Can you get me a discount on Adobe Photoshop? I’ve been a reader of Mac|Life forever, and I know you can get me a deal. Please? I’ll be your best friend?

We’re sorry to inform you that even though the Mac|Life staff possesses superpowers on top of good looks, we have no ability to get you (or us!) discounts on software. But we hear you--at $699, Adobe has priced Photoshop CS4 way out of reach for most people who aren’t professional designers. Luckily, the consumer-focused Photoshop Elements 8 is only $79.99. And Photoshop.com is free both for online storage of up to 2GB of images and its editing functions.

Photoshop.com is a free web app for storing and editing your pics.

Of course, Photoshop.com doesn’t offer all the editing features of Photoshop, but you can crop and resize images, adjust color tint and exposure, fix red eye, distort your image, play with the white balance and focus, and even add decorations such as text bubbles, clip art, and photo frames. It’s fun to play with and produces great results considering its low, low price of nothing. You can even drag-and-drop images from Photoshop.com to other photo-sharing sites including Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket. But if you still need an image-editing app on your Mac, and iPhoto’s basic adjustments aren’t enough for you, consider the more robust Photoshop Elements 8. Current students with valid ID can score discounts of up to 80 percent on Adobe software at Adobe.com (mouse over the word “Store” in the top navigation bar and select the Education store). Aperture 3 is also a terrific option--check out our review for all the details.

This may look like Photoshop, but it's actually Pixelmator.

We also really like Pixelmator ($59, pixelmator.com), which provides a Photoshop-like experience right down to the same keyboard shortcuts. Pixelmator reads and writes Photoshop files, supports more than 100 image-file formats, and handles virtually all the tasks we typically use Photoshop for: manipulating layers, saving images for the web, and changing image sizes. Mac integration includes capturing images from an iSight, browsing your iPhoto Library, creating Automator actions, and using Quick Look.