Forums | MacLife

ChocoFlop may just suit your needs, for free.

Photoshop Elements, at $100, is probably too much program for you, but it's pretty awesome.

There's a lot of free and cheap alternatives to Photoshop out there (and easier to use too).

Good things have been said about all of these these:

Free:
-GIMP (a lot of features here)
-Seashore (based on GIMP, but watered down so as to make it easier to use)

Paid:
-GraphicConverter ($35 - the "classic" Mac graphic editor, sometimes called the "poor man's Photoshop")
-Acorn ($50 - said to be easy to use)


ALSO, lots of other recommendations in this (non-MacLife...sorry) thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=70878

SomeOneOrOther wrote:

There's a lot of free and cheap alternatives to Photoshop out there (and easier to use too).

Good things have been said about all of these these:

Free:
-GIMP (a lot of features here)
-Seashore (based on GIMP, but watered down so as to make it easier to use)

Paid:
-GraphicConverter ($35 - the "classic" Mac graphic editor, sometimes called the "poor man's Photoshop")
-Acorn ($50 - said to be easy to use)


ALSO, lots of other recommendations in this (non-MacLife...sorry) thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=70878

Nice breakdown.

what about google's Picasa?

I hae tried out pretty much every image editor available for the Mac. Some are quite good.
But the only Editor I can recommend with full confidence is Photoshop Elements.
It has a really excellent subset of Photoshops tools at a reasonable price. You can often find it discounted quite deeply.
PSE may be more than the casual user may need now but it has lots of room for you to grow and learn in. Doing the basics is a snap in PSE in a way few others can offer and when you need or want to do something advanced you can do it with PSE while most others will leave you short.
Adobe has been making image editors for 24 years and that experience is hard to beat.

Last edited by Pariah (2009-11-21 4:47 pm)

blondie wrote:

I also dont need top of the line and complicated

Knocks GIMP right out of the picture there.  I've never used Paint.net.

I like Gimp because it's as close to Photoshop that you can get for free. It's UI is ugly but it works. I think it might be too detailed for your needs. I'd say Photoshop Elements although I have to say I got my wife to use Photoshop and she has no problem with it. Adobe products are very user-friendly and you don't have to dive into all the fancy stuff they put on their programs for basic photo enhancing and manipulation.

Jokotai wrote:

ChocoFlop may just suit your needs, for free.

Looks like the project's unfortunately been discontinued. The developer recommends Pixelmator as an alternative, which I've just downloaded and will give a try.

I've now got both actually, GIMP and Pixelmator. But as I've commented in a thread in the Pro forum, given my editing is touch-and-go (since I'm a noobie), developing and refining my editing abilities is as important as finding good software to allow me to do that.

Going to be giving them both a try. Just thought Pixelmator was interesting as the UI is sleek, and it supports native OSX technologies (such as Core Image).

Last edited by SomeOneOrOther (2010-01-11 2:49 pm)