“Acorn, the image editor for humans” says the page title. While the Mac image editing market is dominated by Photoshop, image editors for the home user are just about gaining ground to provide enough of features and power to be cheaper alternatives for the home user and even the semi-professional. Acorn from Flying Meat software is one such application that is way cheaper than Photoshop, much lighter on resources, and most importantly, designed with regular folk in mind. And it’s just been bumped to version 2.0—a Snow Leopard exclusive.

A brief history of Acorn

Many of you already know what Acorn is (it was after all bundled along with this year’s MacHeist). But for those who don’t, here’s a brief story of what Acorn 1 stood for. Acorn sports a simple two window interface, one for your document and one for a floating palette. Everything from layers, to cloning tools, brushes (including brush creation), Vector shapes, are included in that one palette. There’s a lot of power also tucked under the menubar, including image adjustments, canvas adjustments, and filters. The filters palette is something really innovative, allowing you to stack multiple filters, readjust then, and then apply them to your image. Acorn also has a scriptable element to it, supposedly allowing you to quickly produce consistent results. I’m however not familiar enough with Acorn to comment on that.

Acorn 2.0

All in all, a powerful application, feature rich, with a simple user interface. Let’s take a look at what v2.0 brings to the table.

Snow Leopard, 64-bit, and Grand Central

Gus Mueller, developer of acorn writes in his introductory post for 2.0:

Once 10.6 came out Acorn 2 no longer ran on 10.5, and I got to flip the switch on some code optimizations that had been held back. I love Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch. The new Perlin (aka “Render Clouds”) filter is done with Blocks + GCD. I love Blocks and GCD, and if you’re a developer you will too. Acorn 2 is 64 bit. And yes, there are performance improvements with it. Running the Gaussian Blur filter is now 15% faster in 64 bit. Opening JPEG files is 20% faster than 32 bit (measured by scripting operations via JSTalk of course). Is Acorn the first 64 bit image editor for the Mac?

There you go. Finally those few dollars you spent on Snow Leopard’s hidden features are being put to use—and so quickly I might add.

Layered screenshots, Groups

If you remember some time ago we reviewed an application “Layers”, which grabbed a screenshot of your desktop with each document window resided on its own separate layer. This exact same functionality (maybe not to that degree of perfection) has been brought into Acorn. Hitting Cmd+Shift+6 while in any application will grab a screenshot and bring up an Acorn document window. The windows are neatly arranged under layer groups, so you can quickly manipulate your way into the document. By that Acorn also brings in layer groups, for arranging complex documents in a simpler hierarchy.

The new toolbox UI, and the layers produced from a ‘layered screenshot’

As with most version upgrades, Acorn also gets a facelift, sporting a much more ‘Mac-like’ look than before. I like the look, but it may not be the best way to go considering the audience Acorn is targetted towards. Some of the ‘flyouts’ can be changed from the palette options, while others have to be selected from the flyout itself. It’s much cleaner, but harder to figure out for someone who doesn’t know what those icons mean.

Filter mixer: Not new to Acorn 2, but impressive nonetheless

What does it not have?

Acorn falters in several areas. One of the most important ones, is incompatibility with Photoshop documents. It will open them up just fine, but so can Preview, if you’re talking about a flat image. Layers also don’t have any masking options, crucial for non-destructive editing. It’s also pathetic when it comes to colour adjustments, with unfamiliar tools tucked under the Filters menu. Some of the UI decisions are also counter-productive. The single floating palette, while easy to manage means you have less flexibility.

Acorn also suffers the same issues that plague the other Photoshop alternative, Pixelmator: Lack of layer styles, vector paths and shape layers, and all those random features that make Photoshop what it is.

Going Nuts

Acorn 2.0 is a great advancement technology wise, and the layered screenshots feature is sure going to turn some heads. It’s feature set won’t turn away the professional from using Photoshop, it’s lacking in some crucial areas, but home users will find its ease of use and price very compelling. $50 for a license, a 14-day trial awaits. 1.x users, including those from the MacHeist bundle have to pay $20 for the upgrade. If you’ve purchased Acorn after July 2, you’re eligible for a free upgrade.