Photoshop is the industry standard for photo editing, with its powerful tools making it the editor of choice for many artists and designers. However Adobe’s suite of creative tools are quite expensive, requiring an ongoing subscription to be able to use them. So what if you need to simply view a .psd file on your Mac without Photoshop? Or edit one? Fortunately there are other options available for viewing and editing the popular .pst format, which we’ll cover in this article.
Viewing .psd files
Fortunately macOS comes with its own built-in application “Preview” which can view many different popular image formats. Preview can view .psd files, so by default you’ll be able to open up any .psd files and view them, like so:
Editing .psd files
When it comes to editing .psd files on your Mac you’ll need a third party application. Both free and paid options exist, and below we have the best pick for each category:
Free option: GIMP
GIMP is a long-standing open-source alternative to Photoshop, initially released way back in 1996. The application is available for all major platforms, including macOS. You can download GIMP from the developer’s website here.
As you can see, the user interface of GIMP is pretty cluttered and busy, however if you can’t or don’t want to pay for an image editor it’ll get the job done.
Paid option: Pixelmator
Pixelmator is available on the Mac App Store, and offers a much more polished and refined interface, with most of the powerful features you’ll need in an image editor. While Pixelmator is a paid-for application, it’s a once-off purchase which will end up costing you a fraction of the price of a Photoshop subscription. If you’re interested in Pixelmator check out the developer’s website here.
