Do you remember image editing apps before Photoshop came along? Me neither. Photoshop has dominated photo and image editing since well back in the last century. While there may not be a better app than Photoshop, the mother-of-all image editors is bloated, expensive, complicated, and best left to the professionals of the graphic world.
For the rest of us, remember paraphrase: from little acorns a usable Mac image editor grows. The name? Acorn. At a price tag of less than 1/10th that of Photoshop, Acorn gives you image editing tools that are easily learned and quickly used.
A few years ago I dropped Micosoft’s Office for Mac. Why? Too complicated and too expensive.
My new quest is to drop Adobe products from my Mac. I have two left, and one is ready to be discarded.
Acorn is an elegant, Mac-like image editor that isn’t packed with features and functions you need a college course to understand or use.
The basics are obvious. Tools are in floating palettes. Each image can have multiple layers for styles, effects, text, shapes, colors– all without damaging the original image or photo.
For drawing, you get brushes to scribble, sketch, draw– right on top of an image using mouse, trackpad, or tablet. Built in are layer masks, filters, gradients, vector shapes, and a full on spectrum of text tools (text can be art).
Acorn is not Photoshop. It’s somewhat Photoshop-like because it’s an image editor with tools, palettes, layers, and granular control over tools. It also imports Photoshop PSD files and can export files as layered Photoshop files.
That makes Acorn good for photo enhancements, image editing, graphic design, web graphics, even print advertising. On the geekier side, Acorn can be automated using Apple’s Automator, AppleScript, even JavaScript.
But if you are intimidated by Photoshop’s complexity and expense, Acorn is one of the better alternatives.
I shot almost 1,000 Raw images at a music festival last weekend, so I thought it would be interesting to see how Acron handles Raw files. The one I tried opened just fine, but there are several deal killers for me. First, Acorn cannot write IPTC info to files. I am a professional photographer so this is a a deal killer on its own. Second, batch processing requires downloading a third-party app and writing scripts. I want to spend my time taking photos, not writing scripts, but could work around this if Acorn could write IPTC info. Third, the Raw file conversion in Acorn is very basic, and not nearly as hood as PhotoShop’s.
Too bad. My 30-day trial of PhotoShop CS6 expired while I was at the festival. The timing was right, but I’ll get out my credit card and subscribe for the full-blown CS6 suite. Adobe’s products are painfully expensive, but nothing else come close when it comes to professional image software.
Acorn is a great app for the masses, but it’s not a professional tool akin to Photoshop. If you’re a casual photographer you’ll love the enhancements it can make on photos, but it doesn’t have Photoshop’s capability. If you’re a sometime graphic artist but can’t afford to sell your soul to Adobe, Acorn makes a good choice for those on a limited budget.
Acorn is a good recommendation for part-time graphic designers, and those of us with no wish to spend money or time learning Photoshop. From the perspective of a casual, infrequent designer, this is a nearly perfect app. It does plenty enough of what Photoshop does but without the huge financial investment or the steep learning curve.
If you’re expecting Photoshop at 1/10th the price, you’ll be disappointed and rightly so. But if you want some of what Photoshop can do to photos and images and graphic design, you will be pleasantly surprised.
Reviewers should quit referring to these apps as PhotoShop alternatives. They are not.
~ Ron Says: Yes they are. Anyone who needs quality graphic design may consider Photoshop, but there are alternatives that are also less expensive.
They may be alternatives to PhotoShop Elements, but not the full version of PhotoShop.
~ Ron Says: It’s ‘Photoshop’, NOT PhotoShop.
I also wish the reviewers would post comments critical of the review itself.
~ Ron Says: Sorry, that’s not how it works. Rules are basic. “On topic, relevant, worthy and funny. Or, pick any three.” Your comment wasn’t on topic, relevant, or worthy, but you were funny.
Acorn IS a Photoshop alternative. It’s ‘Photoshop’, dude. Not PhotoShop. Amateur.
Everyone doesn’t need all the horsepower that comes with Photoshop, so Acorn and others like it, including my fav, Pixelmator, are very good alternatives to Photoshop.
Some may think nothing compares to Photoshop’s feature set, but should consider the perspective of the user, not Adobe’s bullet points.