mip's scan

An Alternate To Photoshop?

I came across this tool prior to my vacation but didn't have a chance to really use it until this past weekend.  I'm talking about Pixel Image Editor which is a very robust image editing tool that is a good alternative to Photoshop.  I wouldn't say that it's a Photoshop killer, but it is very strong and the current price of $32 (in the future it will cost $70-100) is far less than Photoshop. 

I downloaded the Mac version of Pixel Image Editor and went to work on some recent photos from my vacation.  I was able to work very much like I do in Photoshop, utilizing layers and a variety of brushes for touching up my photos.  The feature set is quite robust.  For a complete list of features, just click here.  At times the application seemed a bit sluggish on my Intel-based iMac but I'm not sure why.  It was unclear if Pixel Image Editor is a universal binary or not. 

All in all, it was a good experience.  Will I keep using it?  Not sure.  I have Photoshop already and love it.  I also use Photostudio on my Macs which is also quite good.  Lastly there is GIMP that I began using on my Linux installs but also use sometimes on my Windows or Mac machines as well.  If you are just getting going with finding an image editing tool than Pixel Image Editor is a great choice if you can't lay out the cash for Photoshop.  Is it a Photoshop replacement - no, not yet. 

Paint.NET

I love finding great open source applications.  Paint.NET was brought to my attention by my daughter who was using it the other evening to do some photo editing for a school project.  I podcasted about it a little here and a lot here.

What I really liked about this tool was just how robust it is.  I watched for 15-20 minutes the first evening as my daughter did some of her photo editing.  "It has layers dad," she said to me with an approving nod of the head.  "It does indeed," I replied with a chuckle but also giving a nod of approval.  If you click on the thumbnail image to the right you can see it has a nice clean interface with all kind of great tools available.  Another feature I uncovered last night while playing with this tool  on my own was the Unlimited History feature.

Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody changes their mind. To accommodate this, every action you perform on an image is recorded in the History window and may be undone. Once you've undone an action, you can also redo it. The length of the history is only limited by available disk space.

So for those of you out there that need and/or want to do some good photo editing, be sure to download Paint.NET and give it a try.  You won't be disappointed. 

If you do any interesting stuff in Paint.NET, email it to me and I'd be happy to show it off for you!

ArtRage

The Tablet PC is a device that always seems like its searching for usefull applications.  Well ArtRage is one of those apps.  Not unlike other commercial applications ArtRage is a great graphics/painting/drawing tool. 

ArtRage is a painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools. ArtRage is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. It can be used with a mouse, but works better if you have a graphics tablet, or even better on a Tablet PC where ArtRage takes advantage of the unique interaction of pen and screen to produce a realistic painting feel.

I've tested it on my Tablet and my Mac but clearly the tablet was the better experience.  It's not as easy to control with a mouse as it is with my pen.  The user interface is great - very simple and yet providing a robust set of tools (click image to the left to see more detail).

Download ArtRage today and if you create any interesting designs I'd love to see them - email them to me and perhaps I'll post them here!