Review by carol irvin

I’ve used extensively Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Gimp. They all have their pluses and their minuses. Yes, Photoshop does everything but it is also an enormous systems hog and has a huge learning curve. It also does nothing simply and many times I LIKE taking the easiest course to get from point A to point B.

I devised a test for how well this new program does against the others. I took the image of a lily which I had photographed. I previously had tried to turn it to a pleasing mauve in Elements and failed miserably. I put it into this program and within about twenty minutes I had a gorgeous mauve lily ready to save. I was frankly surprised I had done that well.

Although it has less tools on the toolbar, I discovered by using other features under the menu that I was able to do pretty much anything I wanted to do. Also, it seems that it may have made one tool to do it all rather than making three or four, like Photoshop or Elements does. For example, the clone tool on this program seemed to do everything for me that I use clone tool and all aspects of the healing tool for in Photoshop and Elements. However, I do miss a polygon lasso as this program only has the regular lasso. Both Photoshop and Elements have the polygon lasso. Next, I miss the burn, dodge, and smudge tools, again found in both Adobe programs. On the plus side though, there are filters with controls in this program which go beyond the ones in Photoshop and I am eager to work my way through them. For example, there is a new filter called Bloom that does a wonderful job on enhancing images.

The user interface is absolutely gorgeous, the best ever. I like the way it looks on my macbook screen better than any other image editing program. Everything automatically disappears while I am working on the image too. It all reappears the moment I am ready to proceed. I love that feature! It is so intuitive. Plus the shortcuts you use in the Adobe programs are the same in this program.

I think this program has enormous potential and I especially like that it was designed solely with my OS in mind. I am so tired of products designed primarily for Windows.

This is the first image editing product I’ve seen that potentially could go the distance against Adobe at least for the non graphic designer market. Only time will tell. This is also a heck of a value for the money. Certainly Adobe would never think of selling this full featured a software for less than thirty dollars!