Acorn for Mac

Easy-to-use Acorn can handle much of what you do in high-end image-editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop, without breaking a sweat or your budget.

Pros

Full set of tools: Acorn's tools palette gives you quick access to a range of tools for moving, zooming, and cropping; drawing and retouching; making selections; and working with text and colors. The tools are customizable, giving you fine control over working with images.

Layers: The image-editing tool handles layers. As you'd expect, you can add, delete, and duplicate layers. You can also group layers together, merge them, lock them, and create layer masks.

Filters: Acorn's filters let you apply effects to a single layer, a group of layers, shape layers, and selections. Filters are nondestructive, so you can make a change to an image and revert it if it's not the effect you wanted. Levels and curves are nondestructive as well.

Shapes: The Shape tools let you create Bézier, rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, and star shapes. A processor tool helps you generate, modify, and adjust shapes non-destructively.

Cons

Runs on OS X 10.10 or later: To run the latest version of Acorn, you have to run a current version of OS X. Older versions of Acorn are available on the company's website if your operating system is pre-OS X 10.10.

PSD support: Acorn can open Adobe Photoshop PSD files and attempt to preserve layers, but styles and editable text are not imported.

Bottom line

The powerful and affordable Acorn image-editing app for OS X is packed with tools for using layers and filters and creating vector shapes. It can import and export PSD files and has native support for Apple's Retina displays. For everything but heavy-duty Photoshop jobs, Acorn is up to the task.