APP STORE AWARDS

Mac App of the Year

Photomator

Your photo editing powerhouse

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This machine-learning-powered photo app wowed us with artful edits we thought only experienced pros could pull off.

– App Store editors

Your Mac is the best place to edit photos, so it takes a lot for an app to stand out. The most powerful apps can be complex and difficult to master; those that are easy to use tend to limit what you can do. Photomator hits the sweet spot. It made us feel like professional photo editors – without the learning curve.

The app’s machine learning (ML) tools make difficult or tedious tasks enjoyable. When a photo we snapped of a gorgeous sunset turned out too dim and with muted colours, the Auto Enhance feature brought it vividly – and realistically – back to life. We easily removed the strangers who wandered into an otherwise perfect family portrait by painting over them using the Repair tool.

Auto Enhance instantly corrects common colour and lighting issues – such as this evening photo that turned out much bluer than reality.

And when when we weren’t sure how best to crop a shot of Yosemite Valley we took from Glacier Point, ML Crop suggested the most artistic framing – based on millions of professional photos – for the aspect ratio of our choice.

Removing colour banding, upscaling resolution, reducing noise – in Photomator they all happen like magic with just a click or two, while advanced users can fine-tune each tool’s effect. And the app’s ML features aren’t limited to fixing photos. Using Match Colors, we were able to take a wedding photo that had that perfect golden-hour lighting – and apply the same colour balance, contrast and exposure to other shots we took that day.

It’s easy (and fun!) to see how an adjustment you made improves your image: drag the slider or press “\” to toggle between before and after.

We also love the app’s many pro-level tools, such texture-aware colour adjustments and support for LUTs – shareable profiles of colour, shadow and contrast adjustments that you can use to, say, apply a favourite look to video in Final Cut Pro. All of the app’s tools also work with HDR images, and in another practical use of ML, Photomator can even convert non-HDR photos to HDR.

Knowing you can undo any change or revert to the original image, even after saving your changes, gives you freedom to experiment and learn. And because Photomator integrates with your Photos library and albums, your edits are synced to the Photos app and all your devices using iCloud Photos.

Photomator truly offers the best of all possible worlds – one where there’s no boundary between what you imagine and what you create.

Quick tip

With the app’s selective-adjustments feature you can apply colour tweaks to part of an image without affecting the rest. For example, use Select Sky, Select Background and Select Subject to make accurate, automatic masks – no manual painting required – then adjust just those elements.

Fun fact

Photomator’s ML-powered Auto Enhance feature was trained on 20 million professional photos... twice. After the initial training, the team tweaked the images in the set to be “slightly incorrect in a realistic way”, says Photomator software engineer Andrius Gailiünas. The feature was then retrained to even improve photos that are already great.

Meet the creator

Brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide founded Pixelmator Team in 2007 to create a Mac-native professional photo editor. The company was among Lithuania’s first bootstrapped tech businesses. Pixelmator Team has since won App of the Year awards on Mac and iPad, as well as two Apple Design Awards.