leftj Loc: Texas

I use and highly recommend Luminar for Mac.

caljr Loc: Indiana

Photoshop, lightroom.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Best is relative to YOUR needs, circumstances, hopes, dreams, desires, style... Here are some products and points to consider:

It comes with Photos for Mac, a complement to iCloud and Photos for iOS (iPhone/iPad). Photos is great for casual users. But I would not want it as my only tool. I use it primarily to bridge my images over to iMovie.

It also comes with Preview, which is extremely powerful if you learn to use it. It makes contact sheets, views, manipulates, and assembles PDF documents, does simple image adjustments, resizing, and more. Learn Preview, and you'll feel more capable as an imaging expert.

Macs also come with Image Capture, which I use to download images from my iPhone and my digital cameras to file folders. I DO NOT use either Photos or Lightroom as my default application for image importing. I like to put my images in specific folders, in specific locations, on specific drives, and import them to LR from there...

Apple chose Affinity Photo as their best Mac app of 2015, and it has received over ten thousand 5-star customer reviews on the App Store. At $50, it is a GREAT deal. If I had just bought a new Mac, and had no real image editing experience, I would download it immediately and not look back. It is amazing for the price. There is a nearly identical version of it for Windows, too.

Of course, the entire Adobe Creative Cloud Suite is available for both Mac OS and Windows 10. At the pro level, the Lightroom and Photoshop and Bridge CC bundle is available for $9.99/month. If you want what the majority of advanced users use, that's it. Of course, Adobe has other bundles with more software, if you need them.

Photoshop Elements is another Adobe product for Mac OS and Windows 10. It's only an 8-bit editor, but capable. It's more expensive than Affinity Photo, but less capable and more widely known. That's because it has been around much longer.

Of course, Corel makes AfterShotPro 3 for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It is for editing raw images. They have several companion products. I'm not familiar with any of them.

Pixelmator is worth a look. It was about as popular as Affinity Photo is now, before Affinity Photo was released.

FOTOR is fun for fooling around.

Graphic Converter 10 is fantastic shareware ($40 if you like it) for image file format conversions, batch processing (crop, size, rename, etc.), simple slide shows and image sorting into folders... I used it as a cull editor on four Macs in a photo lab for many years. It's been around since 1993 or so, and Apple once distributed it with every new Mac.

GIMP is free, public domain software that strives to emulate Photoshop. It is powerful, complex, available for Mac OS, Windows 10, and Linux, but documentation and training are sparse.

What do I use on my Mac? In order of frequency: Lightroom, Photoshop, Apple Preview, EPSON Scan (for my EPSON scanner), SilkyPix Developer Studio SE 4.4.4.4 (for special Panasonic GH4 raw images), Fotor, Graphic Converter 10, Apple Photos, and occasionally, Bridge.

WHATEVER you use, if you are serious about photography, a top priority should be getting a monitor calibration and ICC profiling kit from DataColor or X-RITE. This is a colorimeter or spectrophotometer and software package that you use for calibration and profiling of your monitor. Without proper calibration and profiling, your images will not look the same on paper as they do on screen. And they will look different on someone else's calibrated and profiled monitor than they do on your out-of-the-box monitor.

Calibration "linearizes" a device. It allows it to reproduce the same color output values as were sent to it. Profiling describes to your Mac's ColorSync color management system exactly what your monitor is capable of displaying, so it can adjust what you see to an international viewing standard. In other words, if you calibrate and then profile your monitor, what you see is what others see when they also calibrate and profile their devices. This is critical if you print, produce images for the Internet or TV, or just want great color, repeatably.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

Is that your real NAME Eleanor Rigby? LOL Didn't the Beatles have a song with that name in it?

truckster Loc: Tampa Bay Area

On Mac's recommendation I use Luminar ... here is an example why I like it ...

Washed out original

(Download)

with just two slider adjustments ...

(Download)

Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

A Windows computer. But seriously, take a look at Affinity Photo. It has been out for Mac for 1.5 years, for Windows just a few months. AF is an excellent option to PS and does better at some things. $50 and a 30-day free trial.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

If she needs a Windows computer, she can install Windows on her Mac, either in a separate drive partition, or as a Parallels Desktop virtual machine disk image. I've done that (Parallels and Windows on Mac) for 10 years, and it works great if you "just gotta" use Windows (I did, in a corporate environment, and still do, on occasion.) or Linux.

Dennis833 Loc: Australia

I have both. Iridient Developer is okay but because I now shoot with Sony I only use Capture One Pro. It's fantastic!

blackest Loc: Ireland

Not a bad save, but a circular polarizer filter on your camera would have cut out most of the glare and avoided it being washed out, pretty much. These days its one of the few filters still not able to be replaced with post processing. ND filters are also very useful.

truckster Loc: Tampa Bay Area

Thanks for the heads up ... I actually own a couple sets, for lenses, of polarizing filters. Got to remember to use them!