Image editing tool for home user? (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

Hey, can anyone recommend a low-cost image editing tool for the very non-professional home user?

One of the suprising areas where the Mac has really lagged for years is image editing utilities. On Windows, there's Paint.net, a really great freeware image editor that does all the things an infrequent home user and hobbyist could want. On the Mac...there's Seashore, an janky outdated app that struggles with modern files.

I don't want a "photo" editor. I want an image editor to resize and convert formats and crop random images, and just basic manipulation stuff like that. Well... I want Paint.net for the Mac. But that doesn't exist.

Is there a good image editor for the Mac for under $10? I've searched before and found nothing good. But maybe there's a missing gem I've overlooked!

 

[JohnRice]

Is something wrong with iPhoto? I know it does more than you want, but it does do what you want, doesn't it?

 

[Ashly Yeo]

I use GIMP which is an open source image editor. It is not the easiest to learn but it does what you are looking for - cropping, converting, etc.

 

[DaveF]

Is something wrong with iPhoto? I know it does more than you want, but it does do what you want, doesn't it?

It’s a photo tool, not an image editor. It doesn’t do rescaling or controlled resizing of arbitrary images. It doesn’t have basic image editing and composition tools.

The exemplar of what I want is Paint.net on Windows.
https://www.getpaint.net/index.html

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Adobe Photoshop Elements is usually around $70 and does everything I need from an image editing program.

 

[DaveF]

I use GIMP which is an open source image editor. It is not the easiest to learn but it does what you are looking for - cropping, converting, etc.

I’ll have to try it. I haven’t looked at gimp in over a decade.

 

[DaveF]

Adobe Photoshop Elements is usually around $70 and does everything I need from an image editing program.

I’m hoping for $10 tops. Acorn or Pixelmator for $30 to $40 might have the features I need, but I’m looking for free or low cost software.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I’m hoping for $10 tops. Acorn or Pixelmator for $30 to $40 might have the features I need, but I’m looking for free or low cost software.

Sorry, I was skimming and missed the $10 price point in the first post. Here's some instructions on how to install Irfanview on a Mac:
https://irfanview-forum.de/showthread.php?t=5925

 

[DaveF]

Thanks, but I no longer use virtualization to run Windows programs on my Mac.

 

[Ted Todorov]

It doesn’t do rescaling or controlled resizing of arbitrary images.

Preview, which is free, does exactly that, and Photos, also free, does any basic photo editing you might want.

I really am not understanding, besides wanting a different name for the app, why you wouldn't just use the basic Mac tools.

Pixelmator, which I do have, can also do all of the above

 

[DaveF]

I use Preview a lot (mostly for compiling multi page scans for travel expense reports). But I didn’t know it did image resizing. I’ll check into that and see if it does what I need in terms of cropping and resizing and saving tiff to jpg.

https://www.cultofmac.com/456958/resize-images-mac-preview/

That would be great if it solved the immediate goal: Scanning in Star Wars Armada cards as 600dpi tiffs, then crop and save as jpg and set the dpi so they print back out at correct size.


Photos similarly has general “quality” selections to save photos at lower quality for emailing. But I hadn’t seen that it could do user-set resize and controlled compression levels. Maybe it’s there and I’ve overlooked it. Photos is a great photo library and basic editor - I use it for my photos. But it’s never felt or worked for me like a flexible all-purpose image editor.

 

[DaveF]

@Ted Todorov great tip! Somehow I'd overlooked for a long time (or knew and then forgot) that Preview can do user-defined image scaling in various ways. It also has Crop, which looks workable. That's a lot of my current need! I'm a little ashamed for missing the obvious, but sometimes you don't know what you don't know.

Preview also has some basic compositing ability. I don't know that it's quite enough for some things I do infrequently -- that I currently do in Paint.net on my HTPC. But Preview will help me out a lot for now, and I can ditch Seashore which is really outdated and performs poorly with high res scans.

 

[Johnny Angell]

How about pixelmator and pixelmator photo?
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/co...photoshop-a-serious-run-for-its-money.327303/

 

[Ted Todorov]

My constant gripe about Preview and TextEdit is that Apple still hasn't ported them to iOS for the iPad.

Preview in particular belongs on the iPad - full PDF support, in particular where you are filling out PDFs of meant to be printed forms: filling them out with an Apple Pencil on the iPad or even just signing you name is huge. Yes, there is signature support on the Mac, but the way you type on PDFs via Preview is way inferior to what you could do with an Apple Pencil.

 

[DaveF]

^ I agree. It's crummy that I have to bring up PDFs in iBooks, which has long been a really mediocre and inconsistent app.

For my uses, tonight I bumped into Preview's limitation not being an all-purpose image editor: I can't can't create a new, blank canvas on which to start compositing. I wanted to take two images and put them into a single sheet. I can do that with an image editor like Paint.net. I can't do that with Preview or Photos. (I can do it with Keynote or Pages, but then I lose the integrated image editing features.)

So, I've got a handful of built in tools, which by banging them together in the right order, I can mostly get done what I want. If this remains a headache, I'll spend the $30 for Pixelmator and give it a go.

Also still have to try GIMP.