Want to find the best free scanner software to scan various documents, images, and texts by using external devices like slide scanners?Our collection will help you make the right choice by comparing free programs for Windows and Mac, describing their functionality, and evaluating the pros and cons of each option. Mar 10, 2021 Slack. Since its launch in 2013, Slack has quickly become the first name in business collaboration and messaging, and its free Mac app is the best way to keep in touch with your team. Macs are premium devices with amazing features, awesome apps, and top-notch desktop programs supplied by Apple. But there are loads more third-party apps that can change the way you use your Mac.
- January 02, 2021
- 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 2021 (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.
Here is a list of the best free software for macOS in 2021. If the default apps of Mac can't satisfy your daily needs in video, working, shopping, gaming, etc., find a piece of free Mac software here.
There is still more room to make your already awesome Mac more perfect. For example, you may download some software on your Mac, be it comic book readers, programming editors or media centers, to enhance your Mac experience. Of course, the free software is undoubtedly more favored among Mac users. Among these Mac app, few are gems, but some stand out from the crowd. If you are looking for the best free Mac software to optimize your OS X, here's the best downloads on Mac helping to break down the barrier for better productivity, entertainment, and more.
Best Free Web Browsing Software for Mac
Mozilla Firefox: Each person has their own reasons for loving one browser or another, but on Mac, the premier free, open-source Firefox is more preferred over others. It offers a full range of features but a clean and familiar interface to let you peruse your favorite sites with ease. If you have trouble with certain sites you visit a lot in Safari or other browsers, Firefox may be worth it to try and it is considered by many to be the world's best free browser on Mac OS.
Best Free DVD Ripper Software for Mac
MacX DVD Ripper Mac Free Edition: One of the most popular yet intuitive free DVD ripper software available for Mac. It is good at ripping DVDs to Mac supported formats and app including MP4, MOV, M4V, iTunes, etc for portable playback on iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. So if you want to take your favorite films or TV shows with you, it's the best free Mac software you need.
Tips:In case you've got the latest DVD movies in hand and want to keep them for personal use or even wish to enjoy them on the latest mobile devices like iPhon, iPad, Galaxy, etc without worrying about the curse of copy protection schemes put by DVD publishers, its paid version MacX DVD Ripper Pro will be your best Mac app for ripping DVDs.
Best Free Work Processing Software for Mac
Google Docs: Google Docs' accessibility and non-existent price-tag make it such a compelling and top-rated free Mac software regarding to work processor. You can just navigate to your Drive and type straight away, regardless of what device you're on. It's unnecessary to worry about native apps and all of your progress is saved and synced automatically. As a word processor, it's also offer most of the features found in Microsoft Word.
Best Freeware For Mac
Best Free Video Converter for Mac
MacX Video Converter Free Edition: From time to time, your media player may stray beyond the bounds of playing videos. And best free video converter software for Mac is able to take care of freely converting any videos like MKV, MTS, M2TS, AVCHD, FLV, AVI, MP4, WMV, etc and change these video formats into your device compatible format like MP4, AVI, etc. It is regarded as the best free Mac software with beautiful interface, 100% free and no ads or virus.
Best Free Email for Mac
Thumder Bird: The latest version 12 is a fully featured, safe and functional email client, capable of handling mail efficiently and with style. It remains the best full-fledged email client on Mac you can get for free. Better still, the incredible number of add-ons makes it better and the best free software on Mac.
Best Free YouTube Downloader for Mac
MacX YouTube Downloader: It ranks No.1 under Mac download Channel. The simplicity and reliability make it the best free software for Mac users to download online YouTube videos in whatever format or resolution, including MP4, WebM, FLV, even YouTube HD video. It works on every clip without an error. Whether you want to free download movies, TV shows, music videos or other clips from YouTube, this free software for Mac can accomplish the downloading task in a few seconds only.
Best Free Utility Software for Mac
AppCleaner: What happens most among us is that we usually dislike the app after we downloaded it and the result is we have to remove the software from Mac. Unfortunately, bits and pieces of the app remains on the hard drive. There is no better way to uninstall an app with Freemacsoft's free AppCleaner, which is designed remedy that problem by letting you remove applications and their digital residue and leave no additional files on your system.
Best Free Photo Editor Software for Mac
Image Tricks: Image Tricks is a piece of fun and easy to use free image editor software for Mac OS X. It is based on Apple Core Image filters and includes about 35 Image Units, encouraging experimentation and offering the ability for a wide range of effects to be combined and applied to pictures. For less experienced users who want to achieve creative results, the free Mac software is the best choice thanks to the range of filters and masks that are available.
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Best Free Antivirus Software for Mac
Avast! Free Antivirus: Let's face it: Macs get virus, too. This program is like the blockbuster of antivirus software - minus the whole big-name budget. It is ranked as the No.1 best free Mac software since it is quick and effective, detecting 100% of the Mac malware that went through it as well as those for sifting through email communications, attachments, and various Web activities.
You can visit CNET to get the free Mac antivirus software
Best Free Game for Mac
CSR Racing - Need for Speed is no longer a pricey dream.CSR Racing makes it free to have a street race with a custom car. This free-to-play drag-racing game was first shown on stage at the WWDC on June 11, 2012 and made over $12 million in a month shortly after the freebie lunch in Mac App Store, making it one of the top 10 grossing and best free iPhone games.
Top Free Programs For Mac Like Microsoft Word
In fact, there might be more free apps on your Mac, depending on your field of work. But the abovementioned freeware are the best because they are just the most essential elements on your Mac platforms, whether you are at work, school or home.