A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… Adobe Photoshop used to be a lightweight image editor and available without an annoying subscription fee, but not anymore. With Adobe Photoshop now a comically bloated sluggish and expensive mess, one rebel spaceship carrying an enterprising developer took it upon himself to challenge the ADOBE GALACTIC EMPIRE and build a simple and super lightweight Photoshop alternative to restore freedom to the Mac image editing galaxy; Compositor.
In Compositor, you will find all the familiar critical Photoshop tools, including layers, folders, layer masks, adjustment layers, clipping masks, blend modes, selection tools, filters, background removal, gaussian and motion blurs, lens correction, grain and noise adjustment, liquify, smear, spot healing, clone stamp, brush tools, and text tools. These combine to give you a fantastic set of powerful tools for post-processing images, image editing, and design work, and should be a workable Photoshop alternative for many Mac users. While it’s obviously not going to have every feature in Photoshop, for image editing and post processing, Compositor is really quite impressive, and freakishly lightweight, making it a worthy addition to just about any Mac.
Not only is Compositor quite powerful, but it’s also exceptionally lightweight at only 12 MB. Yes, megabytes, TWELVE MEGABYTES! That’s it! Staggeringly tiny in this day and age of enormous software bloat.
The video below, via the developer @robbietilton on X/Twitter, shows the app in action:
I built a Photoshop-like image editor. It’s called Compositor.https://t.co/gGGHtfwtWW
I originally built it for myself to get off my Adobe subscription, but decided to release it for free and make it open source. It has all the essential tools I need for compositing, with none… pic.twitter.com/vwbGh460Y7
— Robbie Tilton (@robbietilton) September 18, 2026
The developer page for Compositor explains the apps creation and purpose as such:
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 needs.
Compositor is an excellent app, and as a free download, it’s absolutely worth checking out. Maybe it can replace Photoshop for you too?
Another alternative is Affinity, which is available for both Mac and Windows, and also includes vector and text tools, so if you need a bit more than what Compositor has to offer it’s a great choice too. But, Affinity is over 3.5GB… whereas Compositor is a tiny 12 MB!
Give Compositor a try yourself, and let us know what you think in the comments!
