Acorn 4 - The Image Editor for Humans 4.3.1
Device: Mac OS
Category: Graphics & Design
Price: $49.99, Version: 4.2.3 -> 4.3.1 (iTunes)
Description:# Mac App Store Best of 2013
Everyone needs to edit images at some point, but not everyone has the time to learn complicated super pricey image editing programs. This is why we created Acorn. Add text and shapes to your digital pictures. Combine images together to create your own. Work with layers to touch up your favorite photos or make something new from scratch. Do all this and more with Acorn.
Speed: Acorn 4 is a lot faster than its predecessors. And applying filters to large images is a snap.
Layer Styles and Non-Destructive Filters: Acorn has all of the filters you're looking for, and even includes a great interface to chain filters together to create unique effects. You can even save and modify your filters after you've closed and re-opened your Acorn image.
Curves and Levels: Use Acorn 4's new curves window and levels sliders to quickly adjust the color balance in your images.
Layers: Use layers and blending modes to make the most of photo editing by allowing easy placement of text and other objects without destroying the picture underneath. Layers allow you to try things out, and change your mind later on.
Tutorials and Documentation: Acorn comes with online documentation, tutorials, and a forum, so you don't have to learn by yourself.
Text: Acorn's text tools give you control over text while maintaining an easy to use interface. Everything is in the text palette from bold and italic to kern and ligature. There's even spell check. Convert your text into a Bezier Path to take it to the next level. Since Acorn's text tool uses OS X’s native text engine, you get full Unicode support.
Drawing: Acorn features brushes that let you draw, scribble, and sketch right on your image. Use a track pad, mouse, or even a tablet. Create your own brushes using Acorn's built in brush designer.
Erasing: Powerful eraser tools like Instant Alpha and eraser brushes make removing unwanted areas of your image both fast and fun.
Layer Masks: Use layer masks in your image to block out unwanted areas or to expose layers below.
Gradients: Acorn's multi-stop gradients place endless combinations of colors at your fingertips. Add and remove colors simply by dragging and dropping them in and out of the gradient preview window.
Vector Shapes: Acorn makes creating shapes in your image a breeze. Vector shapes let you make squares, circles and lines, and you keep the flexibility to change things later on. Add and subtract points from Bezier paths and rotate your shapes with the flick of a wrist. And if that wasn't enough- Acorn 4 introduces intersect, union, exclusion, and difference operations on selected shapes.
Screenshots: As long as Acorn is open, press the Command-Shift-6 keys while in any application. Acorn will make a screenshot of your entire screen. Your image will be brought into Acorn immediately, ready for work.
Selections: Make selections, invert them, feather, and even add a corner radius. Use Quick Mask mode for intricate selections. Or, if you're looking to quickly select an entire color, try using the Magic Wand.
Web Export: When you need to get that image size smaller and still looking good for the web, take a look at Web Export. Acorn provides an estimate for the export file size and lets you compare the compressed version to the original.
Photoshop Files: Acorn now offers improved support for loading PSD images, and for exporting your images as layered Photoshop files.
Performance: Acorn goes all the way up to 64. Bits that is. Faster performance means less time spent waiting and more time for creating.
Automate and Script Acorn: Automate Acorn using Automator, AppleScript, and even JavaScript by way of JSTalk. And there are plenty of examples for you to build on. You can even write custom plugins for Acorn using the Python scripting language, JavaScript, as well as Objective-C.
What's New
# New Stuff
* Raw Import: The raw import window now includes a histogram for your viewing pleasure.
* Raw Import: You can now choose the color profile you want your image to end up in.
* Raw Import: You can now choose the image depth you want your image to end up in.
* Raw Import: You can now more accurately change the width and height of the image that is being opened.
* Raw Import: New option to adjust noise reduction.
* Raw Import: It's faster!
* New menu item in the View ▸ Guides menu to turn on and off snapping to guides.
* If you have a selection, the frame of the selection will now show up in the status bar of your image's window. This is awesome because sometimes it's hard to know if you have a 1x1 pixel selection or not.
* New option to set the image depth when making a new image.
* The Curves window now has a preview toggle button.
* Crop Presets: There is a new option to resize your image to the original crop dimensions when saving a crop preset.
# Changed Stuff
* Web Export more aggressively tries to get your PNGs smaller if your colorspace is sRGB (Acorn will strip out the color profile data in that case).
* BMP files without an embedded colorspace would previously open up in Adobe RGB 1998. In Acorn 4.3, they will now open in whatever your default colorspace is set to (which is sRGB by default). This also matches system behavior.
* Text boxes will now draw an outline when you are rotating or moving them around. This is awesome because it makes it way easier to align stuff up.
* Little pencil and brush improvements with single clicks.
* If it takes more than .2 seconds to render your brush stroke in the Brush Designer, Acorn will cancel the realtime updates for it and wait till you've finished moving your slider around to re-render your stroke with the updated settings.
* When uploading an image to Facebook / Flickr / Wherevr, Acorn will now make sure the exif info for the image tags along.
* Undo should be faster now for Very Large Images.
* If you drag the top colorwell (stroke color) onto a shape, it will now turn on the shape's stroke if it isn't already, and set the stroke color. Likewise, the lower colorwell (fill) will turn on the fill for a shape as well as set it's color.
* The title of the crop preset pulldown will change to the title of the of a selected preset when used.
* The layers list thumbnail drawing has been sped up by a factor of a billion and four.
* The max grid spacing has been bumped up to 500px.
# Fixed Stuff
* There's a ton of bug fixes in this release- make sure to visit our website to read the full release notes if you want the digs on every bug that's been squashed.
If you like Acorn, we'd love if you could take a moment and give it a nice review. It helps Acorn get noticed, which helps everyone in the long run.
Acorn 4 - The Image Editor for Humans