Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing, and its name has become genericised as a verb although Adobe disapproves of such use.
Raster graphics editors can be compared by many variables, including availability.
Aperture is a discontinued professional image organizer and editor developed by Apple between 2005 and 2015 for the Mac, as a professional alternative to iPhoto.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, usually called Lightroom, is an image organization and processing application developed by Adobe. It is licensed as a standalone subscription or as part of Creative Cloud. It is supported on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and tvOS. Its primary uses include importing, saving, viewing, organizing, tagging, editing, and sharing large numbers of digital images. Lightroom's editing functions include white balance, presence, tone, tone curve, HSL, color grading, detail, lens corrections, and calibration manipulation, as well as transformation, spot removal, red eye correction, graduated filters, radial filters, and adjustment brushing. The name Lightroom is a play on the darkrooms used for processing film.
Seashore is a free and open-source image editor for macOS, similar to Photoshop/GIMP, with a simpler Cocoa user interface. Seashore uses GIMP's native file format, XCF, and has support for a handful of other graphics file formats, including full support for TIFF, PNG, JPEG, JPEG2000, and HEIC and read-only support for BMP, PDF, SVG and GIF. Seashore offers fewer features than Photoshop/GIMP, but is intended to be easy-to-use and to run natively on macOS. It includes layers, alpha channel support, gradients and transparency effects, anti-aliased brushes, tablet support and plug-in filters.
WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency.
Paintbrush is a raster graphics editor for Mac OS X. It aims to replace MacPaint, an image editor for the classic Mac OS last released in 1988. It also is an alternative to Microsoft Paint. It has basic raster image editing capabilities and a simple interface designed for ease of use. It exports as PNG, JPG, BMP, GIF, and TIFF. The application also is often used for pixel art because of its grid option, and is not made for large scale images or GIMP or Photoshop-like editing on pictures or photographs.
Capture NX is a photo editing computer program developed by Nik Software in partnership with Nikon for macOS and Microsoft Windows.
Facetune is a photo and video editing application used to edit, enhance, and retouch photos on a user's iOS or Android device created by Lightricks. The app is often used for portrait and selfie editing.
Affinity Designer is a vector graphics editor developed by Serif for macOS, iPadOS, and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the "Affinity trinity" alongside Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. Affinity Designer is available for purchase directly from the company website and in the Mac App Store, iOS App Store, and the Microsoft Store.
Affinity Photo is a raster graphics editor developed by Serif Ltd. for iPadOS, macOS, and Windows, alongside Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. Development of Affinity Photo started in 2009 as a raster graphics editor for macOS. Its first version reached general availability in 2015 with the Windows version launched a year later. It is a successor to PhotoPlus which Serif discontinued in 2017.
Artipic is a graphics editor developed for Microsoft Windows. An older version for macOS is still available but unsupported.
Bloom Image Editor, formerly known as Ormr, is a non-destructive, node-based vector and raster image editor for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Bloom features selection, painting, retouching, color correction tools, as well as layer-based image editing. Every operation is preserved individually and is editable at any point in time.
Acorn is a raster graphic editor for macOS developed by August Mueller of Flying Meat Inc, based out of Mukilteo, Washington, United States. Acorn was first released on September 10, 2007 and was built upon the framework of a previous image editing application of Flying Meat Inc., FlySketch.
AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an open, royalty-free image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF container format. It competes with HEIC, which uses the same container format built upon ISOBMFF, but HEVC for compression. Version 1.0.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019.
LiveQuartz is a basic graphic editor developed for macOS by Romain Piveteau.
Pixelmator Pro is a photo, video, and vector graphic editor developed by Pixelmator Team for macOS as part of its Pixelmator set of apps. As a Mac-only app, Pixelmator Pro relies heavily on technologies from Apple platforms such as Metal, CoreML, Core Image, AVFoundation, GCD, and SwiftUI.
Pixelmator is a series of graphics editors developed by Pixelmator Team for macOS and iOS. Pixelmator apps are largely built on Apple-specific technologies such as CoreML and Metal. Pixelmator uses a proprietary format across their apps (.PXM), but support a variety of file types including Photoshop, RAW, and WebP. All Pixelmator apps support image editing, but Pixelmator Pro also supports video and vector graphics.
