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• [Fix] Acorn is now a lot better about resizing the crop rectangle when zoomed out.
• [New] You can now drag and drop files on the startup window to open them up.
• [Perf] Scaling down images and various other operations are faster now.
• [New] Cmd-Option-I is now a shortcut to resize the document.
• [Fix] No longer discarding the color profile when saving the document.
• [Chg] Fixed a problem where images returned from a filter with infinite extents were not applied correctly.
• [Chg] Turned off the font preview by default in the font popup list because it was taking too long to load.
• [Chg] The buttons next to the zoom slider now work a little differently; zooming in and out in increments.
• [New] Holding down shift while moving selected shapes or bitmap layers now constrains the direction in goes in.
• [New] Added new plugin apis to crop and resize the image.
• [Fix] Fixed a bug when loading some CI filters.
• [Fix] Handles no longer draw uber big for shapes when zoomed in.
• [Fix] Acorn now comes to the front when you take a screen capture.
• [Fix] Fixed a bug where the layers list would scroll left a little bit.
• [Fix] Fixed a problem where the Font panel would get confused.
• [Fix] Shape layer images now respect the current blend mode.
• [Chg] When merging a bitmap layer to a shape layer, now trimming the bitmap layer first.
• [Fix] Fixed a bug where rasterizing a shape layer would sometimes move its position.
• [Chg] Minor improvements to scaling the image.
• [Fix] Fixed a bug where renaming a layer on 10.5 Leopard didn't always work correctly.
• [Fix] More precise feedback on the size of selections when making them.
• [New] New plugin API to change the front and back colors in the tool palette.
• [New] Pressing the 'd' key now resets the colors.
• [New] Option-delete now works to set the fill color for selected shapes, similar to how option-delete fills with the current color on bitmap layers.
• [Fix] The new document window and welcome window will now float above the palette.
• [Chg] Selecting a shape now loads the shape info in the palette.
• [Chg] Removing the shape layer when deleting a piece of text and it's the only graphic on that layer.
• [New] Added a fallback method to open up PSD files that wouldn't normally open up.
• [Fix] Shape and text layers are no longer rasterized to a bitmap when printing.
• [Fix] Printing now respects the DPI set in the image.
• [Fix] Using a wacom no longer ends editing on text views when you are bringing the stylus in and out of proximity.
• [New] Free rotate in Image->Rotate Canvas->Free Rotate.
• [Fix] Fixed a problem for plugin authors, where the old image wasn't cleared about before applying a new one.
For me, the gold standards of bitmap image editing have for years now been Color It! 4.x and Photoshop Elements (2, 3, and 4), the former for speed and user-friendliness, and the latter for pure power - especially in the context of digital photo enhancement and correction/retouching. I've rarely ever taken a digital photograph that couldn't be significantly improved on with Photoshop.
However, Photoshop Elements, while much leaner than its professional namesake Photoshop CS, is still a ponderous beast that takes seemingly forever to start up, at least on my getting-a-bit-long-in-the-tooth G4 PowerBooks, and it is overkill for a great deal of the image editing tasks that I do, which keeps me coming back to good old Color it!, now at OS X native version 4.5, most of the time. Color it! starts up almost instantly and is delightfully responsive. I like the way its tools are configured, and the program just has a nice feel to it - an impression perhaps accentuated by comfortable familiarity; I've been using Color It! since the early '90s when it debuted as a Mac OS Classic application. Indeed, the Classic Color it! 4.0 on my wife's WallStreet PowerBook running OS 9.2.2 looks nearly identical and works almost exactly the same as version 4.5 for OS X.
Color it! is even quite powerful, with good, basic to semi-advanced image correction tools and filters. For quick an convenient editing or creation of images and product illustrations it's tough to beat. However, Color It! does have some shortcomings. For one thing, it doesn't support layers. I don't find this much of a handicap for most of the stuff I do, but if you need layers support, you have to look elsewhere, Photoshop Elements being a logical candidate. Color It! Also does not support PDF files, which can be seriously frustrating these days now that the PDF format has become more of a standard, for instance the default screen capture format in OS X Tiger. The workaround it is to use Preview or a third-party application like the wonderful little freeware ToyViewer (which also has some pretty impressive image correction tools in its own right) as an intermediary.
Photoshop Elements 4.0, on the other hand, has no such limitations, and aside from its sluggishness, at least on middle-aged or older hardware like mine, it's a delightful application. I am especially smitten with its Lighting and Contrast correction tools, the Clone Tool, and the Spot Healing tools, the excellent red-eye correction feature, and its aplomb in handling higher resolution images (which Color It! sometimes seems to choke on a bit). Indeed, other than when doing very minor and straightforward image tweaking, I find it frustrating to use anything else. With the combination of Color It! 4.5 and Photoshop Elements together costing only 150 dollars, and ToyViewer for free, they make a capable suite of bitmap graphics tools that keep most of the bases covered for relatively modest outlay.
So, is there room for other players in the mid-range OS X bitmap image. editor category? Late last summer, two new applications debuted competing in essentially the same market range as Color It! and Photoshop Elements, challenging them both on price - Pixelmator and Acorn, I reviewed Pixelmator here several weeks ago, and today it's Acorn's turn.
Acorn is $39.95 shareware (making it $20.00 cheaper than Color It! 4.5 and $50 cheaper than Photoshop Elements 4.0) and is a quick download at 5.6 MB.
Acorn features layer-based image editing, tablet sensitivity for pressure strokes and using the tablet's eraser, vector shape and text layers, freeform, elliptical, rectangular, and magic wand selections, gradients, you can control opacity and blending modes for each layer.
THe program starts up quickly, which is a pleasant distinction from Photoshop Elements.
Acorn's developers say that Acorn is "built with one goal in mind - simplicity. Fast, easy, and fluid." Well, that may have been the goal, but thus far Acorn falls well short of it in my estimation.
The Acorn Website's home page blurb says that Acorn is GPU powered and "squeez[es] as much performance out of your computer's GPU as possible." It certainly seems to do that, but not in a good way. My 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook has an ATI RADEON 9600 GPU with 64 MB of VRAM, which isn't exactly state-of-the-art, but it's not chopped liver either,, however, in Acorn responsiveness moving selected image elements is *extremely* sluggish, accompanied by maddeningly long waits and frequent appearances of the spinning beachball. (A lot) more optimization needed here.
[Update: This has been improved somewhat in Acorn 1.0.3, but still has a very long way to go; response is still extremely sluggish.]
Even just simply selecting an item for copying to the clipboard or deleting involves a significant time lag.
[Update: Likewise, a significant improvement with version 1.0.3]
One of Acorn's most highly touted features is its support of layers, which is great if you need layers, but most of the time I don't for the sort of stuff I do, and I wish it were possible to turn layers support off.
The only workaround it to frequently merge the visible layers in order for everything to be contiguously selectable. Layers make for enhanced flexibility, but they also add another layer (so to speak) of complexity, especially when every pasted in or modified element becomes a new layer by default in Acorn.
Another thing I found cumbersome with Acorn is access to tools. Unlike Photoshop Elements or Color It!, in which the entire basic painting, selection, and navigation toolsets are visible all the time (the Tools palette in Color It! needs to be open, Acorn's tools live in a relatively large eight-paned Tools dialog. I found it especially awkward to have to toggle back and forth between the Move and Select panes.
In doing actual work with Acorn, I found myself reverting to the operating system's Command>Shift>4 with a Command click to get the copy I wanted, rather than going through the rigamarole of merging layers and waiting through the select, et al. time lags.
I should note, however, that Acorn has the ability to take screen shots, even if Acorn is not the active application. When you press the Command-Shift-6, Acorn will take over the window and allow you to crop out which sections of the screen you would like to capture. Double clicking (or pressing enter) will take the selection and make a new image in Acorn for you. Unfortunately, this sounds better than it works, although maybe I just needed to get used to it.
Another aspect of Acorn that I find annoying is that moving or deleting something leaves a checked background in the vacated space in the image window, rather than the plain white that obtains in Color It!
Overall, Acorn's sluggish response gets old very quickly, and Color It! (especially) and PE4 are paragons of speed, convenience, simplicity, and fluidity by comparison.
On the positive side, I especially like the handy slider for resizing the working image - the slickest implementation of this function I've used in any graphics app. The user interface, which is essentially the tools palettes, is attractive, albeit not particularly practical.
Another feature I'm partial to is Acorn's "Quick Canvas and Image Resizing. If you hold down the Control key when resizing a window, the canvas will grow or shrink accordingly. If you hold down the option key when resizing a window, the canvas will scale. This is very cool, and you wonder why all image editing apps. don't work this way.
Acorn has the ability to work in synergistic integration with iPhoto. with iPhoto. If you want to use Acorn as an image editor with iPhoto, open up the iPhoto preferences window and then "In application…" from the Edit photo preference. In the window that comes up, choose Acorn. Now when you click the "Edit" button in iPhoto, it will open your image in Acorn.
Acorn has a nice little selection of photo adjustment and color filter tools. I especially like the live Exposure Adjust slider, and the Hue Adjust filter is interesting, with a little dot that you drag around inside a circle with live feedback. Unfortunately, it seems you can only have one filter control window open at a time, a frustrating restriction similar to the one that exists with the main tool control windows. However, there is nothing like Photoshop Elements' Spot Healing and Red Eye correction tools, not PE's handy Auto Smart Fix or Color It's Auto Enhance.
There are also a large selection of special effects filters, which I never use, but some may find them of interest.
Preferences are a single panel with a few paremeter settings.
Acorn will save files in its own proprietary image format, or as PNG, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, and BMP formats, but unfortunately not PDF so on that latter count it's no farther ahead than Color It!. Another niggle is that it doesn't automatically apply filetype suffixes to saved files.
In summary, Acorn is a decent basic image editor, with a few quite cool unique features, but as a challenger to PhotoShop Elements or even Color It! in my image editing suite of tools, it isn't there yet yet. Get the sluggish performance fixed, make it possible for multiple tool and filter palettes to be open simultaneously (or even better, add a customizable palette that could hold a selection of tools and filters that you want available for a particular job) and include some more advanced photo-editing tools and features, and it would be a contender, but for now, PE4, CI!, or perhaps Pixelmator are probably a better bet.
System requirements:
Requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later.
$39.95 (intro price)
For more information, visit:
http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
Charles W. Moore
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