You can also save your edits as a 'filter', which is essentially a preset. It has a history recording too and you can step back through any of the steps you made when editing your image. Even so, it's a very inexpensive application, so it's only to be expected, and to have all you get with it for the prices is pretty impressive. Similarly, there are single sliders for 'Fringing' and 'Distortion' but no more granular control than that. For example, there's a single sharpen slider, but no control over how it works. Most of the controls are pretty straight forward, although some lack finer controls. The app also features local adjustments, and you can stack local adjustments masked by either a straight gradient or a radial gradient. It even has a dehaze adjustment, as well as a nice feature called 'diffuse' which adds some diffuse light back into your image. It features adjustments for pretty much everything you can think of, including all the standard exposure, shadow and highlights adjustments, as well as clarity, sharpen and denoise. The controls themselves actually look very similar to the controls in Apple's photos, with the same kind of sliders. If you're using it as an edit extension in Photos, it works like most other extensions, and opens its interface in the Photos screen, sending the image you're working on the the extension. These are essentially the same as presets, as they store the combination of settings that you're using. On the right are the editing controls and on the left are a selection of 'filters' to choose from. If you're using the app as a stand alone piece of software, you can load multiple images into it, and you'll get a film strip along the bottom from which you can select the image you want to work on. It works as an extension for Apple's Photos app.

While I probably wouldn't suggest using it instead of Lightroom, it does have one other cool trick up its sleeve. That difference comes down to the clean interface, and the fact that it's really fast. However, while it might look the same and have similar functions, it's actually a much different experience when you're using it. It has many of the same functions, and works with both RAW and JPEG images.

It's available for Windows too, but in this short first look, I'm only talking about the mac version (as that's all I've used)īasically Polarr Photo Editor is a photo editing application that is somewhat like the develop module in Lightroom. It's called Polarr Photo editor, and it's just $19.99. I finally got around to trying it the other day, and I'm really impressed by the application. I'd seen it come up in the suggestions a few times and I'd even bookmarked it to come back to and have a look at later. I came across an interesting photo editing app in the Mac app store the other day.

Polarr download mac