Which are the best free photo editors for Mac?

[Panama Hat & Camera]

Which are the best free photo editors for Mac? I am a Windows and Ubuntu user and I'm trying to help a friend that is learning about photography, but has a MacBook.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Antonio.

[skitterbug]

Hi Antonio,

You could have your friend try Gimp - http://www.gimp.org. It is an excellent tool but I think it has a pretty tough learning curve. I decided to put some $$ out and get Adobe Lightroom 6 (not the online deal but a software application). I like using it. And I use the tools in Mac's "Photo" when I'm only dealing with photos for myself and not being overly serious about anything. Thinking about it, I'm not really too serious about anything anyway!
Hope this helps a bit!

Sandy

Which are the best free photo editors for Mac? I am a Windows and Ubuntu user and I'm trying to help a friend that is learning about photography, but has a MacBook.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Antonio.

[Hevii Guy]

Fortunately, we Mac Users have a good variety of FOSS tools available to us.

I also use GIMP for much of my post-processing. Rather than run the "official" dmg version which is often not up-to-date, I use the ones packaged by Partha here. Another benefit is that they are already bound with G'MIC.

Here are some of the others which I use:
RAW Processing: Darktable
Photo Management: Digikam
Tethering: Sofortbild
HDR Processing: Luminance HDR
HDR Processing (RAW): HDRMerge
Panorama Stitching: Hugin
Exposure Blending: EnfuseGUI

[Black Pearl]

Nothing wrong with the Apple Photos app that comes already installed for getting you started.

[plugsnpixels]

I have all the "big boy" tools from Adobe, etc. but always keep GIMP around because it's a cool concept for the "price". Plus it's compatible with layered PS files (import/export) which is great for students and such.

Thanks for the heads-up about McGimp (I just added it to my collection). I read elsewhere that the official gimp.org build is more stable than others, but haven't proved it myself.

I run Windows as a VM on my Macs and have the free paint.net installed, which is a nice basic layer-compatible app.