I sincerely recommended Pixelmator Pro to anyone for image editing on Mac. if you are coming from Photoshop, some parts of interface will make you puzzled, but if you free you're mind, got will enjoy it greatly.
I was expecting someone to post a comment along the lines of "Pixelmator is great for picture editing on macOS"; it is one of the best Mac editors.
But I'm also delighted to see your username pop up :) I used quite a few of your wallpapers back in 2002, when I was making desktop customization packs for Windows XP, and I have fond memories of them.
I haven’t enjoyed an image editor as much since Photoshop 5 in the 90s. Both the old Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro have been commercial software I really felt like I needed and want to buy.
It feels modern and natural on macos. It’s pretty sophisticated, but the feature set I use is easily within reach and it’s intuitive to me. Modern Photoshop is an awkward behemoth. The GIMP has always been functional but painful.
The newer stuff like workspaces for different types of editing seemed odd, but I do flip between the illustration layout and photo layout and enjoy that.
I like the price for the software. It feels very reasonable to me and brings me back to the feeling of supporting developers’ work.
Adobe is so expensive and invasive. It just feels abusive. I also pay for Omnigraffle, but it’s high enough it feels like a burden vs supporting developers.
I am not a professional and just use it occasionally for design, documents, and personal photos. I thought I’d share that, since it colors my view.
Unfortunately with Adobe I'm a victim of a self-imposed sunk cost fallacy. Even though Adobe drains my bank account every month for $20 I can't throw away 20 years of practice and muscle memory on Illustrator and Photoshop.
If you are into the Photoshop experience, you might want to look at Affinity Photo. It is modeled after photoshop and the price is a very reasonable one time fee. You will have a little bit of a learning curve as it is not identical to PS but it is much closer than any other photo editor.
Unfortunately you are also kind of stuck of you have to deal with agencies or designers on a regular basis. Affinity Photo and Designer are really good and I use those sometimes for parts of workflows when I’m stuck elsewhere, but they pretty often misinterpret files created in Adobe proper
I tried Seashore a few years ago but it was completely unstable. The link says they've done a lot of bug fixes to make it work on more recent macOS releases so I'm looking forward to checking it out.
EDIT: Downloaded and tried it. Glad that the UI is simpler than Gimp but it's actually less obvious how to use it. Sad, because I think there's real promise here. Hopefully Glimpse comes to macOS.
Same, but if I’m being honest, I won’t check it out. There’s so much competition in this space that I don’t need to.
I paid for Pixelmator Pro recently because I needed to do a repetitive task. It comes with several useful Automator actions that were exactly what I needed.
Plus it’s new ML features are great. I used it to enlarge a jpg 4x with no loss in resolution. It’s not always perfect, but it’s pretty damn good.
I love FOSS and wish Seashore success, but past experience plus healthy competition means I don’t feel the need to.
Not true. Glimpse editor wasn't just a fork with moderate name and logo.
It had come with improved installers and some UI tweaks. And there was a future plan to complete overhaul for UI as Glimpse NX.
The reason for the project's stagnation was lead developer's departure due to request from their employer (Oracle, if my memory was correct).
I'm still missing MS Paint. MS Paint is unmatched on intuitiveness and simplicity.
This App is nice but the moment I launched it, it started forcing me make decisions: I had to decide how large the canvas should be. I don't know? Let me see the default so I can decide if I want it bigger or smaller.
When I move my cursor over the canvas, it indicates that I am doing something wrong("forbidden" icon next to the cursor). Why don't you first give me the tool that can do something on that canvas so that I can get my feet wet?
I'm sure when I learn the app a bit I will see how simple and powerful it is but with MS Paint everything makes sense immediately, it's just the pinnacle of intuitive image editing.
I think macOS needs an image editor that aims for the simplicity of MS Paint. The professional stuff is out there and it's really good but we still don't have an app for stitching a few random images together and put a text on top as easy as with MS Paint. Preview can do it, Preview is actually very powerful and can do amazing things with PDF and such but it's total pain in the ass to use it to edit something.
I have Photoshop because it comes along for the ride with Lightroom but there are a fair number of times when I want simple cropping or resizing and/or maybe one or two very basic operations. For things like that, pulling out Photoshop feels like pulling out a shotgun to swat a fly in that not only is it massive overkill but it's not even a good tool for the job.
I don't think I realized you can crop with Preview. Yes, that's pretty much what I was looking for. (I think the issue is that it's basically hidden behind the selection tool.)
I know right? For cropping/rotating I would often airdrop the image to my iPhone, crop and rotate there and airdrop it back to my mac. Sure, there's the Photos app that can do that just like on iPhone but it complicates the library management with importing and exporting.
As saagarjha mentioned, you can use Preview for that. Just open the image in Preview and you can crop, rotate and adjust color of an image. You can also export to different file format.
You can also rotate directly in the Finder. Right-click on an image, chose Quick Actions and then choose Rotate Left.
I wouldn’t use Preview as a primary editor but a lot of edits are simple rotate from portrait to landscape, crop out the boring parts, or adjust the exposure and Preview is a quick way to do that for a few photos. If you need to do more in depth changes or for more images, I would use one of the photo editing apps. My own favorite is Affinity Photo.
When I used Windows, The two indispensable apps that I used every day were Notepad and Paint. Notepad was great if you wanted to copy and paste some text and strip out all of the formatting quickly. And MS paint was great for quickly annotating a screenshot. Today I use Skitch and Sublime Text on Mac to accomplish the same goals.
4.99$ or 9.99$ one time fee or 1.99$ a year feels about right for me. I would prefer the one time fee because I don't expect it getting regular updates(I'm fine with paying again for large version updates. I'm already paying for iStat Menus, Affinity Designer, BetterTouchTools and they all work with this business model). It is a utility that I would use every now and then, so subscription feels wrong.
I feel the same with Gitkraken. There has literally been nothing added to it since the first release that I would pay for, but as a subscription they have to tweek it.
$20 one time is all I need. I think Jetbrains has the best model for this.
There are no alternatives that nailed it. I think if the OP successfully crates something on par with MS Paint it can spread by word of mouth because there's no good answer for the question of "how do you put these two images next to each other and add a text on top of it".
I didn't know about Acorn, it looks pretty good. So far I really like the UI. It's not like MS Paint but lightweight Photoshop, which is also good for quick editing.
Thanks! Though, it's bit on the pricey side of the scale for an occasional usage.
MS Paints was neither simple nor intuitive it was easy to use and with the ease of use came a lot of bad habits and with the habits bad jpgs, giant tifs with 256 colors and the list goes on and on. MS Paint is and was a menace.
How does solving a random task make the software good? As I said it’s easy to use but it’s bad software. It’s non conformant to nearly all standards the encoders are decades old… it’s bad AND not maintained. Even Microsoft knows it that’s why it’s EOL.
I do this very frequently on Mac. Here’s how I do it. I paste all the images into Microsoft Word. You can paste anything into Microsoft Word. Then I take a screenshot and then I annotate it with Skitch.
Well, I don't have MS Word, I don't use it enough to pay for it. I also would like to do some small changes to the images(maybe laser eyes? maybe draw some lines to emphasise an emotion?).
I also recall Word being not very easy with alignments.
You could also use LibreOffice or Google Docs. I just meant that for my use-case (arranging images, plain text log files, syntax-colored code, and tables together in one place, quickly) prior to final annotation (big red arrows connecting the dots)
Macintosh uses “⌘” as a command modifier key, not the Apple logo. The Apple II series used the Apple logo. The only reason Mac keyboards used to have the Apple logo on the command modifier keys is because Apple once made keyboards that worked on both the Mac and the Apple II GS.
Fireworks was awesome. When I need that kind of experience these days, especially the smooth vector-pixel crossover aspect, I use Real-DRAW PRO in Wine.
This is not meant to be mean. I really want to know. Gimp is honestly great. Coming from Photoshop the UI is a bit confusing at times, but once you figure it out it's a great piece of software.
To me, Seashore (I haven't downloaded it... just looked at docs) is just Gimp with less features. Am I missing something?
GTK apps feel pretty clunky under macOS, with GIMP feeling moreso than other GTK apps with its various oddball UI patterns that don't even fit in with a GTK Linux desktop (like its layer palette with what looks like a standard list view but behaves nothing like a standard list view). It also doesn't handle multiple monitors well (alerts popping up on a different screen than the document window is on). In summary, it's pretty unpolished option among image editors that run on macOS.
Also, GIMP isn't the most lightweight of software out there… it can be overkill depending on needs.
It's low ceremony: load image, makes some changes, save, done. Most other image editing apps take too long and almost force you to save in their format. Acorn has its own format when you are actually making a project of it.
Acorn has been my go-to image editing app for a long time. Over a decade. It does layers, channel operations, composable filters. Really easy interface. Completely worth the low cost.
Acorn is probably the closest we'll get to a native macOS app that is analogous to Paint.NET from the Windows world, and it's worth the money if one is a Paint.NET cult member. Pinta (open source Paint.NET clone) is available for Macs but it's just as buggy as it is on Linux.
I was somewhat of a power user of Photoshop which I pirated throughout my youth. When I grew too old for that sort of thing, it seems that my need for editing images just kind of disappeared. I am not sure why, really.
Every now and then, I need to edit some image though. I tried using Gimp a number of times but it always rubbed me the wrong way. Paint.net was fine on Windows though it felt a bit limited (at the time. I am sure it's great now). However, when I discovered https://www.photopea.com/ I felt straight at home. It runs in the browser and it's free. Amazing! I still don't use it often but when I do, I love it.
> I tried using Gimp a number of times but it always rubbed me the wrong way
Same here. For a while, I thought it was just my over-familiarity and reliance on Photoshop and mspaint. And to some extent, it certainly was, and is.
But over time, I eventually tried out Affinity, Krita, Pixelmator, photopea, and a few others. And they just worked; the UI just felt "right". The icons, shortcuts and menu and window layouts made sense and were intuitive even for the tools I hadn't used before.
So I've wrapped back around to thinking, nah, maybe GIMP's UX direction is just plain bad. Or bad for me, at least. It could be the case of some things having become a de facto standard that GIMP willfully eschews, but I have tried to go pure GIMP for long stretches and always walk away with a unique sense of pure frustration.
For a very long time there were not enough developers to deal with Gimp problems on macOS. Things have changed recently with Lukas Oberhuber who work on macOS's Gimp, and the upcoming Gimp 3.0 version is expected to have much better UI.
I would like something like this for linux, any recommendations? I usually run some Image Magick command or open Krita simple editing, and it feels like overkill. I thought about configuring imv[0] to have some common editing features, but didn't take the time yet.
wow, nice work!
i'm wondering nowadays what's a good resource to start learning objective-c?
i kind of would prefer it instead of using swift if anybody can point out curated resources, that would be wicked!
i have an idea to learn a bit of smalltalk to grasp the main concepts before.
