Beta

Photographs, in layers

Photo Editor Pro is a native Mac raster editor: pixel layers with blend modes, masks and groups; pixel selections; painting, adjustments and filters; Bitmap, Grayscale, Indexed, RGB, CMYK, Lab and Multichannel documents at 8 or 16 bits per channel. It saves a layered TIFF every other app can still open flat.

Direct download: version 26.0 beta · 32 MB · .dmg · signed & notarizedmacOS 14.6 or later · Apple siliconSkia on MetalNative format: layered TIFF
Photo Editor Pro with a mountain photograph open: HSL Curves adjustment layer, Color Wheels palette and the Layers palette
LayersPixel layers, groups, layer masks and vector masks, blend modes, opacity, adjustment layers and layer effects.
SelectionsMarquee, lasso, magic wand, Grow and Similar, feather, Quick Mask and alpha channels.
PaintingBrush, pencil, airbrush, eraser, rubber stamp, smudge, blur, sharpen, gradient, paint bucket and line.
AdjustLevels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Colour Balance, Brightness/Contrast and twenty-one filters.
ColourBitmap to Lab with conversions, channels, ICC profiles, 8- or 16-bit pictures and a real print dialog.
A pixel document, not a canvas with pixels on it

The document is a picture: so many pixels wide, so many tall, at a resolution.

Photo Editor Pro works the way a photo editor has to. A document has fixed pixel dimensions at a set resolution, a colour mode and a stack of layers; the selection is an 8-bit mask, so a feathered edge really is a partial-density edge and every tool respects it. Vectors have not gone anywhere — the pen, the paths and placed SVG artwork all live inside a layer — but the document itself is pixels.

Underneath, the compositor is Skia on Metal: layers are cached one by one and flushed by dirty tile, so the picture on screen is the picture the file gets. The colour and imaging kernels live in a portable C core below the interface, which is why the preview you drag and the pixels you commit are the same arithmetic.

The file you end up with

A layered TIFF that every other app can still open.

The native document format is TIFF: any viewer sees the flattened picture, Photoshop finds the layers in tag 37724, and the app itself reads back the whole stack — layer names, masks, blend modes, groups, guides, paths, smart-object sources and 16-bit data. PSD is read and written too, with groups, masks, blend keys and 16-bit channels.

Formats and saving →
OpensTIFF, PSD, PNG, JPEG, HEIC, GIF, BMP, WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL and OpenEXR; SVG, PDF, .ai and EPS come in placed or rasterised.
SavesBack into the format it came from — a PNG stays a PNG — while TIFF and PSD keep the layers.
HistoricalFile ▸ Open As… reads PICT, IFF, MacPaint, PixelPaint, Pixar, Scitex CT, Targa, ThunderScan, GIF and raw.
UndoOne History palette for the whole document; cold steps spill to disk so a long session does not run out of memory.

Everything at a glance

Every card below is a section of the feature guide.

Layers and masks

Groups, layer masks, vector masks, sixteen blend modes, opacity, and non-destructive drop shadow, outer glow and stroke.

Learn more →

Pixel selections

Marquee, lasso, magic wand, Grow, Similar, Feather, Fringe, Quick Mask and selections stored as alpha channels.

Learn more →

Painting

Brush, pencil, airbrush, eraser, rubber stamp, smudge, blur and sharpen over a real brush engine, with a Brushes palette.

Learn more →

Adjustments

Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Colour Balance, Brightness/Contrast, Threshold, Posterize, Equalize, Invert and Arbitrary Map.

Learn more →

Adjustment layers

Non-destructive control layers, including Colour Lookup from a .cube or .3dl file, colour wheels and HSL curves.

Learn more →

Filters

Twenty-one filters with their original parameters — Gaussian Blur, Unsharp Mask, Median, Add Noise, Mosaic, Custom kernels and more.

Learn more →

Colour modes

Bitmap, Grayscale, Indexed, RGB, CMYK, Lab and Multichannel, 8 or 16 bits, with channels, ICC conversion and printing.

Learn more →

Paths and smart objects

The pen stays: work paths, vector masks, and SVG, .ai or PDF placed as smart objects you edit in SVG Editor.

Learn more →

AI Console and MCP

The in-app chat, plus twenty-three pe_* MCP tools so an assistant drives the pixel document itself.

Learn more →
The menu bar

The menus a photo editor is supposed to have.

File, Edit, Mode, Image, Layer, Select and Filter sit where your hands expect them, with the Photoshop keyboard chords. The vector menus of the editor this app grew out of are still there, and validate to disabled while a picture is in front.

The workspace →
The Photo Editor Pro application icon: a paintbrush drawn across a photograph of blue mountains
Palettes

Floating palettes, one per job.

  • Layers with thumbnails, mask thumbnails, groups, drag reordering and the blend and opacity header.
  • Channels: composite, one row per colour channel, alpha channels and the active layer mask.
  • History, Histogram, Info, Navigator, Brushes, Colour, Swatches and Paths.
  • An Options bar that changes with the tool, and remembers each tool's settings.

Palettes and tools →

Built on the suite

The same engine as SVG Editor.

Photo Editor Pro is built on the Skia and Metal engine of SVG Editor, which is why placing an SVG, .ai or PDF gives you a live smart object rather than a flat import — and why Layer ▸ Smart Objects ▸ Edit Contents can hand the artwork to SVG Editor, watch the file and take your change straight back into the picture.

SVG Editor →

Get the Photo Editor Pro beta

Version 26.0, the first public build. Direct download only — signed by RainbowFactory LTD, notarised by Apple, and it keeps itself up to date.

26.0 beta · 32 MB · .dmg · signed & notarizedmacOS 14.6 or later · Apple siliconUpdate feed (appcast)

This is the first public build, and it is a beta: work on copies of your pictures and tell us what breaks — Join us on Discord, or Help ▸ Send Feedback… inside the app. What it already does — and what it does not do yet — is on the features page.