About 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 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 blend modes and opacity Layer masks: paint, fill, invert, blur and feather them; 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 and Grain Merge Down, Merge Layers and Merge Group (⌘E) Duplicate, rename inline, reorder and nest by drag and drop; Option-drag to duplicate Drag layers between open 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 Magic Wand 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 and opacity, and Shift for straight lines Spot Healing Brush (content-aware) Clone Stamp, aligned or not, sampling one layer or all of them Blur tool, on pixels or masks Gradient tool and Shape tool (rectangles, rounded rectangles and ellipses) Type tool (T): inline multiline editing in draggable, resizable paragraph boxes; font, size, color, alignment and spacing in the tool header; transform text and use it as a clipping mask Eyedropper and a full color picker Adjustments and filters: Levels (with Auto), Curves, Hue/Saturation, Exposure, Gradient Map, Grain and Invert Gaussian Blur and Motion Blur that spread past a layer's edges Add Noise, Lens Correction and Remove Background Live previews, limited to the selection when there is one Canvas and files: Multiple projects in tabs Crop with snapping, and Option for symmetric cropping Canvas Size and Image Size Sharp high-quality downsampling when zoomed out, and a pixel grid when zoomed in Import JPEG, PNG, HEIC and TIFF — including dropped screenshots and images from other apps Export JPEG with a live preview (⇧⌥⌘S); Copy Merged Photoshop-style keyboard shortcuts throughout Requirements: macOS 26 Xcode 26 (to build from source)
