Please help me find a photo editing app for a Mac with certain features.

July 6, 2020 3:08 PM

My kid wants a photo editing app to replace their beloved, but no longer supported, app, Enlight (the earlier version). They want particular a particular feature but the only application they've seen that has it, Affinity Photo, costs $50. This could be on either a Mac or an iPhone.

The feature they want is called "reshape." It's a tool that lets you reshape the photo as if you're pulling it -- it isn't just cropping it to a certain size. I'd rather spend more like $10 than $50, but I do want to pay something -- I don't want it to have ads. We're in the US.

posted by The corpse in the library to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

It's not much cheaper but Pixelmator Pro does a version of this. It's $40 for Mac. There's a 14-day trial. I just downloaded it and played with it. Load an image, go under the Edit menu to "Transform," and there are a bunch of options that are very similar to what Affinity Photo does. Your kid may also want to go to Tools -> Reshape and try the four options there. They behave like image-altering plugins directly on parts of the image rather than altering the whole perspective or orientation of the image. (Those last four are the kind of editing tools Instagram "stars" use to make their waists look more trim or their muscles a little more buff.)

There is a $5 version for iOS but I don't know if does what the Mac version does.
posted by Mo Nickels at 3:40 PM on July 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Another option for the Mac is the rather lovely open source software Krita which is used by digital painters but can also be used for image editing. Its transformation method is different still! However, it is completely cost-free, though you can make a donation if you wish. I just downloaded it, too, and played with it.

Load an image. Then select the layer transformation tool. You can either hit command T on the keyboard, or choose the tool's icon — it's the eighth one down in the first column of tool icons and when you hold your mouse over it for a second or two the tooltip appears "transform a layer or a selection (Ctrl + T)." (Note: anywhere in the interface it says to use "Ctrl" on the keyboard, instead use the Mac's command key).

Now you see the selection corners on the image. Of course you can drag the corners, but if you carefully hold the mouse on the image's edges or just outside the images, the cursor changes and now different things happen when you drag, including skewing and turning the image. It's not as elegant as other apps but perhaps it will serve. Look for the up-down cursor for skewing and the half-circle-arrows cursor for rotating.
posted by Mo Nickels at 3:56 PM on July 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Glimpse isn't available for OS X yet however the program it was forked from is 99.9% the same except for it's name. If you can live with the name the originating program has a native OS X build. Free in both senses. Both support this feature.

There is also an older fork of that program called Seashore which is for Mac OS and available on the Apple store.

All three of these programs are going to be like hitting a fly with a sledge hammer if he only uses that one feature but they are all free and at least the first two do not have ads.
posted by Mitheral at 6:06 PM on July 6, 2020

Acorn will do this for $30 in the Mac App store. It's a great simple image editor, that feels like a slightly glitchy version of Photoshop. It calls the feature "Perspective Transform" and you get to it via the Layer menu.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:25 PM on July 6, 2020