What learning curve?

As opposed to Photoshop, and even simpler solutions like Photoshop Express or Pixelmator, Snapseed has little to no learning curve. It keeps editing options grouped intelligently and doesn’t overwhelm a user with toolbars and menus. Instead, you have three types of Basic Adjustments, and seven varieties of Creative Adjustments to work with. Within each of these, you get more fine-grained control, but even then, Snapseed makes sure to walk you through the basics, and all changes you make are instantly previewed on your full, working image in real-time.

For family albums and the average user, I’d be willing to bet that quick use of the Basic Adjustments alone would be enough to satisfy most needs. You can likely accomplish the same changes in Photoshop Express and Pixelmator, too, but Snapseed will save you a step or two and that can add up if you’re churning through a backlog of accumulated photos.

Easy effects without the cookie-cutter look

For people who want to share their photos on social networks or use them on personal and professional websites, the Creative Adjustments can really help simplify getting unique and interesting effects. Because each is infinitely tweakable, and because effects can be stacked, you also should be able to create images that don’t look like they came off a filter effect assembly line — something I find can happen far too often with apps like Instagram.

Just be careful when you’re stacking filters; I had one isolated incident where a photo developed some kind of digital noise as a result of combining effects. Luckily, Snapseed uses non-destructive editing techniques, so my original was preserved, but picky users might want to wait for a bug-busting update that addresses this small issue.

Lots of control, but not as fine-grained as the big boys

The lack of dedicated toolbars and brushes in Snapseed means it can’t achieve the level of specific manipulation possible with Photoshop and Pixelmator. You won’t find a blemish brush here, for instance, and while you can add control points that provide impressive control over specific parts of images, there’s no lasso to let you painstakingly stake out an exact, finite area to apply your effects.

This is, I think, both a blessing and a curse. For the average hobbyist user, the lack of fine controls merely means Snapseed’s interface is less cluttered and confusing. It also makes working with Snapseed feel less like work and more like fun, in my opinion. If there’s a blemish or a speck of dust you’d just love to zap away, however, it’ll be frustrating to have to do without.

A tool for photographers, not a profession all its own

The bottom line is that Snapseed, like its iOS predecessor, is a fun, useful tool that should help those who take photos for fun get even more enjoyment out of them. Unlike more full-featured editing suites, it won’t require you to dedicate time and effort to becoming not only a good photographer, but an expert on editing software as well.

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My short answer to this sort of query is always that if you can afford the reasonable cost of Photoshop Elements 6, it’s your best bet, as it offers most of the capabilities that most amateurs, or even many professionals, would ever use from Photoshop CS at a fraction of the price. PSE is, in my opinion, one of the great commercial software bargains of all time.

Adobe has unfortunately let Mac users fall behind again, with version 7 of Photoshop Elements now out for Windows but not for the Mac. However, Photoshop Elements 6 is so good and so powerful that we really have little to complain about. But if Elements isn’t something you’re interested in, here are a few other options.

Pixelmator

If you’re on a constrained budget, or just prefer to keep your software overhead costs down, a very decent alternative to PSE is Pixelmator, which I reviewed here in February. Pixelmator packs an awful lot of power and versatility into a leaner, swifter, more nimble package than ponderous Elements, although with a more modest and limited feature set, for $30 less. Recently I’ve found myself using Pixelmator more often than PSE, largely because it starts up so much quicker and I can usually do what I need to with it.

ToyViewer

ToyViewer is a core tool in my production applications suite. On a typical workday, I probably use ToyViewer dozens of times, mostly for small and short-duration chores like resizing pictures and changing file types, but ToyViewer can do 90+ percent of the image correction stuff I routinely need to do with graphics, and I don’t know what I would do without it. Well, actually I do. After I upgraded to OS 10.4 back in 2005, there were a couple of months before ToyViewer’s developer, Takeshi Ogihara, got a Tiger-compatible version of ToyViewer released. I tried several lightweight graphics programs as substitutes, but found nothing as slick, quick and suited to my needs as ToyViewer was. I’m addicted to this cool little jack-of-all-trades graphics utility.

Color It!

Color it! is quite a bit more powerful than its interface lets on, with basic to semi-advanced image correction tools and filters. For quick and convenient editing or image creation it’s tough to beat. On the other hand, 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’ll have to look elsewhere. 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. The workaround is to use Preview or ToyViewer to convert images from/to PDF.

Seashore

I pondered including GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), a powerful, professional-grade, open-source image editing program that is the image-editing standard for the Unix world, but it seemed like overkill for this roundup, so let’s go with Seashore. It’s an open-source bitmap graphics program built in Cocoa for OS X by Mark Pazolli based on GIMP technology with a nice selection of basic tools and layers support. There are no automated photo image clean-up and optimization/enhancement tools, but Seashore features gradients, textures, clone and smudge tools, and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes, supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing, and uses the same native file format.

Funtastic Photos

Funtastic Photos, which I reviewed here last fall, is a powerful, easy-to-use little photo editor app with a vast array of photo correction and enhancement tools. These tools tap into OS X graphics technologies like the Quartz graphics engine, Spotlight, and ImageIO Kit, and offer advanced photo enhancement technologies. Funtastic Photos sells for $34.95.

So what is the best upgrade from iPhoto from a photo editing standpoint? Photoshop Elements is the most powerful and comprehensive alternative. There are others that have their devotees as well, such as Flying Meat’s Acorn, and the Java-based Open Source ImageJ, which runs in 64-bit mode on Intel Macs running Leopard.

They’re all good tools with respective strengths and limitations. Several of them are freeware, and most of the others downloadable as demos, so it’s worth trying more than one to see which appeals to you most. My own inclination is to use several different graphics apps, depending on what the task is.

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Last month, reinstalling Leopard on my G4 PowerBook broke Photoshop Elements 6, and one reason I’ve been able to procrastinate about the necessary application reinstall (there oughta be a better way, Adobe — nothing else broke) is that Pixelmator is getting so darned good that I haven’t really needed Elements for anything yet.

PSE 6 still offers several high-end features that aren’t supported in Pixelmator — automated panorama merges, group shot merge, cutouts, red-eye correction, advanced black & white conversions, the new Quick Selection Tool, and camera lens distortion correction. However, for most image editing tasks, Pixelmator, a Mac-only Elements challenger by UK-based developers Saulius and Aidas Dailide, is coming on strong. Updates are released every couple of months, with the latest version 1.4 “Sprinkle” being the program’s fourth major update. With this update, a new painting engine, Adobe Photoshop brushes support, a clouds filter, and document presets were added.

“The World’s First GPU-Powered Image Editor”

Pixelmator, claimed to be “The World’s First GPU-Powered Image Editor,” is engineered to tap into powerful OS X native graphics technologies like Core Image, which use your Mac’s hardware video muscle for image processing, as well as Open GL and ColorSync. The relative power and sophistication of your Mac’s graphics support will determine, to an extent, Pixelmator’s performance. If you have a high-performance graphics accelerator with lots of video RAM, you will find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations very lively, but I’ve 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: windows bordered in translucent black, 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 have gotten used to it.

Layers and Smart Palettes

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 iSight input.

Pixelmator’s Smart Palette Hide feature eliminates palette clutter when using adjustment tools or filters, making all unnecessary palettes temporarily dissolve when any of adjustment tools or filters are in play, allowing you to focus on just one image and your chosen tool.

I especially like Pixelmator’s color correction tools, which allow you to fine-tune color values like hue, saturation,color balance, luminance, color levels, channel mixing brightness and contrast.

Pixelmator’s Curves adjustment is notably nicer and more intuitive to use than PSE’s. There is also an Auto Enhance command if you want to let the program make the value-judgments with one-click convenience.

Pixelmator has more than 130 filters and special effects, and supports over 100 different file formats including PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, EPS, and you can open and save Photoshop files with layers data preserved.

Organizing Principles

Pixelmator doesn’t have anything in photo organization support to rival Photoshop Element’s Adobe Bridge CS3 organizer application (previously only available with Adobe Creative Suite applications) that lets you browse through your hard drive to locate photos you want to open and edit, but you can use Pixelmator’s Photo Browser palette to access images in your iPhoto Library, events, albums, Smart Albums, and your Pictures folder.

Pixelmator 1.4 requires Mac OS 10.5.5 or higher, is available as a free 30-day demo and can be registered for $59. Version 1.4 is a free update to current registered users.

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Jade, a different sort of digital image processing utility, doesn’t do anything you can’t achieve using tools and filters in Photoshop, Pixelmator, or other image editors, but it can transform your less-than-perfect shots (dark, dim, feeble, pale, badly lit, vague, gloomy) into images you can be proud of with minimal effort.

Jade leverages advanced graphics algorithms to enhance color, contrast and dynamic range with no user adjustment required for individual shots or batch lots, and also provides manual control to fine-tune intensity values, image contrast and color correction values if desired. I found this seldom necessary. Jade delivers a pleasing result by default almost every time, amazing me by how it can take shots I’ve expended serious time tweaking with Photoshop Elements’ or Pixelmator’s formidable arsenals of image correction tools, and improve them even more almost instantly. Jade is a staff pick on Apple’s download website with good reason.

Jade version 1.3.1, released late last month, adds Picasa Web Albums upload support, keychain support to remember Flickr and Picasa login data, and an updated Picasa/Flickr batch save process, plus extensive fixes in the Help files and some renamed menus. An Apple Aperture Plugin that uses the same algorithms and correction parameters as Jade is also available.

Jade’s interface window has two panes; one a size-adjustable (slider) thumbnail gallery of available images that can be positioned left or right, and the image display panel where you preview originals and the filtered results.

To activate the correction/enhancement filter, click on the Jade Enhanced Icon on the toolbar or select the Enhance command in the Image Menu. Once an image is selected from the thumbnails or dragged into the window or to Jade’s Dock icon, the enhancement filter starts processing the image. Jade does its thing so quickly you won’t spend much time viewing the unprocessed image. You can click on enhanced photos to temporarily revert to the unprocessed image for comparison (Jade unfortunately doesn’t display before and after side-by-side comparisons).

Here’s a sampling of what Jade can do with a single click compared with a couple of full-featured image editors. The original image as it came from the camera isn’t really bad, but a bit dull with little detail visible in the dark areas.

Below is the result with Photoshop Elements 6′s “Smart Fix” command. There’s more snap to the image, and the grass color is more pleasing, but the blues have taken on an aqua tinge.

Pixelmator’s “Enhance” command produced this result. I like the sky color better than what PSE produced, but the cloud detail is a bit washed-out and the grass color isn’t as good although it’s got more detail.

And finally, here’s Jade’s default result. In my estimation the best sky and lake color, the best detail and color in dark areas, and the best grass for both detail and color of all.

Now here’s what Jade did with this underexposed, backlit shot.

For a different sort of example, here is a product shot, with the original at the top, Pixelmator exposure correction in the middle, and Jade’s automatic correction at the bottom.

Jade can batch-process and save many images in a single operation or filter and save all selected images in a folder, a capability that theoretically allows you to filter thousands of images sequentially with no intervention, but one that should be used with care.

I found Jade lively and responsive even on my old 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook, so it must really fly on a MacIntel machine. Jade gives you an awful lot of almost effortless image correcting power priced at $30 for the Home version (functionally identical to the Pro version, but with a Pro registration key you can use Jade commercially). It’s not a comprehensive image editor, but I figure that about 90 percent of the time Jade will do the trick very satisfactorily for my purposes, and it can save a ton of time fiddling with images.

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From the information I’ve read about Pixelmator’s latest update, some parts seem to have been rewritten to tie more closely into Core Image in Mac OS X, as well as to chase away some of the crashes I experienced.

Acorn adds stability to an otherwise already awesome app – great for the average Joe who doesn’t need all of the crazy complexity of a Photoshop-type app, but wants a slightly better tool than iPhoto provides (including awesome scripting capabilities, Web image tools, vector drawing, and easy manipulation of layers). These both kick Photoshop’s butt when it comes to processing ability – they use the GPU, rather than relying on the processor to perform operations.

I personally still use Photoshop for my day-to-day stuff, but anything to keep some nice competition on Adobe’s case is all right with me. If CS4 ends up being a mere upgrade to 64-bit for Windows only, with no real features, I’ll definitely consider jumping to Pixelmator when the time comes for an upgrade.

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