Image editors on the Mac
21/04/08 23:26 Filed in: Software
Lightweight image
editors
Pixelmator
I work with pictures a lot, pretty much every day, so the software I use is pretty much a shoe for me. Photoshop is very comfortable, but it's a dress shoe. You can, theoretically, wear it anywhere, but there are some situations where it can be more uncomfortable than it needs to be.
Photoshop is, to put it bluntly, a RAM hog. The software has always assumed that it's the most important boot in the room and leaves a substantial footprint behind.
Over time, the software slowly takes more and more virtual memory (indeed, it doesn't really work well unless you set aside an empty disk partition so that it can write its temporary files.
That isn't to say that the quirks of Photoshop aren't worth it. The software is a rich, powerful tool for working with images in many creative ways. There are some things, however, that it isn't all that good at.
Opening bizarre image files that carbon date back to the beginning of computer graphics, for instance, or quickly transcoding a folder full of graphics files from one format to another. Photoshop's strength is in applying an impressive palette of tools and tweaks to a single image, not working with many images at once.
That's what Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is for, but sometimes, even that tool is too much software to throw at a simple problem. To resize a folder full of images in Lightroom, you would first have to import the files then export them again at the size and format that you wanted.
No, this is a job for
Lemkesoft's Graphic Converter, one of the grand old men of the
Macintosh graphics world. Graphic Converter can colour correct
images, but that isn't its great strength. What it does well is
wrangle images. Preview them on screen like a virtual contact
sheet, open odd graphics formats, convert and modify while applying
batch conversions like resizing and colour shifting.
I ran an entire daily newspaper's all-digital photographic department with this tool for a year and a half and it never faltered once.
Graphic Converter was an early adopter of the RAW format, unsurprising given Thorsten Lemke's insistence on keeping his software up to date with out of date file formats. The software uses Dave Coffin's DC RAW software toolbox for viewing RAW images and usefully fails to add previews of the XMP files that Bridge and Lightroom can optionally create after they build metadata and image previews of a collection of images (earlier GC versions showed both, which was both confusing and useless).
GC can preview ratings from XMP metadata sidecars, but remains blind to any adjustments.
I still use it to manage student JPEGs, but it isn't as fast as CameraBits' PhotoMechanic, which is currently my software of choice for working with preliminary edits on a folder full of RAW images.
Still. Graphic Converter remains the champion for previewing or transcoding a folder full of mystery images that nothing else will open.
There are times, though, when I don't want to use a hammer to properly fix a pushpin, and having a good, lightweight image editor around that doesn't attempt to grab all my free memory on launch is what I need.
Apple's Preview has some useful tools, but it's just a bit too flimsy for what I need to do.
Iris,
from No Lobe software, is one of a group of new image editors that
tap into Apple's Core Image toolbox to provide just the kind of
full-featured image-editing tools I'm looking for.
Iris has an attractive icon and a spare, screen-filling interface that looks utilitarian. The catch is that the software is buggy as hell, definitely not ready for prime time in its current beta incarnation.
So what do you use if you want an image editor that aspires to Photoshop's thoroughness but reduces both its heavy footprint and breathtaking price?
Enter Pixelmator, software by brothers Aidas and Saulius Dailide of the UK, the love child of iPhoto and Photoshop, a sleek, dark bezeled image editor that replicates most of the best bits of Photoshop with the smooth moves of Apple's Aperture and iPhoto. Best of all, it's just US$59, a remarkable price for software this polished and feature rich. PixelMator makes use of Apple's Core Image as well, but the software feels very different from the current beta version of Iris.
It opens 30 megabyte TIFF files with ease and performs the most common actions that a basic user will need, cropping, rotating and colour correction with dispatch.
There is no CMYK support and the layers feature offers no layer styles, but hey, Photoshop 3 had pretty rudimentary layers and that cost way more than this software.
Pixelmator
I work with pictures a lot, pretty much every day, so the software I use is pretty much a shoe for me. Photoshop is very comfortable, but it's a dress shoe. You can, theoretically, wear it anywhere, but there are some situations where it can be more uncomfortable than it needs to be.
Photoshop is, to put it bluntly, a RAM hog. The software has always assumed that it's the most important boot in the room and leaves a substantial footprint behind.
Over time, the software slowly takes more and more virtual memory (indeed, it doesn't really work well unless you set aside an empty disk partition so that it can write its temporary files.
That isn't to say that the quirks of Photoshop aren't worth it. The software is a rich, powerful tool for working with images in many creative ways. There are some things, however, that it isn't all that good at.
Opening bizarre image files that carbon date back to the beginning of computer graphics, for instance, or quickly transcoding a folder full of graphics files from one format to another. Photoshop's strength is in applying an impressive palette of tools and tweaks to a single image, not working with many images at once.
That's what Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is for, but sometimes, even that tool is too much software to throw at a simple problem. To resize a folder full of images in Lightroom, you would first have to import the files then export them again at the size and format that you wanted.
I ran an entire daily newspaper's all-digital photographic department with this tool for a year and a half and it never faltered once.
Graphic Converter was an early adopter of the RAW format, unsurprising given Thorsten Lemke's insistence on keeping his software up to date with out of date file formats. The software uses Dave Coffin's DC RAW software toolbox for viewing RAW images and usefully fails to add previews of the XMP files that Bridge and Lightroom can optionally create after they build metadata and image previews of a collection of images (earlier GC versions showed both, which was both confusing and useless).
GC can preview ratings from XMP metadata sidecars, but remains blind to any adjustments.
I still use it to manage student JPEGs, but it isn't as fast as CameraBits' PhotoMechanic, which is currently my software of choice for working with preliminary edits on a folder full of RAW images.
Still. Graphic Converter remains the champion for previewing or transcoding a folder full of mystery images that nothing else will open.
There are times, though, when I don't want to use a hammer to properly fix a pushpin, and having a good, lightweight image editor around that doesn't attempt to grab all my free memory on launch is what I need.
Apple's Preview has some useful tools, but it's just a bit too flimsy for what I need to do.
Iris has an attractive icon and a spare, screen-filling interface that looks utilitarian. The catch is that the software is buggy as hell, definitely not ready for prime time in its current beta incarnation.
So what do you use if you want an image editor that aspires to Photoshop's thoroughness but reduces both its heavy footprint and breathtaking price?
Enter Pixelmator, software by brothers Aidas and Saulius Dailide of the UK, the love child of iPhoto and Photoshop, a sleek, dark bezeled image editor that replicates most of the best bits of Photoshop with the smooth moves of Apple's Aperture and iPhoto. Best of all, it's just US$59, a remarkable price for software this polished and feature rich. PixelMator makes use of Apple's Core Image as well, but the software feels very different from the current beta version of Iris.
It opens 30 megabyte TIFF files with ease and performs the most common actions that a basic user will need, cropping, rotating and colour correction with dispatch.
There is no CMYK support and the layers feature offers no layer styles, but hey, Photoshop 3 had pretty rudimentary layers and that cost way more than this software.
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