Apple doesn’t seem to mind a little competition, and it’s obvious the company isn’t afraid to eat its own dogfood. Check out the Photography category on the Mac App Store. The top two paid apps are Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture, one at $15 and the other at $80.

The next three apps on the list are must have apps for anyone serious about photo editing but can’t afford Adobe Photoshop or all the tutorials to make it work.

ColorStrokes: How do you get colors onto an image that needs something to make it stand out? ColorStrokes is a color splash tool that makes it easier to drop colors in, and weed colors out. Monochrome, sepia, blue tone, or grayscale can be applied to an image with a few clicks (though you have complete control over the tint with numerical sliders).

PicFrame: No Mac photo app collection is complete without an app to create photo collages. High on the App Store list is PicFrame which brings more tools than you’ll find with the free collage apps. It comes with over 70 adjustable frames, each of which can handle up to nine photos. You get controls over rounded corners, colors, border size, composing photos within a frame and a bunch of ratios from 1:1 to 16:9. Share online to Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. Not bad for 99-cents.

FX Photo Studio Pro: At the high end of the photo editing lineup is FX Photo Studio Pro which combines an impressive arrange of tools to enhance photos in more ways than you can count. Over 170 photo filters and effects are included, and it does photo frames and borders, splash color, and integrates with Aperture, iPhoto, Lightroom, and Photoshop. Select a filter or effect and it’s instantly applied.

This one is just loaded with useful tools for photographers of every level. It imports photos from Aperture and iPhoto, and exports to both as well as Lightroom and Photoshop. The number and variety of filters and effects will have you spending hours in trial and error heaven (or, hell) but it takes little effort to change a bland photo into a colorful masterpiece.

Back in the day I’d fire up Safari, open up Flickr and flick through hundreds of photos online. Why? Browsing is free, and it’s a good way to see the works of other photographers. Flickr seems to be on the upswing these days with more storage and a better user interface, but browsing is still browsing.

Here’s a better way and it’s free.

The F-Stop app for your Mac gives you more tools to browse through Flickr’s photos, but also upload photos to Flickr, monitor activity, manage photos and details, as well as share your Flickr photos on Twitter.

Yes, you need a Flickr account to use F-Stop, but look at what you get for free.

F-Stop monitors your Flickr account activity so you can see which photos get the most views. Searches can be customized and saved. Within F-Stop you can view all the details of each photo you’ve uploaded.

There’s an option to add notes to specific photos, reorder photos within sets in Flickr, add or remove comments to each photo, update photo meta tags, and see geotag information on a map.

F-Stop is a bit cumbersome to use at first, but the options are limited and the learning curve gradual. Set up F-Stop with your Flickr account details. Then, browse photos in groups or galleries. Search photos and save the search criteria.

All this is free and it makes digging into Flickr a little easier than in a browser window.

Remember the Clapper? It was a sound activated electrical switch from the 1980s which would turn on a switch with a clap of the hands. ‘Clap On! and Clap Off!’ would turn a light on and off without having to reach for the lamp switch.

Clapmera for your Mac does much the same thing but with photos. Clap your hands and say cheese. Clapmera takes a photo using the Mac’s built-in iSight camera.

You can do much the same thing with Photo Booth or QuickTime Player, or any one of a dozen apps which capture images through iSight, but none use the sound of hands clapping to snap the photo.

Here’s an advantage. You want a group photo but who reaches in to click the camera? Clapmera makes it easy.

Clapmera gives you a few seconds to compose the image before the camera snaps a photo. You can also change the sensitivity of the Mac’s built-in microphone to take a photo simply by snapping your fingers.

There’s not much else going on to account for the 99-cent price tag. There are no options to share but there is a timed release option in a slider bar.

The Clapper lives in Clapmera.

When it comes to photo editing apps for the Mac there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that we Mac users can choose from dozens of apps that do something special but not much more. The bad news is that we’d spend a lot of money collecting and using all those one-trick pony photo editing apps.

Here’s another to add to the list. It’s called PIP Easy, and the PIP means picture-in-picture, which is a term mostly reserved for television wherein a smaller video plays in a larger video.

Something got lost in the translation and the PIP in PIP Easy became literal. It’s really more of a photo in a photo but also the kind of effects that are not easy to do unless you have an expensive and complicated photo editor (think Photoshop or Pixelmator).

Here’s an example of PIP Easy with a picture within a picture.

Select a background photo. Select a foreground photo (the picture within the picture). Select an object to drop in the foreground photo and you’re good to go.

Here’s another example.

PIP Easy is limited on the options to place foreground photos into different objects, giving you a bottle, a camera, iPad, and a few others. It needs more. Many more.

Here’s yet another PIP example.

It’s an effect you don’t see in many photo editors and PIP Easy couldn’t be much easier to use, so it lives up to its name. It’s also the kind of effect you won’t use often.

Trips we take these days often have five or six different locations, usually spread out by distance and days, and the one variable we can’t control as we move from plane to rental car to hotel is the local weather. As they say, ‘forewarned is forearmed’ so knowing a little about the upcoming weather in each location you travel is worthwhile.

Most of our weather watching is done one of two ways. Looking outside, which doesn’t tell us much about the future. And, checking various weather apps and radar maps on the iPhone. Yet, much of my day is devoted to slaving over a hot keyboard so having weather conditions and forecasts just a click away is worthwhile.

Temps is a unique Mac app which combines a Menubar weather station with a world clock. It draw weather information from a couple of million locations worldwide and then delivers what you need for up to 11 other locations easily accessible from the Menubar.

Click, and ye shall receive.

Not only do you get a pop down window with weather details for any location (and that includes forecasts and conditions), you also have a pop down which gives you a brief look at weather conditions for 10 additional locations.

Unfortunately, it only displays three-day forecasts, but all the extra details are usually worthy, and, besides, everyone knows five and seven day forecasts are usually wrong. Unless you live in Antarctica or Hawaii.

Other information in the larger drop down includes precipitation, wind, chill factor, cloud cover, barometric pressure, humidity, as well as local time sunrise and sunset.

Here’s what makes Temps a worth addition to your Mac. There’s an iPhone and iPad version that syncs your location list with the Mac over iCloud.

Oh, one more thing. Temps also works with the Netatmo Weather Station, the perfect add on for weather junkies (I’m a minor league junkie, so I don’t have a weather station).