Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018 is one of the best Mac photo editors on the market. You navigate through the interface by choosing between the Guided, Quick and Expert modes. As expected, Guided mode helps you become acquainted with the various tools.

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Your guide

Best Photo Editor Apps for Mac. 1] Photoshop CC. It doesn’t matter what kind of editing you want to do or whether you are a professional photographer or a newbie who wants to start photo editing, you can certainly use Photoshop, which has proved to be the best photo editing software for Mac. Although this is a paid software, the vast majority of people use this tool because of available features, accessibility, ease of use, affordable price and so on.
Apple’s iMovie, which competes only with cross-platform free apps and Adobe Elements, is the obvious choice for the best Mac video editing software, thanks to its outstanding output, themes.

Justin Krajeski

After spending 30 hours researching and testing the top five contenders, we found that the Microsoft Surface Book 2 is the best laptop for creative professionals. The Surface Book 2 had some of the fastest 4K rendering speeds we tested, and it has an excellent keyboard and trackpad and a healthy variety of ports. Its 4K display is the most accurate of the Windows laptops we tested this year, though it isn’t accurate enough for video color grading or print production work; if you do those things, pick up the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro.

Our pick

Microsoft Surface Book 2 (15-inch)

The Surface Book 2 has powerful specs and the best battery life and most accurate screen of any Windows laptop we tested. It’s reliable enough for most creative tasks, but not quite accurate enough for video color grading and print production.

Buying Options

The Surface Book 2 configuration we recommend costs around $2,900—we know! Keep reading—and it has a 4K display, an eighth-generation 1.9 GHz Intel Core i7-8650U processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB solid-state drive. It also comes with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with 6 GB VRAM, a powerful graphics processor that can handle demanding tasks such as quickly exporting 4K footage in Adobe Premiere Pro or gaming. The Surface Book 2’s keyboard is clicky and comfortable to use for long periods of time, and its trackpad is even better: It tracks smoothly and accurately, and it executes gestures and other Windows-related tasks with ease. It also has all the necessary ports and connections: two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port (though not Thunderbolt 3), as well as a full-size SD card reader, and a proprietary Surface Connect port. It also had the longest battery life of any laptop we tested this year by about 20 minutes, and you can even detach its screen and use it as a tablet if you want.

Also great

Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (15-inch, 2019)

The 2019 MacBook Pro has the best display of any laptop we’ve tested, and it’s accurate enough for video color grading and print production. Its keyboard is shallow and its battery life is short, but it’s the most powerful option for those who prefer Apple.

Buying Options

If you need a laptop with a screen precise enough for print photo production or video color grading, get the Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2019). The MacBook Pro’s 15.4-inch Retina display has a resolution of 2880×1800—lower than the 4K screens on the Surface Book 2 and the XPS 15 Touch—but in our tests it was more color accurate than its competition, and it’s the only one of our picks that’s technically accurate enough for color grading and print production work. It also reproduced more of the sRGB color gamut than the Surface Book 2, and it supports the DCI/P3 color gamut while our top pick doesn’t. It has the best trackpad we’ve used on a laptop, as well. But it has a shallow keyboard, it lacks legacy ports, it has a high price tag, and it suffers from a shorter battery life than we’d like. We recommend the $3,150 model—which is about $250 more than the Surface Book 2—with a 2.3 GHz ninth-generation Intel Core i9 processor, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB of solid-state storage, and Radeon Pro Vega 20 dedicated graphics with 4 GB of memory.

Budget pick

Dell XPS 15 Touch

The Dell XPS 15 Touch has fast 4K rendering speeds and decent battery life, and it costs almost $1,000 less than the Microsoft Surface Book 2. Its screen is less accurate, but you can buy a great 4K monitor with the money you save and still have some left over.

Buying Options

If you’re looking for a cheaper option, you don't need to do precise color work, or you don't mind relying on an external monitor when you do, get the Dell XPS 15 Touch. It is not as accurate as the Microsoft Surface Book 2, much less the MacBook Pro: Its reds, in particular, were so oversaturated that we don’t recommend it for photo editing or color grading video. Instead, pair the Dell XPS 15 Touch with our favorite 4K monitor pick, the HP Z27, which is accurate enough for photo and video production work, and buying the XPS 15 plus the Z27 still costs less than one Microsoft Surface Book 2.

We recommend the configuration with an eighth-generation, Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB solid-state drive, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti, and a 15.6-inch 3840×2160 IPS touchscreen. At the time of this guide's publishing, this configuration cost around $1,930. It was a few seconds faster than the Microsoft Surface Book 2 at exporting 4K video in Adobe Premiere Pro. It’s about as portable as the Surface Book 2, and its keyboard and trackpad are decent but not as enjoyable to use. Unfortunately, its webcam is located below its screen, and it fell about a half hour behind the Surface Book 2 in battery-life testing.

Everything we recommend

Our pick

Microsoft Surface Book 2 (15-inch)

Buying Options

Also great

Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (15-inch, 2019)

Buying Options

Budget pick

Dell XPS 15 Touch

Buying Options

The research

Why you should trust us

Wirecutter has been researching and testing laptops since 2013, and our PC team has more than 37 years of collective experience reviewing all kinds of laptops—in addition to the 60 hours we’ve spent researching and testing laptops for video and photo editing work over the past two years.

For this guide, we interviewed 11 creative professionals—three music producers, three product or graphic designers, one 3D modeler, two photographers, a game developer, and a Web developer—to find out what they need in a laptop. Among the experts we spoke to are a composer for Bob’s Burgers, a developer and composer behind the video game Night in the Woods, a senior 3D modeler at Weta Digital, and a graphic designer and illustrator whose work has appeared in The New York Times (parent company of Wirecutter).

Who should get this

A good laptop for photo and video editing should have a high-resolution, high-quality 15-inch screen, but it should also be portable.Photo: Sarah Kobos

If you’re a creative professional looking for a laptop that can perform demanding tasks—including photo editing, video editing, graphic design, drawing, programming and developing, game design, and audio production—on the go, you should get what we call a power notebook.

If you work in print production or color grade video, you should buy a MacBook Pro.

While an ultrabook can perform some of these tasks, a power notebook will let you do m

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