Posts Tagged
Graphics
If you scan the features page on the Adobe Photoshop CS5 website, you’ll find descriptions for almost 70 different features, everything from “Automatic lens correction” to “Fluid canvas rotation” to “Puppet warp.” But anyone who’s ever used Photoshop knows that 70 features is just the tip of the iceberg, and when you start to add the various options for each of those features, you’re talking about such a beastly bit of software that it sinks the hopes of any amateur who dares open it.
That’s where the Mac App Store comes in. With the Mac App Store’s democratization of the Mac software market, image-editing amateurs like me have access to a whole new range of “one trick ponies,” niche software that will do the one thing you’re looking for, and not a darn thing else.
Colorize is one such one-trick pony.
Great news, we’ve randomly selected our ten winners! Here’s a quick list of the commenters (based on the names they gave) that will be receiving a copy of SideFolders for Mac. If you won, you’ll be receiving an email shortly with more information.
- Eddie
- Jeannie
- Tio Istivi
- iMac
- Hok
- Tomas
- Kevin
- duckzila
- Robert Sarudy
- Mike Diaz
A huge thanks to everyone who entered! Stay tuned for more great giveaways and awesome coverage of all things Mac!
Original Post
I’m pleased to let you know that we’re kicking off a competition to win ten copies of SideFolders. This app aims to give you quick and easy access to your recent, and regularly used, files and folders through a useful sidebar panel that appears on your desktop. We recently reviewed the app, and this might be a good place to start if you’d like to find out more.
Entering the competition is really simple – all you need to do is leave a comment on the post. That’s it! Let us know why you’d like to win, tell us a funny story, or just have a short rant about your complex sidebar needs…
The competition will run for one week, and I’ll pick ten winning comments at random on Wednesday 8th June. Best of luck, and be sure to check out SideFolders in the meantime and download a trial copy!
This week’s sponsor is a fairly unique application – Smoke. Not your usual graphics editor, Smoke is all about creating unique graphical effects.
It offers a unique type of brush that renders stunning graphics with the simplest mouse movements. Abstract backgrounds, lighting texts, art-house drawings – or anything else – this tool helps to convert an idea into a painting.
You can head over to the Smoke website to see an few examples of the application in action, or grab your copy from the Mac App Store. It’s definitely worth giving this unusual, unique application a try – you’ll be surprised by what it can do!
It’s going to be the 800-pound gorilla in the room for the entirety of this article, so I’m just going to acknowledge it now: Photoshop. There. I said it.
Photoshop has been king of the computer graphics hill for a very long time. Even though other software exists, and other applications take more specialized approaches to creating digital graphics, in a professional environment it always comes back to Photoshop.
This article isn’t about Photoshop. And yet it kind of is. It’s about Acorn, the image editor for humans, from Flying Meat Software. Specifically it’s about version 3 of Acorn, and how this update brings Acorn so close to taking on Photoshop in the minds of so many people.
For a lot of those people, it’ll beat Photoshop. Let me show you why.
People want to be able to do cool stuff with their computers. It’s why they bought them in the first place, right? The promise of power, being bestowed with abilities that up to now you didn’t possess.
One category of apps that has long been ruled by high-end software is graphic creation. There’s no doubting the utility of these apps for the professional, but both their toolkit and their price tag are overkill for the average consumer.
Developers have spied an opening here, and Mapdiva have created an interesting app called Artboard. It’s directly aimed at the average consumer who’s looking to create vector-based graphics.
But while the marketing message and pedestrian price tag of $19.99 appeal to the consumer, does Artboard fulfill on their promise of “Simple. Powerful. Fun.”? What does Artboard have to offer? And while we’re at it, how does it stack up to its high-end competition?
This week, I’m incredibly proud to have Pixelmator as our Mac.AppStorm sponsor. One of my all-time favourite apps, this is a fantastic alternative to the increasingly-bloated Photoshop for all manner of graphic editing work.
Labelled as an “image editor for the rest of us”, Pixelmator’s interface is enjoyable to use while maintaining a simple learning curve for new adopters. If you’re already a seasoned Photoshop pro, you’ll feel right at home with the familiar palette interface and similar tools.
Pixelmator is based on Core Image technology that uses your Mac’s video card for image processing. This means that it’s fast. It supports a huge range of graphics formats, and the price of $59 is a welcome change to the inflated charge for many competing apps.
Although I still use Photoshop from time to time, Pixelmator has become by go-to tool for 80% of tasks that require working with graphics. If you yearn for a faster, sleeker alternative to Photoshop, give Pixelmator a try today.
If you’ve never come across Pixelmator before, you’re really missing out. Pixelmator is an absolutely incredible image editor for the Mac, exuding quality, style, and speed. It’s a piece of software I use every day, and it’s a pleasure to feature one of the founding partners – Saulius Dailide – today.
Saulius co-founded Pixelmator in 2007, and since then it has seen a great deal of success. Today we’ll be chatting about his motivation for creating the app, taking a look inside their incredible “iOffice”, and getting a better picture of what goes on behind the scenes at Pixelmator!
Apple does a pretty good job providing us with an array of smart looking icons as part of OS X. Most software companies that develop for Mac do the same. Their clientele is just a little more conscious of great icon design – or maybe just more easily persuaded with something shiny.
Whatever the case, sometimes we find an icon lacking for one reason or another. Sometimes we feel the need to add a little personal touch. Icon designers have answered the call and there are now millions (I’m guessing here, but there are a lot!) of beautifully designed icons for us to use.
It’s not too tough to change an icon with Mac OS X, but it’s not the most straightforward process either. Wouldn’t it be great if there was some utility to manage all these fancy little things? Turns out there is – and it’s called IconBox. Read on to find out more!
There are a number of mammoth picture editors that can do just about anything with an image. Then there are a few very effective smaller-scale apps that have a lot of power while remaining simpler to use – a personal favourite is Acorn. But if you’re someone with only needs to work with images now and then – a blogger looking for attractive embellishments for your texts, or someone maintaining a personal website – even Acorn might seem complicated.
That’s where Acqualia software’s Picturesque comes in: it’s super-simple to use, and delivers excellent results without requiring much knowledge about design, or prior experience of working with graphics.
Everyone knows about the big guns in the graphics field. Adobe is pretty much the unchallenged master of image editing with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks. Adobe’s InDesign shares the digital publishing field, albeit grudgingly, with Quark’s QuarkXPress. Serious graphic designers find themselves stuck between these two large corporations, due in part to format lock-in and in part to features that other pieces of software just don’t have.
For those of us who don’t need things like the ability to switch from right-to-left text to left-to-right text with one click of the mouse, or even more obscure features, there are a number of other third-party applications out there that may meet our needs.
They range from cross-platform open source programs with more power than beauty, to applications with innovative user interfaces developed by pillars of the indie Mac developer community. One thing is true in all of them: they’re less expensive than the Adobe alternative!
