HM GUI for Mac
shoot.
edit fast.
animate.
A speed editor with a capture platform behind it. Shoot tethered over USB, fly through a session, develop RAW, retouch on layers, turn the layers into frames and write a GIF, and let recorded actions, Shortcuts or your own AI editor do the repeats. One purchase, no HoneyMotion account, no network access at all.
Coming soon to the Mac App Store. $39.99, one purchase, updates included.
the HM photo engine, from its test suites
the GIF engine
layers in.
a loop out.
Window ▸ Timeline is a frame strip under the picture. Make Frames From Layers builds the whole strip in one go, or you add frames yourself; each frame is the layers that show and how long it holds. Play it back over the picture, set it to loop forever, once or three times, and export it as an animated GIF — or the same frames as an MP4 or a MOV.
frames from layers
One click turns a stack of layers into a strip of frames, bottom layer first, the way Photoshop's Make Frames From Layers does.
hold each frame
Per-frame timing from a hundredth of a second up, with the strip showing the total length as you go.
play it in place
Press play and the animation runs over the picture in the viewer, in the document you are editing. No separate preview window.
GIF, MP4 or MOV
File ▸ Export writes the animated GIF, or the same frames as video. GIFs are written with macOS's own image writer.
in the engine too
The HM photo engine reads animated GIF, APNG and animated WebP, and can apply one look to every frame of an animation or a video.
in Shortcuts
Export Image is an Apple Shortcuts action, and GIF is one of its formats, so a GIF can come out of a Shortcut you build.
automation, scripting and AI
you do it once.
Every edit in HM GUI is a step in a small JSON recipe, so anything you can do by hand can be recorded, replayed and handed to something else to run. That is the same recipe format the engine uses, written down in plain text you can read.
record an action
Window ▸ Actions records what you did as a list of steps, like Photoshop's Actions, and plays it back on one picture or on a whole folder through Batch.
build it in Shortcuts
Open Image, Run Action and Export Image are Apple Shortcuts actions. Point Run Action at files and an output folder and the Shortcut does the rest.
your AI editor, inside the app
Switch on the AI Automation bar and the AI editor you already use on your Mac — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex — edits the open picture with HM GUI's own tools, looking at a preview between steps.
off until you switch it on
AI Automation is off at every launch. Each recipe lands as one step in History, so ⌘Z takes the whole thing back, and your own edits always win.
only HM GUI's own tools
A recipe may use only the steps the app lists, at most 100 of them, and file paths inside a recipe are refused. Exports go to the hand-off folder and nowhere else.
HM GUI sends nothing
The app has no network access at all and opens no port: it reads and writes files in one folder. Your AI editor is the thing with a connection, under its own terms.
the engine inside.
HM GUI runs on the HM photo engine, which studios and app teams can also license on its own. These are the engine's capabilities; the Mac app's features are listed on the Mac app page.
healing that heals
Spot heal finds its own source. Smart fill rebuilds texture from the surroundings instead of smearing it. A patch tool is built in.
portrait tools
Skin that keeps its texture, blemish removal, eyes, teeth, under-eye and shine, each with its own strength slider.
one tap
An automatic portrait retouch that shows every step it took, so you can edit or undo any of it.
clean cut-outs
Hair-aware subject selection, background replace with light wrap, portrait-mode blur and sky swap.
event crops
Print sizes, photo strips and social formats, with auto crop that works around the faces it finds, plus auto straighten and perspective fix.
layers, not damage
Every tool can put its result on its own layer. The original pixels are never overwritten.
one recipe.
every device.
In the HM photo engine, an edit is a small JSON recipe, not a new pixel file. hmcore (Python) and HMCoreKit (Swift) read the same recipe, and golden tests prove they produce the same colors.
// look.json: made on the Mac, replayed on iPhone { "hm_recipe": 1, "name": "HM Portrait (natural)", "steps": [ { "op": "spot_heal", "points": [[812, 640, 9]] }, { "op": "smooth_skin", "strength": 0.35, "texture": 0.5 }, { "op": "enhance_eyes", "strength": 0.25 }, { "op": "white_balance", "temperature": 5600 }, { "op": "curves", "points": [[0,0],[.5,.56],[1,1]] } ] }
private by design.
HM GUI for Mac has no HoneyMotion account, tracks nothing and has no network access at all: it cannot go online, and cameras tether over USB. The HM photo engine works the same way: photos never leave the device for editing, and face analysis runs on the device.