I love seeing smaller companies take on Adobe, but branding this as a replacement for Photoshop is a mistake.<p>Photoshop is such a large and complex beast that nothing small and focused could ever replace it. That's Photoshop's true strength. It manages to be the industry standard across a whole slew of slightly different industries.<p>Nobody uses the whole thing. Few people use even half of Photoshop's features. Competing against it on a specific feature may be possible, and that's precisely what this app does.<p>But even matching what Photoshop does for one segment of users won't be enough. To beat Photoshop, you have o be 10x better at that one feature---otherwise users will stick with the industry standard.
I bought SnapHeal a few weeks back, but is nothing like an inexpensive photoshop alternative. Photoshop is extremely powerful, snapheal feels extremely underpowered.
In fact I used snapheal in a few photos, with such terrible results that I deleted the app. My experience certainly didn't match the results that the app screenshots showed, even after spending hours trying to do so.
"Mashable does not condone altering images to sensationalize news stories."<p>Which is why in opposite world they don't start every article with a giant picture they found somewhere on Flickr that is usually barely related, like this one.<p>"If you already own and are comfortable using Photoshop, you have no use for Snapheal, which is in no way a replacement for professional editing software."<p>An odd way to end an article that claims it is exactly that.<p>It's hard to take Mashable seriously.
Pixelmator is going to be your best bet for a Photoshop alternative on a Mac. It's far faster, more beautiful and all-around pleasant to use, not to mention the original was built by just two brothers and I like supporting smaller teams that actually use their products (something I wonder if a lot of Photoshop developers do given the issues that are consistently not addressed with each release).<p>It imports PSDs, but last I tried, it had trouble with layer styles.
Paint.NET is the only relatively feature-complete tool I've used that is remotely on par with Photoshop. I actually prefer it to Photoshop in some ways because the UI is more intuitive.<p>The GIMP is good, but it's less stable than I would like in my experience.