. If you need to remove image background or do some color adjustment, this could be your perfect go-to instrument.
But before entrusting photos to a default tool, define what has to be done. The chances are, Apple’s native software might fall short of meeting your needs.
#1: Improve composition: Crop, straighten, rotate, and flip
Getting pictures ready for the web often means cropping and straightening. If you need to get a whole group ready, and the changes are simple and easy to do, the native Mac Photos app can do this.
To crop an image automatically or manually with Photos, open the photo and click Edit > Crop. Choose Auto for automatic cropping or customize aspect ratio if you want to crop a specific area. To manually straighten your photo, click Crop > Dial, and then adjust the area by dragging up and down.
Also, look no further if your task is to rotate or flip an image. Once you launch Photos, choose Image in the top menu bar, and click Rotate clockwise/counterclockwise or Flip vertical/horizontal to apply desired changes.
PhotoBulk gives you the advantage of real-time previewing for all photos in the set you are working on, giving you the ability to automatically edit, crop, watermark and straighten a whole folder of images in minutes.
To crop your photos with CameraBag Pro click the Crop button in the right-hand toolbar (second from bottom).
Batch resize photos in Preview app
Let’s say you want to set custom dimensions for 20 images. It’s very likely, your eyes might betray you if you go through them one by one.
In the Preview app, you can batch resize any number of photos without even opening all of them. Drag images onto Preview icon in your dock and select thumbnails for all by clicking Edit > Select All. Set any dimensions and press OK to see your photos in the new shape.
#2: Adjust lighting and exposure
Back when print film was the only option, waiting for and chasing the light was a challenge every photographer had to struggle with. You could make some changes after a picture was taken, when they were being printed. But you had to be careful. Print film was expensive and you couldn't afford to take dozens of the same shot.
Now you can do a lot more with pictures after they're taken. Editing software won't turn a poor picture into a Pulitzer prize winner, but various apps can be used to improve and enhance the lighting of a picture. Within Photos, for example – Apple's native images app – you can make some changes to the light levels and overall warmth of an image. To quickly fix exposure, brightness, and other lighting values, click Edit and start adjusting by moving sliders to the right or to the left.
Other apps that are good at adjusting the light levels and exposure within an image include the following - and each comes with numerous other handy features:
TouchRetouch - Includes a range of tools for selecting areas you want to erase. TouchRetouch is also great at making color adjustments to your photos to ensure that your final edited work looks the way it should, which includes lighting changes.
PhotoBulk - Mentioned earlier in this article. It can apply lighting adjustments to a whole folder of images in only a few clicks, taking a matter of minutes. Useful if you're someone who regularly needs to make simple, quick adjustments to large numbers of pictures with a short turnaround to think about.
Photolemur - an AI-powered photo enhancer that automates the editing process. This is the first photo enhancer that can actually think for itself. You don't need to learn what the pros know and you don't need to spend hours messing around with sliders and editing every image manually. Using 12 smart AI-powered technologies, Photolemur identifies then makes changes to images, including adjustments to lighting, colors and exposure.
To adjust the lighting and color with CameraBag Pro:
Tip: you can undo any change by pressing the Off icon in the bottom toolbar. You can also undo anything pay pressing Command-Z.
#3: Remove small and big imperfections
Imperfections spoil perfect pictures. It doesn't matter if its dirt or rainwater on a lens, or background distractions such as rubbish or graffiti, it can make it harder to get an image ready to be published or printed. Thankfully, almost every photography app comes equipped with features that make it easier to erase or clone out imperfections of any size.
Quickly retouch and correct Red-Eye in Photos
Apple's Photos app includes a healing brush and red-eye correction tools that enhance your images. To quickly retouch, click on the arrow next to the bandage icon, customize the size of your brush and apply it to a specific area in a photo. For red-eye correction, use the same logic or choose auto-correction.
There's another option, great for beginners: TouchRetouch. It comes with a wide range of easy-to-use features that help you identify and remove imperfections. Including a single click tool for blemishes, and a clone stamp to copy pixels from one part of the picture to cover an imperfection you want removed. You can also crop a section of a photo if it proves too difficult to clone pixels.
#4: Make your photos sharper and reduce noise
You can apply some basic sharpness adjustments and reduce noise in Photos. The same Edit section we’ve discussed previously comes to help here. Upload your photo and click on Noise Reduction – you can either choose auto or customize the value by moving the slider. In the Sharpen section, set custom values for Intensity, Edges, and Falloff.
CameraBag Pro is also useful for making images sharper. It comes with an adjustment tool that identifies where changes are needed within a picture, remedying them automatically.
When making changes to sharpness, you need a tool and a screen that is configured to what your eyes see. A powerful graphics card and high-resolution screen is a must if you are doing this professionally. With the right app supporting this work, they can spot imperfections that you might miss. Producing sharp images has become a necessity when everyone is equipped with smartphones that come equipped with HD screens.
Emulsion is another option for this. Built for Mac users, giving photo editors a powerful and usable creative workspace for enthusiast and professional photographers.
#5: Fix color balance
When making edits to photos, the color balance is worth reviewing to ensure some areas aren't too warm or cold, depending on the look you are aiming for. This is something you can change using Photos.
How to use Selective Color in Photos
Once you open your image with Apple’s native app, click Edit and scroll down to SelectiveColor. In the drop-down menu, you can adjust Hue, Saturation, and Luminance, as well as customize a range of colors, based on your preferences.
More conveniently, you can make changes as part of a series of edits within other photo editing apps, such as Emulsion.
Emulsion provides an immersive environment, created by photographers. https://fishingever140.weebly.com/blog/code-snippets-app-mac. Different areas of the picture can be made warmer, colder, brighter or darker - making small but necessary changes to enhance the original image to stunning effect.
#6: Photo effects and filters
Long before Instagram was popular, photographers have always been keen on using filters. Some of the most basic could apply the warmth of a sunset, or the grainy impurities of older film cameras to modern images. With the right tools, you can do amazing things to images. Even make a picture look as though it was printed on metal.
Add filters to your image with Photos
The easiest way is to apply filters in Photos. Simply click Edit > Filters and fit any of the suggested effects on your photo. The collection is pretty limited though.
Enhance photo effects with Photolemur and CameraBag Pro
Some apps are more equipped than others for applying filters and special effects.
Photolemur can also make enhancements and apply color and texture changes to single or whole batches of images. It can even enhance the color of foliage and the sky.
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CameraBag Pro comes with dozens of filters, including black & white, classic photographic styles, grainy effects, mattes, vintage, numerous types of film stocks, and many more. Well worth testing out if you want to apply a range of styles to your images.
#7: Prepare photos for web or commercial print publishing
And finally, you are going to want to make sure your images are ready for the web, commercial use, or printing. This could include watermarking them to protect your creative and intellectual property. Thankfully, photo apps often give you the ability to ensure RAW files - after edits - are turned into high resolution or web versions (where the file size needs to be much smaller) - and watermarks are applied.
Photobulk can add watermark to portrait, landscape, and cropped photos in a single batch.
That's all.
How to bring an edited image back into your Photos library
Once you’re done with editing, you can Save or Export your image from Photos to desktop. To bring it back to your Photos library, click File > Import or simply drag it into the app.
What is the best app for photo editing?
Every app we've mentioned here has several features worth recommending, including Photos. What you choose partly depends on what you need and how familiar you are with photo editing software. Here is how we would classify the apps mentioned in this article - all of them available from Setapp - alongside Photos, a Mac tool available on every macOS device.
Key Takeaways: Short tips about mentioned apps
Discover all the 6 best photo editing apps, available for Setapp members - this is a quick way to weed out which app is right for you.
TouchRetouch, an app to remove unwanted objects from any photos with the absolute minimum of effort.
One-touch removal tool makes distracting lines vanish in seconds - mark only a section of a line to remove it whole (no need to be precise - the app is so smart that can remove the entire line.)
This app can remove unwanted things from any photo:
Emulsion app is a photo catalog which allows non-destructive editing, metadata manipulation, photo organization, and more:
CameraBag Pro is the robust editing app to apply, tweak, and compare professional filters and adjustments across your photos.
Photolemur, an AI-powered photo enhancer that automates the editing process.
Best App For Photo Editing On Mac Free
This app makes almost any photo look better without manual editing, as well as allows to automatically enhance a batch of images at once with drag-and-drop simplicity. The app has 12 smart technologies ranging from color recovery and exposure compensation to smart noise reduction to automatically analyze and adjust your photos.
Photobulk, an app for batch editing: add text/image watermarks, rename, resize, compress photos, and optimize them for the web in a click.
It can be a hard choice, and different photographers - amateurs and pros will have different opinions on each app. It could be worth downloading a few from Setapp to find which you prefer, trying out different features on various aspects of photo editing.
Free Photo Editing AppsThese might also interest you:
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