Photoshop is in Trouble
OK, once again I am amazed by the quality of the software from the top-tier developers in the Mac Community. This morning it's the announcement of Acorn from Flying Meat. Incredible. I use Photoshop Elements for most all of my graphical work. It's nice and powerful and it does everything I need it to do - at a fraction of the cost of Photoshop. Nothing wrong with Photoshop, and if it were cheaper and lighter weight, I'd be a user. But it's neither. It's a very large app - both in cost and in machine footprint. So I was very interested in seeing what Acorn had to offer.
I use VoodooPad and FlySketch, so I wanted to like Acorn for that point of view, but I knew that I had real needs for a bit-mapped image editor that several lesser apps just didn't cut it for me. For instance, Inkscape is a nice idea, and it's free, but it's more cumbersome than I'd like. Also, the GiMP is nice, and I've used it for a very very long time on a lot of different platforms, but I've had to get a book on it to make sure I knew how to do the things I needed to do in it.
Photoshop Elements was as close to perfection as I have come, but I hated the redesign of the tool options panel and the constant menu bar under the menu bar. Not to mention that it's still a PowerPC app and is not as fast as it could be because of that. It works, and I was living with the issues, but I was a little miffed that I haven't seen an update in all these months that Photoshop CS3 has been out. I'd even considered dropping down my own money for Photoshop CS3.
But I was saved by Acorn.
As I said, I was a little worried that Acorn was going to fall short of what I needed so I downloaded it and took it for a trial spin. I was very impressed to see that it had the layers capabilities... I use that from time to time. And I played with it a bit to see how it felt to make selections, zoom in, use the tools. It all felt very natural - much more so than Photoshop Elements. When I checked the memory footprint it was 30MB as opposed to Photoshop Elements' 150+MB. Again, light on it's toes in terms of machine footprint. Nice.
So I decided to take it for a real spin and have it do the most difficult thing I've done in Photoshop Elements recently - the soft-focus/fade of an image for the weblog. It's nothing really earth-shaking, but it's the most advanced thing I've done in Photoshop, and it took a Googling to figure out how to do it in Photoshop Elements. In Acorn it was obvious. Amazing. Once I played with a few things and got a feel for where things are, I was able to knock it out in no time. Amazing. Acorn even has the most common file types I use for my work. Again, nothing earth-shaking, but just simple, clean, natural, and easy.
If you have a need for Photoshop and can't justify the cost, give Acorn a try. I was amazed.