I've come across a couple nice (and light)OS X image editing applications. Up until now I've used Corel Draw/Paint for my image editing needs - modest as those needs are - but to say that these programs are slow is a profound understatement; I'm sure that there are divorces that feel quicker than either of these monsters. Anyway, irritated beyond belief that I couldn't open a tiff image that I had scanned and then, after I converted the image to a jpeg, irritated even further because I couldn't figure out how to easily resample the image and make it smaller. I just gave up in disgust - I used to know how to do this with these programs but I just couldn't remember for the life of me. So I scouted around and managed to find a couple of interesting freeware alternatives:
The first program that I found is called Teal, it's all of 218kb in size! It reminds me of the sort of tight code that one used to come across all the time when hard drives were small and being an economical programmer was seen as a virtue. Anyway, Teal strikes me as being something of a simple yet enhanced "Windows Paint" program. It features a few simple brushes aswell as a couple of simple filters. It needs a nicer icon though :). Teal doesn't seem to open tiffs or bmps at the moment - it is fine with jpegs though. At the moment this program is listed as being in a preview stage, but it looks really promising. Take a gander at it here.
The second program, called Seashore, is to quote it's developer:
an open source image editor for Cocoa. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.
Now I've never been a big fan of the Gimp (fairly steep learning curve, lots of features, usually needs X11 on OS X), but this (2mb) program was a real eye-opener; fast and light, pretty powerful but not so overwhelming that you can't get into it quickly and an aqua application aswell. As the original author admits in the 39 page user manual, this program was started to solve a need that he had. I found it straight forward to use, it handled the file types that I was working with, and it allowed me to resample the size of my image in an intuitive manner. Of course one person's intuitive is anothers ... Anyway an excellent program that does have a really pretty icon. If your interested in seeing what it looks like:Go here. Good stuff.
The first program that I found is called Teal, it's all of 218kb in size! It reminds me of the sort of tight code that one used to come across all the time when hard drives were small and being an economical programmer was seen as a virtue. Anyway, Teal strikes me as being something of a simple yet enhanced "Windows Paint" program. It features a few simple brushes aswell as a couple of simple filters. It needs a nicer icon though :). Teal doesn't seem to open tiffs or bmps at the moment - it is fine with jpegs though. At the moment this program is listed as being in a preview stage, but it looks really promising. Take a gander at it here.
The second program, called Seashore, is to quote it's developer:
an open source image editor for Cocoa. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.
Now I've never been a big fan of the Gimp (fairly steep learning curve, lots of features, usually needs X11 on OS X), but this (2mb) program was a real eye-opener; fast and light, pretty powerful but not so overwhelming that you can't get into it quickly and an aqua application aswell. As the original author admits in the 39 page user manual, this program was started to solve a need that he had. I found it straight forward to use, it handled the file types that I was working with, and it allowed me to resample the size of my image in an intuitive manner. Of course one person's intuitive is anothers ... Anyway an excellent program that does have a really pretty icon. If your interested in seeing what it looks like:Go here. Good stuff.
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