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

Develop the RAW as a layer. Exposure, white balance, curves, colour, masks for local adjustments, noise reduction and lens correction, for Bayer and X-Trans sensors. The development stays a layer of the document: you edit on top with layers and masks, and move the exposure again whenever you like, without leaving for another module.
Measured colour, real detail. For cameras whose sensor was measured, colour comes from its real sensitivities, calibrated for the light of each photo. The sensor's mosaic is rebuilt with Photisan's own algorithm, and capture sharpening undoes the lens's blur by deconvolution, without sharpening noise or making halos.
24 films from their datasheets. Kodak, Fujifilm, Ilford and more. These aren't filters: each simulation reproduces how the emulsion responds, with its grain by format and its halation, and answers overexposure and underexposure with its own latitude.
Darkroom black and white. Choose the film (panchromatic, orthochromatic or infrared), the filter in front of the lens, the paper grade, split-grade printing, the eleven zones of the print and the paper tone. And export the negative as a monochrome DNG that any raw developer opens like a file from a monochrome camera.
Cinema colour. Grade the blacks, midtones and highlights as in a film colour suite, with a qualifier to isolate a colour and work on it alone. Take the result with you as a LUT.
Convert your negatives. From the scan or the photo you take of it with your camera: colour negative, black and white negative and slide, with each film's curves and the lab print you choose (Frontier, Noritsu or neutral).

And everything you expect from an editor

Retouch. Frequency separation, spot healing brush, clone stamp, patch, remove, 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 into one photo with the light of all of them, or join the photos you took turning the camera into a panorama, in HDR too. 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.

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

The colour and the detail your camera captured

For cameras whose sensor was measured in a laboratory (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm and others), Photisan takes colour from the sensor's real sensitivities, calibrated for the light of each photo from 2000 K to 18 000 K: about three times closer to the true colours than the usual colour matrix in daylight, and four times under tungsten. And it rebuilds the sensor's mosaic with its own algorithm, with more detail and less false colour, on Bayer and X-Trans sensors.

Capture sharpening gives back the sharpness the lens, the sensor and the mosaic took, by deconvolution (Richardson–Lucy): it measures the blur on the photo itself, larger towards the corners, and undoes it without sharpening the noise or making halos.

The same detail developed in Photisan — The same RAW from a Fujifilm X-T4 (an X-Trans sensor) at 100 %, developed in another program and in Photisan. Drag the line to compare.

A detail of the photo developed in another program — The same RAW from a Fujifilm X-T4 (an X-Trans sensor) at 100 %, developed in another program and in Photisan. Drag the line to compare.

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.

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 — **Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400** · Colour negative

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 — **Kodak Portra 800** · Colour negative

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.

Recognises the orange mask
Measures the film base
Balances the greys
Sets the exposure

A black Volkswagen Beetle parked before a red gate: Photisan's positive — **A precise positive in one click.** Drag the line to see the negative.

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.

HDR and panoramas

Merge the light of several exposures into one photo: the shadows of the brightest, the highlights of the darkest. Or join the photos you took turning the camera into a panorama, in one row or several. And if you shot a bracket of exposures at each position, you get an HDR panorama in a single step.

It aligns handheld photos and removes the ghosts of what moved between them. Each photo is lens-corrected before joining and their exposures are evened out; you choose a spherical, cylindrical or perspective projection. The result is a DNG that opens as a RAW layer and develops like any other.

Photisan with a panorama of five photos open and, in front, the Merge photos dialog

Requirements and compatibility

macOS 11 or later, on a Mac with Apple Silicon or Intel.
Internet only to activate the license; after that it works offline for up to 14 days in a row.
Opens RAW files from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Leica, Panasonic, Olympus, Pentax, Samsung, Sigma, Hasselblad, Phase One and others, plus DNG, PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG and WebP.
Exports JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, PSD and monochrome DNG.
In English and Spanish.

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