My Photoshop Replacement
Since getting my Mac earlier this year, I've been on the lookout for a decent Photoshop replacement. Why replace Photoshop? Well, there are a number of reasons:
- It's expensive. Even if I'm able to write it off on my taxes, CS5 runs $700. The features that I use don't justify that price tag.
- It cements Adobe's monopoly. Buying CS5 means that I help keep the system in place - a world where there aren't that many great alternatives to Photoshop.
- It's bloaty and slow. Photoshop has notoriously bad performance on Macs. Adobe has been dragging its' heels with any sort of performance enhancements.
I figure that these reasons are good enough to pursue alternatives. The question is, what alternatives are there? Well, right now there are two popular "independent" image editing programs for Mac: Pixelmator and Acorn. I tried both, and ended up choosing Acorn. My reasoning:
- Acorn has a more standard UI. Acorn looks like a regular Mac application. While some developers try to differentiate their apps by using non-standard chrome, I think that following Apple's UI guidelines is a big plus. Pixelmator uses a black background for all its' windows, which I've never seen in an OS X app before. The result is that conflicts horribly with other windows that you might have open, and looks very out of place.
- Acorn's toolset is a suitable replacement for Photoshop. There are some minor things that Acorn doesn't have (such as an option for aliased text), but on the whole it has all the functionality that I need. Acorn can even do stuff like having two windows open that display the same document at different zoom levels.
- Acorn is cheaper. Hah, OK, I'm nitpicking here, but Acorn is $10 cheaper than Pixelmator (and $650 cheaper than Photoshop).
- Acorn is shareware, but you can still use a stripped down version after your trial expires. It's nice that the developers still allow you to use a portion of Acorn's functionality, even after the demo expires. Much nicer than totally disabling the app. Since I don't have a chance to work with a new program every day, sometimes my shareware trials expire, and I have to search around for whatever preference file stores the "first run" date on my system, and delete it. Or I just delete the program, because I wasn't favorably impressed enough.
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