Fortunately, the program now offers a QuickMask feature, which lets you define a selection by painting.

The usual lasso, marquee and magic wand tools are provided and, as in most image editors, these are largely useless for creating the types of subtle, smoothly blended masks that you need for sophisticated photo compositing. Good compositing requires good selection tools. Acorn offers fairly sophisticated layering controls, with the ability to easily duplicate layers, and change their blending mode and opacity. Basically, it’s Photoshop’s tool palette and control bar combined into one box.Īt the bottom of the tool palette sit layer controls.

When you click on a tool, the right half of the toolbox fills with parameters, and tool variants. In that tool palette you’ll find navigation tools, a crop tool, a text tool, drawing, gradient, paint bucket, shape tools, a clone tool, and a color picker. The tool palette is very wide and kind of squat. While, conceptually, this is a nice idea-you always know where to find a tool-it makes for a rather inefficient use of screen space. In Acorn, your document appears in one window, and your tools appear in a palette. What’s not entirely clear is who it’s aimed at.Īcorn offers an interface that is very streamlined, particularly when compared to Photoshop and Photoshop Element’s large assortment of palettes and toolbars. Priced at $50 (or a $20 upgrade for Acorn 2 users), Acorn 3 is a full featured image editor with a lot of high-end features, including raw conversion, multiple layers, vector graphics. After decades of Photoshop’s domination of the image editing market, it’s been surprising to see that, over the last couple of years, a lot of small companies have decided to make image editing programs-and have done a surprisingly good job! Joining affordable image editing applications like Pixelmator, Flare, and Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements 9, is Flying Meat Software’s Acorn, which just received an update to version 3.0.

Acorn photo editor for mac