Photisan

Handcrafted photo development and editing.

Photisan is a photo editor for Mac, with no artificial intelligence: your skills and your creativity make the photo. You develop the RAW and edit with layers in the same window, with tools built on how photography works.

Buy · 45 USD a year Download for Mac

Try it free for 14 days, no card needed, with a 30-day refund if you buy. For macOS 11 or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

Photisan with a portrait open and the Kodak Portra 400 simulation chosen in the adjustments panel

What can you do?

What you won't find in other apps

And everything you expect from an editor

No artificial intelligence, by choice

Your skills.
Your creativity.

Creating is part of what makes us human, and it's a skill that grows the more you use it. That's why Photisan uses no AI: it doesn't generate images or decide for you. Every choice in your photo is yours, and every photo makes you a better photographer.

No replaced skies, no automatic skin retouching, no suggestions from a neural network. Every tool follows the rules of photography: light, emulsion, development. The ones that work on their own, like film conversion or quick selection, follow rules you can see and correct.

And your photos never leave your Mac: the app only goes online to check your license.

Developing isn't another module

Open the RAW and adjust it in the side panel: exposure, white balance, highlights and shadows, curves, colour, texture, clarity and dehaze. The development stays a layer of the document: you work on top with layers and masks, and move the exposure again whenever you like, without exporting or resorting to smart objects.

Noise reduction, capture sharpening and correction of distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration with the profiles of some 1,500 lenses. Linear, radial and brush masks for local adjustments. For Bayer and X-Trans sensors.

Layers panel: two layers of a RAW inside a group, under an adjustment layer

24 films, modelled from their datasheets

These aren't colour filters. Each simulation reproduces how the emulsion responds: each layer's sensitivity to colour, how the layers hold each other back during development, their characteristic curves and their grain, measured for 35 mm, medium format or large format. Overexpose or underexpose, and each film answers with its own latitude.

Film menu with Kodak Portra 400 chosen
Characteristic curves of Kodak Portra 400: density of the red, green and blue layers by log exposure −3 −2 −1 0 0 1 2 3 Log exposure Density Blue Green Red
Kodak Portra 400 in Photisan: the density of each layer of the film by exposure, fitted to Kodak's datasheet.

Colour negative

  • Kodak Portra 160
  • Kodak Portra 400
  • Kodak Portra 800
  • Kodak Ektar 100
  • Kodak Gold 200
  • Kodak UltraMax 400
  • Kodak Vision3 50D
  • Kodak Vision3 250D
  • Kodak Vision3 200T
  • CineStill 800T
  • Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400
  • Fujifilm Pro 160NS

Slide

  • Fujifilm Velvia 50
  • Fujifilm Provia 100F

Black and white

  • Kodak T-MAX 100
  • Kodak T-MAX 400
  • Kodak T-MAX P3200
  • Kodak Tri-X 400
  • Eastman Double-X 5222
  • Fujifilm Acros 100 II
  • Ilford FP4 Plus
  • Ilford HP5 Plus
  • Ilford Delta 3200
  • Ilford XP2 Super

For black and white, with yellow, orange, red and green filters, as if in front of the lens.

What a film changes

Each photo developed without film and with one of the 24. Drag the line to compare.

An abandoned, rusted pickup truck before mountains wrapped in cloud, on Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400 An abandoned, rusted pickup truck before mountains wrapped in cloud, developed without film
Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400 · Colour negative
A street sweeper with his cart of drums and brooms before a wall of posters on Avenida Amsterdam, on Kodak Portra 800 A street sweeper with his cart of drums and brooms before a wall of posters on Avenida Amsterdam, developed without film
Kodak Portra 800 · Colour negative

Darkroom black and white

Develop black and white as in the darkroom. Choose how the film sees light (panchromatic, orthochromatic, infrared or like a sensor without filters), put a yellow, orange, red, green or blue filter in front of the lens, and take the print to paper: its contrast grade, split-grade printing with two exposures, the eleven zones of the print and the paper tone.

Tone the print with selenium, sepia, gold, copper, platinum, palladium or cyanotype. And export the negative as a monochrome DNG that any raw developer opens like a file from a monochrome camera.

Photisan with a black and white portrait and, in front, the zones of the print, from 0 to X

Cinema colour

Colour grading tints and exposes the blacks, midtones and highlights separately, with soft transitions by exposure. With the qualifier you isolate a colour to work on it alone, and with windows, an area of the photo, as in a film colour suite.

Wheels, zones, colour curves, warper, harmony and moods, in nodes applied one over another, with a vectorscope. Import LUTs (.cube) from Resolve, Premiere or your camera, and export your grade as a LUT.

Colour grading: lift, gamma, gain and offset wheels, with the vectorscope

Convert your negatives

Open the scan, or the photo you took of the negative with your camera, and Photisan converts it like a minilab. Tell it which film it was to use its real curves, and choose how the lab prints it: Frontier style, Noritsu style or neutral.

Colour negative, black and white negative, and slide.

  1. Recognises the orange mask
  2. Measures the film base
  3. Balances the greys
  4. Sets the exposure
A black Volkswagen Beetle parked before a red gate: Photisan's positive A black Volkswagen Beetle parked before a red gate: the scanned negative
A precise positive in one click. Drag the line to see the negative.

Retouch

Frequency separation, spot healing brush, clone stamp, patch, remove and liquify, and dodge and burn as in the darkroom.

Select down to the hair

Quick selection that snaps to edges, magnetic lasso, pen, magic wand and refine edge for hair and difficult outlines.

Layers and PSD

Layers, groups, masks, blend modes and adjustment layers, in RGB, CMYK, Lab or greyscale. Opens and saves PSD in 8 or 16 bits to carry on in Photoshop.

HDR and panoramas

Merge exposures or photos taken by turning the camera, aligned even if you shot them handheld and free of ghosts. The result is a DNG you keep developing.

Organize and export in batches

A library with ratings and colour labels. Paste a development onto many photos, save your presets and export them all at once as JPEG, TIFF or PNG.

Light and smooth

Adjustments are computed on your Mac's graphics card and applied to the full photo, not to a reduced copy.

What you need

What you pay for stays yours

A yearly subscription with every update. If you cancel, you keep using the version you paid for, forever. Rather try it first? You get 14 days free, with every feature.

$45USD a year

Yearly subscription, cancel anytime

  • Every update while you're subscribed
  • If you cancel, you keep the versions you paid for, forever
  • Use it on two Macs
  • Refund within the first 30 days
Buy Try it free for 14 days

Payment is handled by Polar: it sends you the receipt, gives you the license key, calculates your country's taxes and lets you cancel the renewal at any time.

Questions

Does Photisan use artificial intelligence?

No. No feature uses artificial intelligence models, either to generate or to decide. That's a choice: creativity is something you exercise, not something you hand over. Photisan is for people who want to make their photos with their own hands, and grow with each one.

How do I buy and activate the license?

Click “Buy” and pay with Polar, whenever you like, during the trial too. When the payment is done you see your license key, which also reaches your email and stays in your customer portal. If you don't have Photisan yet, download it for Mac from this page. Then open Settings › License, paste the key and activate it: your photos and documents stay where they were.

What does the trial include?

Everything. For 14 days you can open, edit, save and export with no limits. When it ends, the app still opens and shows your photos, but you need a license to save and export.

What happens if I cancel the subscription?

Nothing stops working: you keep using, forever and on your two Macs, the versions released while you were subscribed. You just stop getting new ones. If you subscribe again, you get every update again.

Do I need to be online?

Only to activate the license or start the trial. After that, Photisan works offline for up to 14 days in a row, and renews the license by itself when you're back online.

Can I move to another Mac?

Yes. Deactivate the license in Settings › License and activate it on the other Mac with your key.

Does it open my Photoshop files?

Yes, it opens and saves PSD with layers, groups, masks and blend modes. What Photisan can't reproduce, such as editable text or smart objects, opens as pixels. The app tells you what would change and, the first time, saves under another name so the original stays untouched.

Which cameras does it support?

RAW files from almost every camera: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm (X-Trans too), Leica, Panasonic, Olympus, Pentax, Hasselblad, Phase One and more, plus DNG. If your camera is very new and doesn't open, write to us.

Does it work on Intel Macs?

Yes. Photisan works on Macs with Apple Silicon and with Intel, on macOS 11 or later.

Is there a Windows version?

For now, Photisan is Mac only.

Download Photisan

For macOS 11 or later. Open the file and drag Photisan to Applications. Already bought it? Open Settings › License and paste your key. If not, you start with a 14-day free trial.

Download for Mac Buy · 45 USD a year