iPhoto is a great place to download, park, and organize your digital
photos, but its image editing and correction toolbox is rudimentary, to
say the least, leaving much to be desired if you really want to get the
best out of your photos.
If you're serious about that at all, you need at least one
additional "helper" application for working with photos, and happily,
there is a good selection of photo graphics applications available for
Mac OS X, with the price of entry ranging from free on upward to
take-out-a-second-mortgage Adobe Photoshop CS
A while back Bambi Brennon over at Mac 360 posted a profile of
her favorite iPhoto helpers. It's a good overview, well worth
checking out for her perspective. However, while there's some crossover
with my own preferred image editing tools, Bambi passed over several I
find indispensable.
ToyViewer - Free
Interestingly, this least-expensive program in my image editing
suite (it's freeware) is the one I use more than any other. ToyViewer
is not a full-fledged image editor by any means, but it does the things
it's good at extremely well - in particular, resizing images and file
format conversions, although it also supports some image correction and
enhancement functions that can be extremely handy when you need to
spruce up an image quickly and don't want to wait for Photoshop
Elements to lumber into action.
It doesn't hurt either that ToyViewer, despite its whimsical name
(it's Japanese - perhaps something is lost in translation) has user
interface elegance and program stability that puts a lot of commercial
software to shame. The elegance element has even been enhanced with the
release of ToyViewer 5.0 last week, the most substantial upgrade the
program has had in years.
Version 5 is primarily a Snow Leopard compatibility build, and
indeed, some "limitations" Apple's WebKit APIs have, according to
ToyViewer's developer Mr. Takeshi Ogihara, imposed some issues for the
OS X 10.4 "Tiger" and
10.5 "Leopard" versions, with certain functions no longer "working as
expected." One biggie I've discovered is that ToyViewer 5's rendering
of PICT images from direct-to-clipboard screen shots or clipboard cuts
from ancient but still useful Color It! 4.5 is simply unacceptable.
There are several other caveats that I would encourage current Tiger
and Leopard users to check out in the release notes before
upgrading.
Happily, version 4.92 remains an excellent performer in these older
OS X versions, and I suggest continuing to use it unless you just
can't live without one or m ore of the new features listed immediately
below.
New in Version 5.0
Some new functions are added and software itself is refined greatly.
The following is the outlines of new functions.
- Color profiles embedded in image files can be replaced. Exif and
GPS information are also displayed.
- You can save image files with/without Exif and GPS
information.
- Images with CMYK color space can be dealt easily.
- SVG image files can be displayed. Note that, however, all kinds of
SVG cannot be displayed correctly (it depends on WebKit).
- TIFF Stacks, that is, TIFF image files with multi-frame can be
displayed. Moreover, ToyViewer can show animation of TIFF and GIF files
with multi-frame.
- Displayed images can be easily enlarged / shrunk by new mouse
operation.
- The interface to see files in a directory sequentially by using
full-screen is greatly changed. You can see two images at the same time
as an opened book, and two or more pieces be seen in
fast-forwarding.
- The effect of obtaining the contour from an image is updated.
- New effect called "Cartoon" is added. You can add the contour to
cartoon and posterize effects.
- Blur effect has variations: Gaussian filter, Median filter, and
Kuwahara filter.
I expect that Version 5.0 works just fine in Snow Leopard, but I
haven't had the opportunity to check that out yet. Note that OS X 10.3 "Panther" is no
longer supported in ToyViewer 5.
Among its many capabilities, ToyViewer will rotate images in single
degree increments, convert images to monochrome, and has a pretty good
basic brightness/contrast/gamma levels tool that makes decent guesses
in automatic mode with manual fine-tuning supported via sliders.
ToyViewer supports and converts between most popular image formats,
including PDF, and also has a PDF control palette for navigating
multipage PDF documents.
ToyViewer can display each image file in a folder one by one in
full-screen mode. You can also mark images to move - or to delete. With
this feature, ToyViewer can be used as a comic viewer and can also can
display images in full-screen and in front of all other windows. If you
like a displayed image, you can make it your desktop picture.
Further reading: ToyViewer, a Cool Free Graphics Tool for OS
X
Color It! 4.5 - $60
As I mentioned above, another mainstay of my image-editing toolkit
is Color It! 4.5, an
image-editing editing application almost as venerable as Photoshop,
dating back to early days of the classic Mac OS.
Color It! is currently a Carbon port to OS X and retains its
much-appreciated virtues of speed, an extremely user-friendly interface
(similar in many ways to Photoshop, but with more speed and less
angularity), and a relatively modest price. For most editing tasks that
ToyViewer can't handle, Color It! Is usually my first alternative,
partly out of familiarity, partly because the program starts up almost
instantly, and I just like the "feel" of it and the way it works.
Color It! Is showing it's age. It doesn't support either layers or
the PDF file format, and I can't confirm how it will work with Snow
Leopard, but if those points aren't deal-breakers, it's still worth
checking out if you want a fast, nimble, reasonably priced ($49.95) but
still powerful image editor.
Further reading: Color It 4.5 Does Work with
Intel Macs and
Charles Moore Reviews Color It! 4.5 For Mac OS X
Funtastic Photos - $35
Here is one on which Bambi Brennon and I concur. Funtastic Photos,
another application from the Orient, offers an amazingly comprehensive
range of tools and filters in an intuitive and convenient interface,
mostly controlled by sliders, that pretty much anyone should find easy
to learn. It will do many of the things most amateur, hobbyist digital
photographers would use Photoshop for, with a lot less complexity and
resources overhead - and for far less money.
Funtastic Photos leverages OS X's powerful built-in graphics
technologies like the Quartz 2D graphics engine, Spotlight, and ImageIO
Kit, and comes packed with advanced photo editing features, such as
nondestructive photo editing, which allows non-permanent adjustments
that can then be altered or removed at any time. Such changes can
include exposure, shadows and highlights, blurring, captions, color
manipulations, borders & frames, matte effects, blending, rotation,
levels, digital flash, shadows, highlights, contrast, saturation,
one-click styles, water drops, reflections, grayscale, sepia and many
more. The edited photo can also be easily "rewound" to its original
state, no matter how many editing changes have been applied.
The Funtastic Photos main interface window is a file browser that
can display photo archives stored in iPhoto, in folders on your hard
drive, or on other connected volumes. You select archive in a sidebar
and display its contents in the standard icon/list/columns troika of
view options. A tool bar at the top of the browser window has a button
to access OS X Leopard's Quick Look feature, as well as buttons
for various other navigation and organization tasks. There are also a
thumbnail size adjustment slider and a search field at the bottom of
the main window .
Another Funtastic Photos feature, "Finishing Touches", can be
employed to add borders, a matte, vignette effects, glosses, or 36
different provided border styles. You can also add your own borders to
the "Finishing Touches" library.
Further reading:
Funtastic Photos Offers User-Friendly Photo Editing &
Sharing
Pixelmator - $59
This is another one Bambi and I both included. Pixelmator, of which Version 1.5
($60 via electronic download from Smith Micro) was
released a couple of weeks ago, is a superb and powerful image editing
program with professional-level adjustment and correction features at a
price a fraction of what Adobe charges for Photoshop CS, and with what
I think is the most strikingly attractive user interface in the
category.
Like Funtastic Photos, Pixelmator is engineered to tap into OS X's
powerful native graphics technologies like Core Image, which uses your
Mac's hardware video muscle for image processing, as well as OpenGL and
ColorSync. The relative power and sophistication of your Mac's graphics
support will determine Pixelmator's performance somewhat. If you have a
high-performance graphics accelerator with lots of video RAM, you
should find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of
Pixelmator operations very lively. It flies on my Core 2 Duo MacBook, but I
found the program quite usable even on a 1.33 GHz PowerBook.
What grabs you when you start up Pixelmator the first time is its
user interface with windows bordered in translucent black - document
windows, black tool palette backgrounds, and colorfully styled tool
icons that magnify and show tool tips OS X Dock-style on mouseover. I
found the spectacular appearance a bit distracting initially, but I
have gotten used to it and now quite like it.
Like Photoshop, Pixelmator is a layers-based image editor that
supports linking and blending layers, changing opacity, and creating
clipping masks or layer masks to hide some layer portions. You can
quickly create layers from photos, other pictures, selections, or even
from iSight input.
Pixelmator is not, at least yet, a serious challenger to Photoshop
or Photoshop Elements for professional and advanced amateur
photographers and graphic artists, lacking such features as PSE 6's
automated panorama merges, group shot merge, cutouts, redeye
correction, advanced Black & White conversions, the new Quick
Selection Tool, and camera lens distortion correction, and I also miss
Elements' Lighting and Shadows adjustment panel, although Pixelmator's
Exposure adjustment compensates somewhat. However, Pixelmator should do
pretty much anything the average non-professional user would ask of it
- and a lot more besides.
Some of Pixelmator's correction tools deserve particular honorable
mention, especially its Curves and Exposure adjustment tools, which I
prefer to their respective counterparts in Photoshop.
Note that Pixelmator 1.5 requires at least OS X version 10.5.7 and
supports Snow Leopard.
Further reading: Pixelmator 1.1.3: A Serious
Challenger to Photoshop Elements?, Pixelmator 1.2 Closing the Gap with
Photoshop Elements 6, and Pixelmator 1.3.2 Gains Some
Cool Enhancements
Photoshop Elements 6 - $90
You don't have to cough up $900 for Photoshop CS to get most of
Photoshop's features - perhaps all that the average nonprofessional
photographer would ever use. Photoshop Elements 6 has to be one of the
biggest commercial software bargains ever, selling for $89.95.
(Currently available from Amazon.com
for $59.99 with free ground shipping.)
If I were limited to just one image editing application, it would
have to be Photoshop Elements, because there are still things Elements
does - or does better than any of the other applications mentioned
here, some examples being its lighting correction tools, its
sophisticated redeye correction, its monochrome support, and stuff like
its ability to stick together panorama shots and cut/add people in
images, the new Quick Selection Tool, and camera lens distortion
correction - and those examples barely scratch the proverbial
surface.
As a bonus, the Mac version of Elements also includes Adobe's Bridge
photo cataloging and organizing application, which some users may
discover they like better than iPhoto.
