The Editor
Reimagining professional photo editing from the ground up. Combining breakthrough artificial intelligence with the precision tools photographers demand, this editor transforms the way you work with images on macOS. From raw capture to finished masterpiece, every pixel is under your control.
Overview
In a market crowded with photo editing software, it takes something genuinely transformative to stand apart. This editor was conceived with a single, uncompromising vision: build the most intelligent, most responsive, and most intuitive photo editing experience ever designed for the Mac platform. Rather than bolting AI features onto a legacy codebase, the entire application was architected from day one around machine learning inference pipelines, ensuring that artificial intelligence is not an afterthought but the very foundation of every tool, every slider, and every adjustment you make.
The result is an editing environment that understands your images at a semantic level. It recognizes faces, skies, foliage, water, architecture, and dozens of other scene elements before you even open the adjustment panel. It anticipates your creative intent based on the content of the photograph, offering intelligent starting points that would take a skilled retoucher minutes to establish manually. And it does all of this while rendering previews in real time, even on complex multi-layer compositions with dozens of adjustments stacked together.
Beyond the intelligence layer, this editor is built for photographers who care deeply about image quality. The processing pipeline operates in 32-bit floating point precision throughout, preserving every nuance of tonal and color information from your camera sensor. The RAW decoding engine supports over 500 camera models and delivers results that rival or exceed dedicated converter software. Whether you are processing a single hero image for a gallery exhibition or batch-editing a thousand wedding photographs under a tight deadline, the editor adapts to your workflow rather than forcing you to adapt to its limitations.
Features
From foundational adjustments to cutting-edge AI capabilities, explore the complete toolkit that makes this editor indispensable for professional and enthusiast photographers alike.
At the heart of the editor lies a sophisticated ensemble of neural networks trained specifically for photographic enhancement. Unlike generic image processing algorithms, these models understand the visual language of photography: they know what a well-exposed portrait looks like, how golden hour light should fall across a landscape, and when a product shot needs clinical precision versus atmospheric warmth.
The AI engine performs automatic scene detection the moment you open an image, classifying it across dozens of categories including portrait, landscape, architecture, macro, street, wildlife, and food photography. Based on this classification, it pre-configures adjustment parameters and suggests enhancement profiles tailored to the specific content of your photograph. You retain full manual control at all times, but the AI provides an expert-level starting point that dramatically accelerates your editing workflow.
Machine learning also powers the editor's predictive masking system, which can isolate complex subjects like windblown hair, translucent fabrics, and intricate tree branches with a level of accuracy that traditional edge-detection methods simply cannot achieve. The result is selections that feel hand-crafted, generated in a fraction of a second.
The proprietary RAW decoder is engineered to extract the maximum possible quality from your camera's sensor data. Supporting over 500 camera models from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Olympus, Leica, Hasselblad, Phase One, and many more, the engine delivers color accuracy and tonal fidelity that compete with the industry's best dedicated converters.
The demosaicing algorithm uses adaptive interpolation that responds to image content, applying different strategies for high-frequency detail areas versus smooth gradients. This eliminates the moiré patterns and color fringing that plague simpler Bayer-pattern decoders. Combined with intelligent highlight recovery that can reconstruct up to two stops of overexposed data from the raw file's linear headroom, the engine gives you access to image information you might have assumed was lost forever.
Profile-based lens correction automatically compensates for distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberration using a database of over 1,200 lens profiles. When a profile is not available, the editor's AI can analyze geometric patterns in the image to estimate and correct optical deficiencies automatically.
The portrait tools represent a leap forward in AI-assisted people photography. The face-aware engine detects individual facial features with sub-pixel precision, mapping 68 landmark points to create a three-dimensional understanding of face geometry. This allows adjustments like skin smoothing, eye brightening, and facial reshaping to be applied with anatomical awareness rather than brute-force pixel manipulation.
Skin retouching uses a frequency-separation approach powered by neural networks that distinguish between skin texture, which should be preserved, and blemishes, uneven tone, and imperfections, which should be reduced. The result is retouching that looks natural at any zoom level, preserving pores and fine details while creating a polished, magazine-quality appearance. Adjustable intensity lets you dial in anything from subtle enhancement to editorial-grade smoothing.
Additional portrait tools include intelligent red-eye removal, teeth whitening that respects natural variation, under-eye circle reduction, and a face-light tool that simulates the effect of adding fill light to shadows on the face. For group portraits, the engine processes each face independently, allowing different settings for different subjects within the same frame.
Transforming the sky in a photograph was once a painstaking manual process requiring advanced masking skills and careful color matching. The editor's AI sky replacement engine makes it a one-click operation that produces results virtually indistinguishable from an in-camera capture. The system uses a semantic segmentation model trained on millions of landscape and architectural photographs to create pixel-perfect sky masks, even around the most challenging subjects: bare tree branches, construction cranes, wire fences, and windswept hair at the horizon line.
The replacement engine goes far beyond simply pasting a new sky behind your subject. It analyzes the lighting direction, color temperature, and ambient luminosity of both the original scene and the replacement sky, then automatically adjusts foreground elements to match the new atmospheric conditions. If you drop in a warm sunset sky, the foreground will take on a subtle golden cast. If you choose a dramatic storm cloud, the scene will shift toward cooler, more contrasty tones. This relighting feature is what separates convincing sky replacements from obvious composites.
The editor includes a curated library of high-resolution sky images spanning clear blue, golden hour, dramatic clouds, starry night, aurora borealis, and many more. You can also import your own sky photographs to build a personal collection of atmospheres that match your creative style.
Whether you are preparing product images for an e-commerce catalog, creating composite artwork, or simply isolating a subject for a clean social media post, the background removal tool delivers studio-quality cutouts in seconds. The underlying model uses a trimap-free architecture that predicts alpha mattes directly from the input image, handling semi-transparent elements like hair wisps, smoke, glass, and motion blur with remarkable fidelity.
After removing the background, you can place your subject against a solid color, a gradient, a custom image, or leave it on a transparent canvas for export. The edge refinement controls allow you to adjust feathering, decontamination of color spill from the original background, and edge shifting to ensure seamless integration into any new context. For batch workflows, the tool can process entire folders of images using consistent settings, making it ideal for catalog production where hundreds or thousands of products need uniform white-background treatment.
High-ISO noise has always been the enemy of low-light photography. Traditional noise reduction algorithms face an impossible trade-off: remove the noise and you lose fine detail, or preserve the detail and live with distracting grain. The editor's AI denoiser shatters this compromise by using a deep convolutional neural network trained on tens of thousands of paired noisy and clean images to distinguish between genuine image detail and sensor noise at a structural level.
The system recognizes the difference between the organic texture of fabric, skin, or foliage and the random luminance and chrominance noise introduced by the sensor. It suppresses noise aggressively while preserving and even enhancing legitimate texture, producing results that look like they were captured at a much lower ISO setting. Event photographers, astrophotographers, and wildlife shooters working in challenging light will find that images previously considered unusable can be transformed into clean, detailed photographs suitable for large-format printing.
Three processing modes are available: a fast preview-quality mode for rapid culling, a balanced mode for general workflow, and an ultra-quality mode that applies the full depth of the neural network for maximum detail recovery. Even the ultra mode processes a 24-megapixel image in under ten seconds on Apple Silicon hardware.
Color grading is where technical correction ends and creative expression begins. The editor provides a professional-grade color grading interface featuring three-way color wheels for shadows, midtones, and highlights, along with independent hue, saturation, and luminance curves for surgical precision. A global tone curve with per-channel control offers the same flexibility found in high-end cinema color suites, adapted for the photographic workflow.
For photographers who work with Look-Up Tables, the editor supports all major LUT formats including .cube, .3dl, .csp, and .lut files. LUTs can be applied at any point in the adjustment stack and blended with opacity controls, allowing you to use them as subtle starting points rather than heavy-handed presets. The built-in LUT browser provides a real-time preview grid showing your image with dozens of different looks applied simultaneously, making it easy to explore creative directions without committing to any single option.
The split-toning controls go beyond basic two-tone effects, offering a five-point system that lets you assign different color tints to blacks, shadows, midtones, highlights, and whites independently. This level of granularity enables the creation of complex, film-inspired color palettes that give your images a distinctive and instantly recognizable signature look.
For compositors, digital artists, and photographers who need pixel-level control over complex edits, the editor provides a full layers system with blend modes, opacity controls, and non-destructive masking. Each layer can contain an image, a texture, a gradient, text, or a vector shape, and all standard blend modes are supported: Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Difference, Exclusion, Hue, Saturation, Color, and Luminosity, among others.
The masking system combines brush-based painting with AI-powered automatic masks. Paint a rough selection and the AI refines it to follow natural edges. Use luminosity masking to target specific tonal ranges for adjustment, allowing techniques like darkening only the brightest highlights or adding saturation only to midtone colors. Gradient masks, radial masks, and color-range masks round out the toolkit, and any combination of masks can be stacked and combined with Boolean operations for arbitrarily complex selections.
Every adjustment you make is stored as a non-destructive instruction, meaning you can revisit, modify, or remove any edit at any point in your workflow. The parametric editing history is saved with the image file, so you can close a project and return to it months later with full access to every adjustment you made.
Distracting elements in a photograph can ruin an otherwise perfect composition. The AI object removal tool uses a generative inpainting model to intelligently fill in areas where unwanted objects have been erased, synthesizing new image content that seamlessly matches the surrounding texture, lighting, and perspective. Whether you are removing a trash can from a landscape, erasing power lines from an architectural shot, or cleaning up blemishes on a product surface, the results are remarkably natural.
The tool operates with simple brush strokes: paint over what you want to remove, and the AI handles the rest. For larger objects, the generative model considers the global context of the image to produce coherent replacements. Removing a person from a beach scene will result in convincingly rendered sand and water that maintain the correct perspective and wave patterns. Unlike older clone-stamp techniques, which require manual sampling and careful blending, the AI approach delivers consistent results regardless of the complexity of the surrounding content.
A real-time preview shows the inpainting result as you paint, allowing you to refine your selection before committing. Multiple removal operations can be stacked and adjusted independently, and the entire process remains non-destructive with full undo support.
Professional photographers often work with hundreds or thousands of images from a single session. The batch processing engine transforms what would be hours of repetitive editing into an automated pipeline that handles volume without sacrificing quality. Define your adjustments on a single reference image, then apply them across an entire folder, an entire catalog, or a custom selection of files with a single command.
The batch engine goes beyond simple preset application. Its AI-adaptive mode analyzes each image individually and adjusts parameters to account for varying exposure, white balance, and subject content across the set. This means that a portrait enhancement preset will apply skin smoothing only to images that actually contain faces, and a landscape optimization profile will detect and treat different lighting conditions appropriately. The result is a batch-processed set that looks individually edited rather than uniformly stamped.
Export options within the batch processor include format conversion, resolution scaling, watermark application, metadata management, and file renaming with customizable templates. Progress monitoring shows estimated completion times and allows you to pause, resume, or cancel operations at any point. Background processing lets you continue editing other images while the batch runs, maximizing the productivity of your editing session.
Workflow
From opening a file to exporting a finished image, the editor streamlines every step of the photographic workflow into four intuitive stages.
Drag and drop files, browse your file system, or connect directly to your camera's memory card. The editor accepts RAW files from over 500 cameras, along with JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIF, PSD, and DNG formats. Automatic organization groups images by date, camera, or custom tags, giving you instant access to the shots that matter. The import process generates high-quality previews in the background, so you can begin culling and rating immediately while the full-resolution data loads behind the scenes.
Within milliseconds of opening an image, the AI engine performs a comprehensive analysis. It identifies the scene type, detects faces and their features, maps depth information, segments the sky and foreground, and evaluates exposure, white balance, and color distribution. This analysis creates an intelligent editing context that powers automatic suggestions and enables content-aware adjustments throughout your session. The analysis runs locally on your Mac with no cloud dependency, ensuring both speed and privacy.
With the AI foundation in place, you have access to the complete toolkit: exposure and tonal adjustments, color grading, portrait enhancement, sky replacement, object removal, layers and masks, creative filters, and much more. Every adjustment renders in real time with full-resolution accuracy. The non-destructive editing model means you never alter your original file, and the complete edit history is available for review, modification, or reversal at any time. Switch between guided AI workflows for speed and manual precision tools for fine control.
When your image is complete, the export engine delivers files optimized for any destination. Choose from JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIF, AVIF, PSD, or DNG output formats with granular control over color space, bit depth, compression quality, resolution, and metadata inclusion. Dedicated export presets for web, social media, print, and archive workflows eliminate guesswork. Soft proofing simulates how your image will look on different devices and in different color spaces before you commit to the final export, ensuring what you see is what your audience gets.
Technology
The intelligence embedded in this editor is not a marketing gimmick or a superficial filter layer. It represents years of dedicated machine learning research, trained on a dataset of millions of professionally edited photographs spanning every genre, lighting condition, and camera system. The models learn not from rules written by engineers, but from the collective expertise of thousands of working photographers whose edits define what a beautiful image looks like.
Scene understanding is the cornerstone of the AI system. When the editor opens a photograph of a sunset over the ocean, it does not merely see an array of pixels. It recognizes the sky, the water, the horizon line, the sun, and any foreground elements. It understands the expected color palette of a sunset scene, the typical dynamic range challenges, and the emotional intent behind capturing that moment. This contextual awareness allows every subsequent tool to make smarter decisions. The exposure slider knows that recovering shadow detail in the foreground rocks should not compromise the rich saturation of the sunset. The color grading engine knows that warming the highlights will enhance the golden atmosphere without turning the ocean an unnatural orange.
Content-aware editing extends this understanding to every brush stroke and selection you make. When you paint an adjustment over a landscape and your brush crosses the boundary between sky and mountains, the AI automatically feathers the effect along the natural edge. When you clone-stamp a texture, the model matches not just the color but the directionality, scale, and randomness of the source pattern. These micro-intelligence features accumulate into an editing experience that feels almost telepathic, reducing the friction between your creative vision and the finished image.
All AI processing runs entirely on your local machine using Apple's Neural Engine and GPU acceleration frameworks. No images are uploaded to any cloud service, no internet connection is required for any AI feature, and your creative work remains completely private. Model updates are delivered through standard application updates and are optimized to run efficiently on both Apple Silicon and Intel hardware configurations.
Performance
Performance is not just a specification; it is the difference between a tool that inspires creativity and one that frustrates it. Every millisecond of latency between moving a slider and seeing the result is an interruption to your creative flow. That is why the editor is built on a custom rendering engine optimized specifically for the macOS graphics stack, taking full advantage of Metal GPU acceleration, the Apple Neural Engine, and the unified memory architecture of Apple Silicon processors.
Built as a universal binary with dedicated code paths optimized for the M1, M2, M3, and M4 families. The unified memory architecture eliminates data transfer bottlenecks between CPU and GPU, delivering fluid performance even with massive files and complex layer stacks.
Every pixel-processing operation, from basic exposure adjustments to complex AI inferences, is dispatched to the GPU through Apple's Metal framework. This offloads the heaviest computational work from the CPU, enabling real-time previews on edits that would otherwise require seconds to render.
See the results of every adjustment as you make it, without waiting for a progress bar. The tiled rendering engine processes only the visible portion of the image at full resolution while maintaining a lower-resolution cache of the entire canvas, ensuring smooth interaction at any zoom level.
Designed to handle the output of modern high-resolution sensors, including medium format cameras producing files over 100 megapixels. Memory-mapped file access and progressive loading ensure that even the largest files open quickly and edit smoothly without exhausting system resources.
AI features leverage Apple's dedicated Neural Engine for machine learning inference, running neural network models at hardware-accelerated speeds without consuming GPU or CPU cycles. This allows AI processing and traditional editing to occur simultaneously without performance degradation.
The export pipeline uses parallel processing across all available cores, with intelligent queue management that maximizes throughput while keeping the system responsive. Batch exports of hundreds of images complete in a fraction of the time required by competing solutions.
Compatibility
Designed to integrate seamlessly into existing photographic workflows, the editor supports the broadest range of hardware, software, and file formats in its class.
Community
Great software is only the beginning. A vibrant community and rich resources make the difference between a tool you own and a tool that empowers your growth as a photographer.
Browse thousands of professionally crafted presets and LUTs created by working photographers and colorists. From moody cinematic tones to bright and airy wedding styles, discover looks that transform your images with a single click. Preview any preset on your own photos before applying, and build a personal collection that defines your visual brand.
An extensive library of step-by-step tutorials covers everything from first-time setup to advanced compositing techniques. Video walkthroughs, written guides, and interactive exercises help photographers of every skill level master the editor's capabilities and improve their craft. New content is published weekly, keeping pace with feature updates and creative trends.
Share your best work and discover inspiration from photographers around the world. The community gallery showcases stunning images edited with the editor's tools, complete with before-and-after comparisons and the editing settings used to achieve each look. Featured artists receive exposure to the entire community, fostering connection and creative growth.
The development team ships feature updates on a regular cadence, driven by user feedback and advances in AI research. Each release brings new capabilities, performance improvements, and expanded camera and lens support. A transparent public roadmap lets you see what is coming next and contribute your voice to the editor's evolution.
FAQ
The editor supports an extensive range of file formats for both import and export. For input, it accepts RAW files from over 500 camera models (including CR2, CR3, NEF, NRW, ARW, RAF, RW2, ORF, DNG, and many more), as well as JPEG, TIFF (8-bit and 16-bit), PNG, HEIF/HEIC, WebP, AVIF, PSD, and PSB. For export, you can save as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIF, AVIF, PSD, and DNG, with full control over color space (sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, Display P3), bit depth, and compression settings.
Yes. The editor is distributed as a universal binary that runs natively on both Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4 and their Pro, Max, and Ultra variants) and Intel-based Macs from 2018 onward. While Apple Silicon hardware delivers the best performance due to its unified memory architecture and dedicated Neural Engine, Intel Macs with a compatible discrete GPU or integrated Iris Plus graphics receive full feature support including all AI capabilities. A minimum of 8 GB RAM is recommended for Intel hardware, with 16 GB preferred for working with high-resolution files.
No. All artificial intelligence features run entirely on your local Mac hardware. The neural network models are included in the application bundle and execute using Apple's Core ML framework, leveraging the Neural Engine, GPU, and CPU as appropriate. No images or data are ever transmitted to external servers. This on-device architecture ensures maximum processing speed, complete privacy, and the ability to work in any environment, including locations without internet access such as remote outdoor shoots or in-flight editing sessions.
The editor is designed to serve as a comprehensive solution for photographic editing workflows. It combines the organizational and batch processing strengths typically associated with Lightroom-style applications with the layer-based compositing and precision editing capabilities found in Photoshop-style applications. For the vast majority of photographic editing tasks, including RAW processing, color grading, retouching, compositing, sky replacement, and object removal, it provides equivalent or superior functionality. Additionally, it works as a plugin for both Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, so you can integrate it into an existing Adobe workflow rather than replacing it entirely.
The rendering engine uses a tiled, memory-mapped architecture that loads only the portions of an image needed for the current viewport, regardless of the total file size. This means a 100-megapixel medium format file opens and edits with the same responsiveness as a standard 24-megapixel photograph. Virtual memory management ensures that even systems with 8 GB of physical RAM can work with large files without running out of memory. For batch processing of large files, the engine processes images sequentially to maintain optimal memory utilization while maximizing throughput across available CPU and GPU cores.
Yes, completely. The editor never modifies your original image files. All adjustments are stored as parametric instructions in a sidecar catalog, meaning every slider position, mask, layer, and AI enhancement is recorded as a set of parameters rather than pixel changes. You can revisit any image at any time and modify, reorder, or remove individual adjustments. The full edit history is preserved when you close and reopen the application, and projects can be archived with their complete editing state intact for future revision.
Browse our free photo editing guides and discover the techniques that professional photographers use every day to create stunning images. From color correction fundamentals to advanced retouching workflows, our tutorials will help you elevate your photography regardless of the tools you use.
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