Easy Video Editing App For Mac

  • January 02, 2020
  • 18 min to read

Most free photo editors available on the App Store are quite basic, offering just a limited number of filters and allowing you to easily and quickly liven up your photos before posting them on social media.

But if you’re an aspiring or professional photographer, you probably need a more powerful app with a broader set of tools to use your creativity to the fullest. Besides, you probably use your Mac for photo editing because working on a large screen makes it possible to adjust the slightest details.

IMovie is the default video editor for Mac, free since macOS 10. Versions after 10.1 have added support for 4K resolution and HD at 60fps. Users can import, freely edit videos in 4K 2160p, 1080p 60fps and share content in 4K quality. This free 4K video editing software has enough features for novices to make a decent video. Openshot is a great free video editing software for beginners who wants to edit YouTube videos. It has a very easy drag and drop facility that is much like that of. Avidemux is an open source and free video editing software for Mac, whose main characteristic is user-friendliness. Its ease of use and installation, with the added availability of a good tutorial, makes Avidemux an ideal tool for beginners in video editing. The app can work with many video formats such as DVD, MPEG, AVI and many more. Pixelmator is one of the most popular photo-editing apps on the Mac, as it hits the sweet spot that combines powerful editing tools, an attractive and easy-to-use interface, and a very competitive.

1. Apple’s Photos (Built-in app)

Apple’s Photos app is included for free on all recently released Macs. It does a good job at organizing your photos, but its collection of photo enhancement tools leaves much to be desired. Hopefully, our selection of the best free programs for photo editing on Mac will help you choose the right app to suit all your creative needs.

2. Luminar (7 days trial)

Luminar is another full-featured photo editor that’s popular with both Mac and Windows users. It can work as a standalone app as well as a plugin for such popular programs as Apple Photos.

Easy Video Editing App For Mac Windows 7

Luminar uses Artificial Intelligence to enable sophisticated yet quick photo enhancements. Among these AI features are Sky Enhancer, which adds more depth and detail to the sky in your photos while leaving other areas untouched; Accent AI, which analyzes a photo and automatically applies the best combination of different effects to enhance your image; and Sun Rays, which allows you to place an artificial sun and adjust the lighting to your liking or make the sun rays already in your photo look even more incredible.

Luminar has over 60 filters you can apply to your photos to enhance them in a moment. Luminar also provides a set of powerful tools for cropping, transforming, cloning, erasing, and stamping, along with layers, brushes, and many more incredible features. Luminar supports the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, making photo editing even more effortless and pleasing.

Easy video editing app for mac free

3. Photolemur 3 (Free Version with watermark)

Photolemur is a relative newcomer on the photo editing market but it has all the chances to win the favor of beginner photographers and hobbyists. Running on Artificial Intelligence, Photolemur is a completely automatic photo enhancer, meaning that it does all the editing for you in no time. It has the simplest interface, with only a few buttons and sliders to adjust the enhancement to your liking and view the before and after results.

All you need to do is choose a photo (or a few) that you want to improve, drag and drop or import them using the Import button, and let the program make enhancements. After it’s done, you can compare the edited version with the original image by using the before–after slider and, if you want, adjust the skin tone or even enlarge the eyes using additional sliders. Pretty easy, huh?

Photolemur also offers a number of impressive styles to touch up your photos and give them a sophisticated and professional look. With this app, you don’t need to stuff your head with photo editing nuances and terms. Just run Photolemur and watch the magic happen!

4. Aurora HDR (14 days trial)

As you probably can tell from the name, Aurora HDR is designed to help photographers enhance their HDR photos, making them even more detailed and beautiful. It’s an ideal tool for editing your photos, with an extensive collection of more than 20 tools including details, tone, mapping, color, glow, and vignette. Each tool has its unique selection of controls to adjust its effects.

Aurora HDR enables you to work with brushes, layers, and masks, and provides a number of automatic AI tools for recognizing and removing noise, enhancing colors, lighting, and details, improving clarity, and adding contrast to dull areas while leaving other areas untouched.

Aurora HDR does a great job dealing with difficult lighting situations and creating full-of-life images while being easy to use.

5. Pixelmator (Trial 30 Days)

Pixelmator is a photo enhancer beloved by many Mac users, as it offers a good combination of a modern and simple interface, the ability to work on multiple layers, and powerful features that take photo editing to a whole new level. With so many editing tools, brushes, and effects, you can enhance your photos to your liking. You can choose between two versions of Pixelmator – standard and pro – depending on your needs. The standard version is great for basic photo editing with its selection of essential tools and filters, while the pro version is packed with extra brushes, tools, and effects that let you push your creativity to new boundaries. You can decide which version is suitable for you according to what features you’re looking for in a photo editing app.

6. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 (Trial link)

Photoshop Elements isn’t as affordable as other photo enhancers for beginner photographers. But luckily there’s a trial version available, so you can check it out before deciding whether this app is worthy of your money. Photoshop Elements acquired many powerful features from Photoshop, only Elements is simplified for amateur photographers and enthusiasts. It includes a good number of effects and filters, plus automated editing options for improving lighting, color balance, and exposure, and even opening closed eyes and reducing the effects of camera shake.

In addition to all of these awesome features, Photoshop also offers editing modes for beginners, intermediate users, and experts. Beginners will probably prefer Quick mode, as it focuses on essential tools to quickly enhance your photos by improving color, lighting, and other basic settings. Guided mode provides intermediate users with step-by-step guidance with more professional features like artistic effects, skin tone correction, and background replacement. Expert mode gives you full access to the app’s really powerful editing features and is ideal for creating stunning images.

7. Affinity Photo (Free Trial)

Affinity Photo’s interface may seem overwhelming at first, especially for novices, but when you come to grips with it you’ll find that the app is just what you’ve been looking for. Its numerous professional tools, effects, and filters encourage you to get creative with your photos. Among the coolest features Affinity Photo has to offer is a before and after view to compare the original photo with its edited version.

Affinity Photo works with 15 file types, including common ones like PDF, PSD, JPG, and GIF as well as some less popular ones. The app amazes with its abundance of basic and top-notch editing tools, allowing you to tweak your photos using all possible kinds of instruments. Affinity Photo allows you to edit HDR photos, apply artistic filters and effects, play with masks and layers, and create breathtaking compositions by combining several images in one. If you find its interface a bit much and are afraid of getting lost in all those advanced tools, you should probably look for something more suitable for your level. But Affinity Photo is worth mastering.

8. Google Photos

Google Photos is a popular cloud storage service for photos and videos. It can’t boast countless masterly tools like other photo enhancers that we review in this article, but it includes some fundamental features like filters, color adjustment sliders, and transformation tools.

Although Google Photos may not be that helpful when it comes to editing photos, it does a pretty good job at storing high-resolution images and videos with 15GB of free online storage, compared to iCloud’s mere 5GB (which you can upgrade to 50GB for a monthly fee). If you’re planning to go on a trip and take plenty of photos, then it might be smart to sign up for Google Photos to use that extra storage space when you come back.

9. PhotoScape X (Free)

A relatively new photo editing app, PhotoScape X has been gaining popularity with many Mac and PC users since its release in 2008. Its interface is simple but unconventional, with a number of tabs running along the top of the window. Each is responsible for a specific stage of editing. The Viewer tab allows you to browse and organize your photos. After you pick a photo, you can switch to the Editor tab, which includes a broad set of instruments, filters, and effects and a useful feature that enables you to compare the adjusted photo with the original.

The next tabs, including the Batch tab, mainly concentrate on editing and renaming multiple photos at once. The GIF tab allows you to easily create an animated GIF from a group of selected photos.

The downside of PhotoScape X is a lack of selection tools, so all changes are applied to the whole image rather than to a selected part.

10. Gimp (Free)

Gimp is a free open-source photo editing app that has been on the market for over 22 years and is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux. Unlike many free apps, Gimp doesn’t have any ads or in-app purchases. Its grey interface might seem a little old-fashioned and it may be a bit sluggish when it comes to complex effects, though.

Video Editing Software For Mac

Gimp offers a vast collection of advanced tools that hardly any free photo editor can boast. It has numerous enhancement options such as clone and heal brushes, layers and channels, accurate selection tools, a number of transformation instruments, and, of course, color adjustment controls. Gimp is one of the most powerful tools for enhancing photos and is beloved by so many users for its price (free) and versatility. But if you can’t come to grips with Gimp’s interface, it may be worth paying some cash for a more user-friendly program.

Why do you need a free video editing software

As with any good video in order to get it right it’ll need some edits. Editing your videos shouldn’t be that expensive either as there are some good, free, safe and easy to use video editing software in the internet.

Video editing has been made easy by tools that are readily available online. However, not all programs do what they're supposed to. A lot of such freeware packages are harmful and contain spyware/adware. Nevertheless, there’re a lot that are quite professional and there are even some that come without watermarks.

As there are so many on the market, we’ve put together a selection of 7 of the best free video editing software on the internet.

Easy Video Editing App For Mac Download

7 free and easy to use video editing software

Some of the software listed below are all recommended for either both Windows and Mac.

  1. Openshot

    Openshot is a great free video editing software for beginners who wants to edit YouTube videos. It has a very easy drag and drop facility that is much like that of iMovie and it’s excellent for making special occasion films.

    Advantages

    • The software is available for PC running Windows 10, 8 and 7. It’s also compatible with Linux and Mac platforms.
    • It caters for both the novice user and the more experienced one.
    • The program’s advanced timeline allows for panning, scrolling, zooming, snapping and easy drag and drop.
    • The package comes with a whole trove of 3D animated subtitles, you can create titles or choose some from the hose of templates it has.
    • The software is a full open source system.

    Disadvantages

    • It doesn’t have a very comprehensive help section.

  2. Lightworks

    If you’re looking for a professional video editing system then Lightworks is one of the best on the internet. This software is jammed full of useful utilities and features that more meet the needs of any user. It comes with a $25 per month Pro Version but the free version is more than adequate for most people’s editing needs.

    Advantages

    • Video trimming to the highest precision standard.
    • It supports almost all video formats and allows for 720p video export to Youtube.
    • It comes with all the standard and advanced video features.
    • It’s one of the top packages for all kinds of video editing.
    • The software is supported on Windows, Linux and Mac operating system platforms.

    Disadvantages

    • The video support in 4K for YouTube is only an option in the paid Pro version of the software.
    • It’s not user-friendly for a beginner.

  3. iMovie

    As with most iProducts they’re relatively easy to use and come with just enough utilities and features. It’s a really great package in which anyone with a Mac can learn the basics of video editing. iMovie has easy to use drag and drop features, it’s very intuitive but there is only so much you can do with this software.

    Advantages

    • It’s one of the best program packages for Mac users to learn how to edit a video.
    • Its features are very easy to use.
    • 4k/60fps Video Recording with the Sony IMX377 Image Sensor capturing high-quality video in full High Definition (HD) and 12MP still images.

    Disadvantages

    • Available only on Mac.
    • The software has limited features.
    • Slow / sluggish rendering time.

  4. Windows Movie Maker

    Movie Maker is a hand free app that comes with Windows. It’s a very easy to use and simple piece of software that allows a person to add various background music, effects, titles and transitions to their videos. It has come a long way since it was first released.

    Advantages

    • It’s a system application that comes standard with Windows 7, 8.
    • Easy to use timeline for adding clips.
    • Has all the basic functions like slow motion, speed-up, trimming, video playback preview, etc.
    • Enables the user to edit and capture feed direct for the PC camera.
    • Excellent for beginners wanting to learn how to do some video editing before going into a more complicated application.

    Disadvantages

    • Only available on the Windows 7 and 8 platform.
    • Limited functionality and features.
    • Windows 10 no longer supports Movie Maker. For the OS you have to get Movie Moments from the store.
    • People experienced in video editing will be limited with this application.

  5. VSDC Video Editor

    VSDC is one of the best apps. However, the problem with this application is that it’s only available for Windows users. It’s also quite expensive to get support on a problem because the free version doesn’t come with free support. The will charge you a monthly cost of $9.99 or a yearly one of $14.99. If you choose to buy the Pro version for $19.99 the support is free, and it unlocks a host of great functions.

    Advantages

    • The software is available only on the Windows Operating System Platform.
    • Although VSDC free version comes with some power packed features, it does lack in quite a bit of powerful features and functionality.
    • VSDC comes standard with audio editing and correction of color.
    • The software is really easy to use.

    Disadvantages

    • Most of the features are available only in the Pro version.
    • Support of the product is free only for a paid Pro member or if you pay for a month / a year.

  6. Avidemux

    If you’re looking for a software to learn how to edit, then this option is for you. It’s very easy to use and it has some great basic features and tasks. Avidemux is powerful in its simplicity and gives the novice user a great place to build the video editing knowledge.

    Advantages

    • Simple video editing applications for beginners.
    • The software hasn’t got a lot of technical jargon, you don’t really even need to read the manual or help documents.
    • Few basic editing functions like filtering, encoding and easy cutting features.

    Disadvantages

    • It’s really limited in its functionality and features.
    • The app is not designed for anything other than the simplest video editing.

  7. VideoPad

    VideoPad is one of those small applications that end up being hugely surprising. It’s like a super version of Movie Maker.

    Advantages

    • For use with most Windows Operating system platforms.
    • Simple and has great features that are helpful for a beginner user.
    • It has a lot of powerful editing tools that even more experienced user will find it good for video editing.
    • The software is compatible for video uploads to media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
    • It supports various video file formats giving a wider editing choice.
    • The editor is completely free for people who are using it for non-commercial use.
    • Handy drag and drop features for quick easy timeline video creations which is good for making special occasion film montages.
    • It comes loaded with special video effects, features and filters.
    • The software has several different transition setting.

    Disadvantages

    • It doesn’t have as many special features and effects as some of its competitors.