Compositor

Adobe Photoshop costs too much and tools like GIMP don’t feel familiar enough for me to stay in flow. That’s why I built Compositor.

The goal was to create a full-featured image editor that is completely free and open source. I used to use Photoshop for compositing and post-processing, so Compositor is built around that workflow - with the tools needed to create a pixel-perfect final image.

Because it’s open source, you can download the Xcode project and add, remove, or modify any feature to fit your workflow.

Features

Layers

• Layers and folders, with opacity and Photoshop's full set of blend modes in its order — a folder's opacity dims everything inside it
• Layer masks: paint, fill, invert, blur and feather them anywhere on the canvas, past the layer's own pixels; link or unlink them to transform a mask on its own
• Clipping masks and folder masks
• Adjustment layers: Hue/Saturation, Levels, Curves, Exposure, Gradient Map, Grain, Black & White, Color Balance, Invert, Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur and Noise
• Layer effects: Stroke, Drop Shadow, Color Overlay, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow and Inner Glow, rendered on the GPU and editable at any time
• Merge Down, Merge Layers and Merge Group (⌘E)
• Duplicate, rename inline, reorder and nest by drag and drop; Option-drag to duplicate; a right-click menu in the Layers panel
• Copy and paste whole layers and folders (⌘C/⌘V with no selection), within a project or between projects, or drag them between projects

Transform

• Non-destructive move, scale, rotate and flip — images keep their full resolution however small you make them
• Free distort (⌘-drag a handle), with Shift to lock to an axis
• Transform several layers, or a whole folder, together
• Snapping to canvas and layer edges and centers, with guides
• Exact values for position, size, scale and angle, stepped with the arrow keys
• Flip Layer and Flip Canvas, horizontal and vertical

Selections

• Rectangle and Ellipse Marquee, Freehand and Polygonal Lasso, and the Magic tool — Wand selects by color, Object traces whatever you click (Tab switches)
• Select Subject, and Expand, Contract and Feather on any selection
• Add to and subtract from selections, move the outline, or move and duplicate the pixels inside
• Load a layer's pixels or a mask as a selection
• Content-Aware Fill, which can also extend an image past its edges

Painting and retouching

• Brush with size, hardness, opacity and smoothing, in Paint or Erase mode (B and E), and Shift for straight lines