Snapheal Is an Inexpensive Alternative to Photoshop

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.

Has anyone tried Gimp for OS X? <a href="http://www.gimp.org/downloads/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gimp.org/downloads/</a>

"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.

Gimp and Paint.NET are inexpensive alternatives to Photoshop.<p>This one looks like a tool to easily do a very limited set of tasks.

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.