Mordant
Lifts the subject out of a photograph and bites away the rest.
Drop a photograph on the plate and the subject is lifted the moment it lands. Correct whatever the lift got wrong with a brush, then write a cutout at full resolution — your photographs are read from disk, worked on in memory, and written where you say.
How it bites away the background
One pass, on this machine
The subject is separated once, when the image lands, using the segmentation frameworks built into macOS. Everything after that — background, edge, brush — is immediate, because nothing is being asked to think again.
The correction is yours
Where the lift is wrong you paint it right: add or remove by brush, keep or drop each subject it found, refine the edge. A photograph with several subjects offers each of them separately rather than guessing which one you meant.
A folder at a time, still reviewed
A whole folder can go through in one pass, written beside nothing and over nothing. One unreadable file never stops the run, and the results that are least decisive say so — so you check four rather than audit forty.
Mordant at work
Before the dose, after the dose
- An hour with the pen tool, and the hair still reads as cut out
- A 48-megapixel photograph handed back at web size, with a mark across it
- A JPEG quietly flattened onto black where the background used to be
- One pass, then a brush for whatever it missed
- Full resolution, no watermark, and the original colour space kept
- Transparency where the format holds it, and a fill you chose where it cannot
Frequently asked
How good is the cutout?
Good, and not perfect — the app is built on that assumption rather than around it. Fine hair, glass, motion blur and a subject that barely separates from what is behind it are all hard, and some photographs have no clear subject at all. That is why the brush is there in every version, why the edge controls exist, and why a folder pass marks the results worth a second look instead of presenting all of them as finished. You are the one who decides a cutout is done.
Do my photographs leave this Mac?
No. The lift, the matte and every export run on your own Mac using frameworks built into macOS. No image, filename or dimension is ever uploaded, there is no account, no cloud, and no queue on anyone else's server.
Does the app report anything at all?
Yes, and it is a different thing, so it is stated separately: Mordant reports anonymous usage and crash diagnostics, so faults can be found and fixed, and it can send product news if you ask it to. That is about the app. It is never about your pictures.
Does it change my original?
No. The cutout is always written as a new file beside the name you choose, and a folder pass writes into a destination you pick — never over the source. If a write fails, nothing on disk was changed and trying the same image again is safe.
Different symptom, same cabinet.
Frankensheet
Lays a folder of images out as one clean contact sheet.
- Thumbnails from any folder
- Custom grids, labels and margins
- Export to PDF or PNG
Changeling
Swaps one image format for another without losing the original.
- Any image format in or out
- Originals left untouched
- Batch or one at a time
Maskelyne
Converts audio and video from one form into another, cleanly.
- Audio and video formats
- Presets or custom output
- No residue left behind
Nepenthe
Removes faces, number plates and location data before you publish.
- Faces, number plates and text
- Metadata and hidden copies removed
- Every export verified
Imprimatur
Makes codes that must read back before it will let you export them.
- Eleven symbologies, QR to EAN-13
- Vector output for print
- Every render decoded before export