Various flavors of Photoshop have become synonymous with the concepts of image-editing and working creatively with bitmaps, beyond basic photo-editing offered by the likes of iPhoto. However, a number of low-cost alternatives to Adobe’s Photoshop (and its consumer-based sibling, Elements) exist -- including Flying Meat’s Acorn -- and they’re getting better with every release.
Discover what you can do to your images with Acorn.
The developer of Acorn describes it as “the image editor for humans” and it’s certainly a very user-friendly application. Instead of sprinkling myriad palettes around the screen, tools, options and layers are consolidated into a single palette, augmented as necessary only by system-level palettes for choosing colors and text. This is a huge usability boost, because it makes getting to grips with Acorn relatively easy. But despite the application’s streamlined interface, there’s power under the hood -- even more so in version 3, which has a number of useful new features. These include multi-stop live gradients, quickmasking and instant alphas, enhanced vector tools, text rotating and layer styles. The last of those is what we’ll concentrate on here.
Layer styles differ from typical filters, because they are non-destructive. This means you can make major edits to an image’s appearance, without affecting the underlying image. This makes layer styles great for experimentation, and because Acorn’s interface for applying these styles is reminiscent of its wonderfully usable Apply Filters window, they’re very easy to work with -- you can even drag and drop them to reorder the "chain".
Acorn is available from the Mac App Store, priced $49.99. For more information, visit Flying Meat at http://flyingmeat.com/acorn.
