Acorn: Handy Lightweight Pixel-Based Image Editor

Screenshot of single palette pixel-based image editor Acorn A new image editor snuck in under the radar a few days back: Acorn. It’s a pretty nice lightweight alternative to Photoshop for either users who don’t need all the bells and whistles the Adobe juggernaut has to offer, or would like to have a companion app for those times when you just need to do some quick edits and don’t want to fire up Photoshop just for an annotated screenshot.

If Adobe has Photoshop Elements, you could call Acorn “Photoshop Molecule”.

You get paint & basic vector tools, eraser, move and selection tools — and get this: layers, filters and effects! I think that’s the killer thing here — the painting and drawing tools are nice but standard; the layers and effects however, are where the hook sets in. You really can’t beat it for $40. There’s also support for your iSight camera, which is novel, but another handy feature is a snapshot utility that will let you venture away from Acorn and use an Acorn shortcut to drag out a screenshot, which is then automatically opened in a new Acorn editing window. Perfect for bloggers.

The other neat feature is the single, contextual tool palette. While definitely not for power users, for lightweight image editing it’s really refreshing to have a single palette on the screen. Sometimes when working in Adobe apps I feel as if my art is the least important thing on the monitor. All those palettes and control bars can start to look like a fighter jet dashboard after awhile.

There is pressure-sensitive tablet support, but it’s nowhere near what you get with Photoshop. It mostly handles brush size and opacity. Functional, but not much more. That said, still glad to see it included. This could make Acorn a very handy rough sketch/doodle application.

There seems to be some overlap with another upcoming “Photoshop Lite” app — Pixelmator — but really these both seem to address different niches and depending on your needs and usage, I think there is room for both apps. Since getting the blog going, I have more and more found myself wanting something just like the functionality Acorn offers, and the more robust feature set promised in Pixelmator. I think I will be picking up a license for one of the two, but until Pixelmator makes it out of it’s mysterious beta stage, I’ll be putting Acorn through the paces to see how it stands up. I definitely want to give both a try before making my decision.

by George Coghill -
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