GeekFindr: Acorn, Lightweight Image Editor
Every now and again I need to do a little image editing - typically this involves firing up Photoshop and doing what needs to be done and what needs to be done is super basic stuff, resizing, cropping, compositing and the occasional unsharp mask. Photoshop is waay overkill for this and it takes a little while to boot up even on my speedy new iMac. Enter Acorn.
This speedy image editor opens - and I mean opens and ready to use - in one hop on my OS x dock. That is completely awesome. And it does everything I need it to do well, easily and more. It’s got a convenient modal palette that contains most all of the tools - and it looks like the new finder windows with a set of options in a left pane and then the selected options in the main right pane. And for my pea brain it also has an iPhoto like zoom slidebar - instead of having to choose the magnification percent, you just slide and it works. The whole interface feels very Mac-like in the best way.
Beyond that it has really neat features. You can easily add in a new layer from iSight, so super imposing images of yourself is very easy. Even more useful to me is that you can take screen shots directly into it and ready to edit. Although one bug with this is that it doesn’t handle dual screens - you can only screen shot your main screen (where the dock is). Another minor issue is that it doesn’t let you play with levels - or more to my point, it doesn’t do “auto-levels” which often makes pictures look nicer.
This is definitely a great find - it’s much easier to use for mere mortals than Photoshop and much faster to get in and out of. I definitely recommend checking Acorn out if you mostly have pretty basic editing needs it’s got a free trial and is well worth the $39.95 for the application.
