Compositor
robbietilton/CompositorReviewed by AI
What it does
Compositor is a free image editor for Mac, written to feel like Photoshop: layers and folders, layer masks, adjustment and filter layers, selections with Select Subject and content-aware fill, brush and clone tools, a camera raw panel and the same keyboard shortcuts. It opens JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP, SVG, PDF, animated GIF, camera RAW and Photoshop PSD or PSB files, and exports PNG, JPEG, PDF and GIF. You download a signed 8 MB installer. It needs macOS 26 or later on an Apple silicon Mac, and it is English only.
How easy it is to install
A · download and open · macOS
Grade A on Mac: every release ships a ready Compositor.dmg (8 MB) that the README says is signed and notarized and updates itself, and there is also a Homebrew cask. It runs nowhere else, as the author states: "Compositor is macOS only".
Numbers on GitHub
- Stars
- 18,280on Oct 31, 2026
- Downloads
- 116,2366,662 this week
- Growth
- +330stars in 5 days
Stars over time
Facts
- Runs on
- macOS
- You need to install
- Nothing extra
- Disk space
- not determined
- Accounts or keys
- None
- Cost
- Free · Free and open source (MIT), with no account and no paid tier mentioned.
- License
- MIT (Permissive)
- Can replace
- Photoshop, Pixelmator Pro, Camera Raw, Lightroom
- Last update
- Oct 31, 2026
Risk signals (5)
- AttentionVery new repository with many stars
18067 stars in 41 days
automatic check
- Attentionneeds newest macos and apple silicon
README.md Requirements: "macOS 26.0 or later on a Mac with Apple silicon". Intel Macs and older macOS versions cannot run it at all.
AI review
- Infosingle maintainer
README.md on translations: "It's maintained by one person, every new string would need translating from then on". The app is English only and localization pull requests are not accepted.
AI review
- Infovery fast release cadence
58 releases between the repository's creation on 2026-09-16 and 2026-10-27, with three of them (v1.5.10 to v1.5.12) in two days. The app updates itself automatically, so changes reach you quickly, tested or not.
AI review
- Infounofficial ports for other systems
README.md lists Windows and Linux ports by other people and says: "These unofficial ports are made by others, not reviewed or supported by me". Those downloads come from repositories this project does not control.
AI review
Evidence is shown in its original language.
What Radar could not check
- Whether the ready .dmg was built from the source code in this repository
- How faithfully Photoshop files open, beyond the stated limits (8-bit RGB only, no CMYK, some vectors and vertical text become pixels)
- How it behaves with very large documents and how much memory and disk it uses
- Whether the pace of releases brings new problems, since the app updates itself