And I’m not ashamed of including myself in the category.
I’m a keen and passionate amateur but when it comes to applying the final touches to my photos I’m completely and utterly hopeless, and Adobe doesn’t seem to be interested in making the job any easier for me.
This is why yesterday I was overly excited to discover a new image editing software for Mac OS X which promises to do everything that Photoshop does for 1/10 of the price and 1/100 of the brains I currently waste looking for some obscure effect in Photoshop cryptic menus.
Last year when I switched from iPhoto to Aperture I thought I could finally stop using additional software, I was dead wrong, Aperture organises my photos, stores them and makes them easy-ish to find, however, it still lacks some of the editing capabilities that would make it my only software of choice. At the moment, after exporting a cropped and correctly exposed version of a photo from Aperture I proceed to open Photoshop and apply the final corrections before publishing it on Flickr. Needless to say it often comes out of Photoshop worse than how it goes in.
I’ve been using a trial version of Photoshop and wondering whether I should pay the big bucks they want to keep wrecking my photos. I’m sure Photoshop is totally worth the amount they’re trying to sell it for, just not for me. Hence my strive for a cheaper/easier solution.
Pixelmator promises to be the answer to all my prayers. The software has just entered a closed beta phase, I contacted the team practically begging to be able to give it a spin (no answer so far but I’ll keep this blog updated). The list of Tools and Filters on their site looks complete enough for me and from the screenshots I’d say it also is easy to use, even for image-editing-impaired people like me.
$59 is a price I’d be more than happy to pay to get a decent application, especially if it makes my amateur-photographing painless rather than extremely laborious, can’t wait to try the software first-hand!
Furthermore, I’m a Mac user, can’t help it, I love beautiful and clean interfaces, even if it means giving up some of a software capabilities.
Take it easy,
Stefano
Update: CrunchGear review
