- PDF-Images is a tool for Mac OS X that extracts images from PDF files. It is free, as in 'there are no watermarks and no other limits whatsoever'. PDF-Images is based on pdfimages, a Linux package by The Poppler Developers.
- Free Vector Graphics Software Design with Vectr. Vectr is a free graphics software used to create vector graphics easily and intuitively. It's a simple yet powerful web and desktop cross-platform tool to bring your designs into reality.
Check out our free graphics software for all your digital photo editing needs. Easily compress or convert any image file with these award-winning programs. And an essential tool for all types of graphic design projects. Download for Windows| Download for Mac. Graphic design software for expressing your creative ideas, making a logo.
There are dozens of free photo editors out there, so we've hand-picked the very best so you can make your pictures look amazing without paying a penny.
We've spent hours putting a huge range of photo editors to the test, and picked out the best ones for any level of skill and experience. From powerful software packed with features that give Photoshop a run for its money to simple tools that give your pictures a whole new look with a couple of clicks, there's something for everyone.
Many free photo editors only offer a very limited selection of tools unless you pay for a subscription, or place a watermark on exported images, but none of the tools here carry any such restrictions. Whichever one you choose, you can be sure that there are no hidden tricks to catch you out.
1. GIMP
The best free photo editor for advanced image editing
GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the best free photo editor around. It's packed with the kind of image-enhancing tools you'd find in premium software, and more are being added every day.
The photo editing toolkit is breathtaking, and features layers, masks, curves, and levels. You can eliminate flaws easily with the excellent clone stamp and healing tools, create custom brushes, apply perspective changes, and apply changes to isolated areas with smart selection tools.
GIMP is an open source free photo editor, and its community of users and developers have created a huge collection of plugins to extend its utility even further. Many of these come pre-installed, and you can download more from the official glossary. If that's not enough, you can even install Photoshop plugins.
2. Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 2019
Fuss-free photo editing with automatic optimization tools
If you've got a lot of photos that you need to edit in a hurry, Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 2019 could be the tool for you. Its interface is clean and uncluttered, and utterly devoid of ads (although you'll need to submit an email address before you can start using it).
Importing pictures is a breeze, and once they've been added to the pool, you can select several at once to rotate or mirror, saving you valuable time. You can also choose individual photos to enhance with the software's one-click optimization tool. In our tests this worked particularly well on landscapes, but wasn't always great for other subjects.
If you want to make manual color and exposure corrections, there are half a dozen sliders to let you do exactly that. It's a shame you can't also apply the same color changes to a whole set of pictures at once, but this is otherwise a brilliant free photo editor for making quick corrections.
For more advanced editing, check out Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 7 – the premium version of the software with enhanced optimization tools.
3. Canva
Professional-level photo editing and templates in your browser
Canva is a photo editor that runs in your web browser, and is ideal for turning your favorite snaps into cards, posters, invitations and social media posts. If you're interested in maintaining a polished online presence, it's the perfect tool for you.
Canva has two tiers, free and paid, but the free level is perfect for home users. Just sign up with your email address and you'll get 1GB free cloud storage for your snaps and designs, 8,000 templates to use and edit, and two folders to keep your work organized.
You won't find advanced tools like clone brushes and smart selectors here, but there's a set of handy sliders for applying tints, vignette effects, sharpening, adjusting brightness, saturation and contrast, and much more. The text editing tools are intuitive, and there's a great selection of backgrounds and other graphics to complete your designs.
4. Fotor
One-click enhancements to make your photos shine in seconds
Fotor is a free photo editor that's ideal for giving your pictures a boost quickly. If there's specific area of retouching you need doing with, say, the clone brush or healing tool, you're out of luck. However, if your needs are simple, its stack of high-end filters really shine.
There's a foolproof tilt-shift tool, for example, and a raft of vintage and vibrant colour tweaks, all easily accessed through Fotor's clever menu system. You can manually alter your own curves and levels, too, but without the complexity of high-end tools.
Fotor's standout function, and one that's sorely lacking in many free photo editors, is its batch processing tool – feed it a pile of pics and it'll filter the lot of them in one go, perfect if you have a memory card full of holiday snaps and need to cover up the results of a dodgy camera or shaky hand.
5. Photo Pos Pro
Advanced photo editing tools packaged in a simple interface
Photo Pos Pro isn't as well known as Paint.net and GIMP, but it's another top-quality free photo editor that's packed with advanced image-enhancing tools.
This free photo editor's interface is smarter and more accessible than GIMP's array of menus and toolbars, with everything arranged in a logical and consistent way. If it's still too intimidating, there's also an optional 'novice' layout that resembles Fotor's filter-based approach. The choice is yours.
The 'expert' layout offers both layers and layer masks for sophisticated editing, as well as tools for adjusting curves and levels manually. You can still access the one-click filters via the main menu, but the focus is much more on fine editing.
6. Paint.NET
Looking a little dated, but still a dependable all-rounder
More is not, believe it or not, always better. Paint.NET's simplicity is one of its main selling points; it's a quick, easy to operate free photo editor that's ideal for trivial tasks that don't necessarily justify the sheer power of tools like GIMP.
Don't let the name fool you, though. This isn't just a cheap copy of Microsoft's ultra-basic Paint – even if it was originally meant to replace it. It's a proper photo editor, just one that lands on the basic side of the curve.
Paint.NET’s interface will remind you of its namesake, but over the years, they’ve added advanced editing tools like layers, an undo history, a ton of filters, myriad community-created plugins, and a brilliant 3D rotate/zoom function that's handy for recomposing images.
7. PhotoScape
Raw image conversion, batch processing and much more
PhotoScape might look like a rather simple free photo editor, but take a look at its main menu and you'll find a wealth of features: raw conversion, photo splitting and merging, animated GIF creation, and even a rather odd (but useful) function with which you can print lined, graph or sheet music paper.
Free Graphics Tool
The meat, of course, is in the photo editing. PhotoScape's interface is among the most esoteric of all the apps we've looked at here, with tools grouped into pages in odd configurations. It certainly doesn't attempt to ape Photoshop, and includes fewer features.
We'd definitely point this towards the beginner, but that doesn't mean you can't get some solid results. PhotoScape's filters are pretty advanced, so it's if good choice if you need to quickly level, sharpen or add mild filtering to pictures in a snap.
8. Pixlr X
A comprehensive browser-based photo editor for quick results
Pixlr X is the successor to Pixlr Editor, which was one of our favorite free online photo editors for many years.
Pixlr X makes several improvements on its predecessor. For starters, it's based on HTML5 rather than Flash, which means it can run in any modern browser. It's also slick and well designed, with an interface that's reminiscent of Photoshop Express, and a choice of dark or light color schemes.
With Pixlr X, you can make fine changes to colors and saturation, sharpen and blur images, apply vignette effects and frames, and combine multiple images. There's also support for layers, which you won't find in many free online photo editors, and an array of tools for painting and drawing. A great choice for even advanced tasks.
9. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor
A convenient way to correct lighting and exposure problems
As its name suggests, Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is a trimmed-down, browser-based version of the company's world-leading photo editing software. Perhaps surprisingly, it features a more extensive toolkit than the downloadable Photoshop Express app, but it only supports images in JPG format that are below 16MB.
Again, this is a Flash-based tool, but Adobe provides handy mobile apps for all platforms so you won’t miss out if you’re using a smartphone or tablet.
This free online photo editor has all the panache you’d expect from Adobe, and although it doesn’t boast quite as many tools as some of its rivals, everything that’s there is polished to perfection. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor is a pleasure to use. Its only drawbacks are the limits on uploaded file size and types, and lack of support for layers.
10. PiZap
A fun photo editor for preparing your pictures for social media
Free online photo editor PiZap is available in both HTML5 and Flash editions, making it suitable for any device. You can choose to work with a photo from your hard drive, Facebook, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Search, or a catalog of stock images. This is an impressive choice, though some of the stock images are only available to premium subscribers, and you'll need to watch out for copyright issues if you use a pic straight from Google Images.
piZap’s editing interface has a dark, modern design that makes heavy use of sliders for quick adjustments – a system that works much better than tricky icons and drop-down menus if you’re using a touchscreen device.
When you’re done, you can share your creation on all the biggest social media networks, as well as piZap’s own servers, Dropbox and Google Drive. Alternatively, you can save it to your hard drive, send it via email, or grab an embed code. You can only export your work in high quality if you’ve opened your wallet for the premium editor, but for silly social sharing that’s unlikely to be a problem.
- Get your videos YouTube-ready with the best video editing software
Over the course of writing guides to boosting Mac and hard drive speeds, I’ve discussed the incredible performance improvements Macs can get from simple upgrades — adding RAM, choosing a fast solid state drive (SSD) as an internal or external drive, and even running a simple disk optimizer tool. But there’s a common question that comes up when considering upgrades: how can you tell in advance how big of an improvement you’ll actually see?
The answer: benchmarking tools. Many apps help you measure the speed of various components of your Mac, and with a little help, you can estimate the performance jumps you’ll see after an upgrade. Below, I’ll introduce three of the best free Mac benchmarking tools, and explain how they work…
For Hard Drive Speeds: BlackMagic Disk Speed Test
Measuring the speed of your hard drive is the easiest benchmarking process around, and the best tool I’ve found for that task is the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test by BlackMagic Design. Completely free to download from the Mac App Store, this app has only a single window and very few settings to worry about. If you have only one hard drive, you can just hit the Start button after you’ve quit all of your other apps; otherwise, you can access settings by pressing the gear button between the two speedometer circles, or use the File and Stress menus at the top of the screen. Here, you can choose the right hard drive to test, and the level of stress for the testing (1GB is least, 5GB is most).
BlackMagic designed this app to help video editors determine whether their hard drives could handle various video files, ranging from basic, low-bandwidth NTSC videos to more demanding 1080p videos with higher frame rates and color depths. Unless you’re editing video, those details (summarized in the Will it Work? and How Fast? charts below the speedometers) won’t matter at all to you. You only need to focus on the two big gauges.
The drive’s Read speed is on the right, with the Write speed on the left, respectively giving you a sense of how fast apps and videos will load, and how fast things you create will be written to the drive. Speeds in the 25-30 Megabyte per second (MB/s) range are slow — what you’d expect from an external hard drive connected via USB 2.0. The same drive placed inside an iMac, or connected via USB 3.0, could reach four or five times that speed — around 100-120MB/second.
But pop an SSD like the top-selling Samsung 850 EVO I’ve recommended into the same iMac, and these are the kind of speeds you can see: around 500MB/second, five times faster than a traditional hard drive. This is the sort of speed difference that’s dramatic, instantly noticeable, and likely to really improve your day to day Mac experience. Outstanding SSD performance is the key reason Apple has switched all of its MacBook laptops away from traditional hard drives to SSDs, and is beginning the same process with its desktop machines.
For Overall Computer Performance: Geekbench 3
Although there are a bunch of different “total computer benchmarking” apps out there, the one that’s easiest to recommend is Primate Labs’ Geekbench 3, since it’s partially free, works across multiple platforms (including Macs, iOS devices, PCs, and Android devices), and lets you compare one computer’s results to other computers and other users. Like Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, Geekbench 3 is designed to be simple to use — choose one setting, make sure your other apps are closed, and hit the “Run Benchmarks” button shown above. There’s only one hitch: the free version of Geekbench 3 only runs older (“32-bit”) benchmarks on your Mac; to see the superior performance you’d get from newer (“64-bit”) apps, you’ll need the full $10 version from the Mac App Store.
Graphic Design Programs For Mac
I could go into a lot of detail regarding Geekbench’s results, and there are a lot of them, sorted into three main categories, each with multiple tests. But the key numbers you need to know are the big two at the top: Single-Core Score and Multi-Core Score. Compared against results from other machines, Single-Core gives you a relative sense of how fast your Mac performs under most situations, when only one processing core is handling all of the Mac’s work. Multi-Core shows you how the Mac does when it’s being pushed to its limits and all of its processing cores are sharing a bigger workload at once.
The scores above show how my 2011 four-core iMac compares to my 2013 two-core MacBook Pro; under most circumstances, they’ll feel identical (3166 is only 3% faster than 3078), but when given big tasks to perform, the four-core iMac will deliver nearly twice the performance of the two-core MacBook Pro. Your numbers will vary a little bit from test to test; running the test multiple times will give you an average.
Geekbench offers a web-based Browser that lets you compare performance between your own machines, as well as the key hardware components found in each computer. You can see above that the differences between my iMac and MacBook Pro aren’t merely in their numbers of processor cores; look closely and you’ll note that each iMac core is faster, and the iMac has more memory. On the other hand, the MacBook Pro’s processor is newer, and its memory is faster.
The critical benefit Geekbench offers is the ability to compare your results against ones submitted by other users. Doing a search of the Geekbench 3 database for, say, “iMac 27” would let you see how various 27-inch iMacs compare with your current computer. That way, if you’re going to shop for a new Mac, you can get a sense of the Single-Core and Multi-Core performance other users are getting from their machines. Do a little math (divide the new machine’s Single-Core number by your old machine’s Single-Core number) and you’ll get a sense of the performance boost. A 27″ Retina iMac with a score of 3980 would be around 26% faster than my current machine (3166) at most tasks. That’s a big jump by Mac standards, and unlike the 5%-8% benefits typically seen in annual Mac updates, one worth paying for.
Buying an all-new Mac is a big step, though, so you might prefer something simpler and cheaper, like adding extra RAM. Although that can deliver excellent performance improvements at a relatively low cost, Geekbench’s Memory test doesn’t show you the improvement you’d get from more RAM — its benchmark only shows the RAM’s raw speed, which typically can’t be improved over the top-specced RAM Apple ships in its Macs. Whatever RAM you buy as an upgrade will match the existing RAM’s speed, but the performance improvements you see will be real, including much-reduced hard disk accessing and better CPU utilization.
For Video Card Performance: Cinebench R15
Last but not least is Maxon’s Cinebench R15, a free tool that tests two things: graphics card performance using OpenGL, and CPU performance. The CPU test shown above checks how fast your computer’s main processor can render a photorealistic 3-D scene containing 2,000 objects with lights, reflections, shadows, and shaders. This test starts with a black window and fills out the image square by square over the course of several minutes; the higher the “point” total, the faster your CPU is. Like the other benchmarks, speeds in Cinebench R15 can be reduced if other apps are running.
The more distinctive benchmark is the OpenGL test, which uses three complex 3-D cars interacting on dimly-lit city streets to test your graphics card’s ability to handle nearly 1 million polygons at once with various special effects active. It’s a cool demo to watch, and the results will be displayed in frames per second (fps). My iMac hit around 68fps, versus around 23fps on my MacBook Pro. Doing a little research online, I found scores suggesting that the demo Mac Pros in Apple Stores were getting around 77fps last year.
That’s the major hitch with Cinebench: it’s hard to meaningfully compare your numbers against other Macs unless you search Google for “Cinebench R15 score” and the specific Mac you want to compare with. Maxon does include a small sampling of different OpenGL scores within a “Ranking” box, but all that tells you is that your machine (in orange) with X cores (C) and Y threads (T) running at a given GHz speed with a certain graphics card achieved Z frames per second. This isn’t “actionable information” in that you can’t do anything with it — most people won’t even be able to tell which Macs those specs pertain to. And unless you have a Mac Pro, the only current Mac with a replaceable video card, your only option to improve graphics card performance is to buy a new Mac.
My advice: if you’re interested in improving your current Mac’s performance, consider boosting the RAM and/or putting in an SSD. CPU and GPU improvements call for an all-new machine, and Geekbench is the best way to determine whether the performance differences will be meaningful enough to justify the added price.
More Great Ways To Improve Your Mac
To make the most of your Mac (or pretty much any other Apple device), I’ve written quite a few How-To and Best of guides, as well as reviews of worthwhile accessories. Read more of my guides and reviews for 9to5Mac here (and don’t forget to click on Older Posts at the bottom of the page to see everything)!