Acorn: The Leatherman Tool of Image Editors

The more I try out image editors Pixelmator & Acorn, the more Acorn’s simplicity and new perspective on the interface grows on me. Pixelmator is looking to be just about perfect for those people who need a Photoshop Elements style app with low overhead at a sweet price point.

Acorn, on the other hand, seems to be carving out a new niche, and developer Gus Mueller has shown in some of the details that’s he’s not trying to compete with Photoshop (or even Pixelmator), rather he’s attempting to do something new & unique. From the single, unified tools palette to the Option & Control key resizing & crop features (with the live pixel dimension display on the bottom left of the window frame) to the live brush size on the brush slider, Mueller demonstrates that he’s been using graphics software, he’s been frustrated with some things, and he’s thought of a way to make it painless, effortless and intuitive.

Once you’ve worked a bit in Acorn with some of these novel approaches to old habits, you’ll soon wonder why it was never done this way before.

To be fair, I’m talking about quick image editing and prep for a blog post, an email attachment, a sketch. Times when you need to open up the file, do some quick tweaks and get out. Acorn lets you do this transparently.

One limitation at this point in time with the 1.01 release is the lack of control over, or the ability at all, to save a web-optimized JPG or GIF. You only get a vague “low – medium – high” slider which tells you nothing of the resulting file size. There’s no live preview either. This, however, is coming to Acorn in a future release as noted in the Acorn forums.

I have never been one to have much use for filters, and thus have not really experimented much with these in either Acorn, Pixelmator — or Photoshop for that matter. My primary need for a lightweight bitmap graphics editor would be for resizing, cropping, minor image/photo cleanup & tweaking, annotating and occasional screenshots. For me, Acorn is just about the ideal application for these tasks.

With neither Pixelmator nor Acorn supporting CMYK color modes currently, these aren’t going to replace Photoshop anytime soon for print production work. And I don’t think that’s the target audience anyways. But once CMYK is supported, both could be viable contenders for those people who only need to dip into the print world on occasion.

At present, Pixelmator is too much like Photoshop for me to have a need for it, despite the small resource footprint. Possibly with proper pressure sensitivity tablet support I might change my mind. In the meantime, I really like Acorn for it’s clever and new approach to some of the regular, basic tasks for which Photoshop is definitely overkill. Pixelmator also needs to get brush size cursors; drawing with the Brush icon cursor is not the way to go at all.

One thing I have noticed is that both apps really start to slow down on large-ish images. I have found that a 240 dpi image works just about perfect for me as far as fleshing out rough sketches, and neither app was very responsive with an 8″ by 10″ document at 240 dpi. Pixelmator resized my 72 dpi JPEG file no problem, but Acorn really choked on it, freezing up the MacBook for a few minutes. Granted, the MacBook doesn’t have the best “video card” — in fact it doesn’t even have a dedicated video card. But I think these apps are targeted to just the kind of user that would own a MacBook. Seems an issue that needs attention.

This brings me back to my original focus, specifically for Acorn: it’s perfect for basic cropping, resizing and touchups for average to small sized images. Until Pixelmator is a bit more responsive on the MacBook for larger images (and gets proper tablet pressure sensitivity), it’s pretty much out of the running for me. Acorn really needs to step up to the plate in performance for larger images before I can even consider doing anything productive with it outside the above-mentioned tasks.

If you need a Photoshop-like image editor, and have been balking due to price, Pixelmator is definitely the way to go. It seems a great companion to iPhoto as well. Acorn on the other hand is more like the Leatherman tool of graphics software; a few great tools, not something you’d use for a big job but perfect for those times when you just need to do the basics.

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.