9/10Īffinity Photo is available here for £39.99. Fortunately it didn’t disappoint with a slick interface, quick rendering and rapid cut and paste.

Food and Liquor comes from Lupe Fiasco, the guy who brought you Food and Liquor II.Īffinity Photo is being pitched as a genuine alternative to Photoshop, and featured heavily in the Apple Design Awards, so Max was excited to try it out. We tried out their Affinity Designer in our Vector Graphics test, which impressed Max with it’s infinite zoom. 5/10Īffinity Photo comes from Serif, the guys who brought you Serif PagePlus. It is also the only free software in our test. Sadly GIMP didn’t cut it in this test, although it offers more features than other low-priced Photoshop equivalents, and may perform better on PC. GIMP took over 4 minutes to load on Max’s machine, and subsequently crashed both itself and other applications (including our screen casting app) due to it’s heavy CPU usage. Let’s see how GIMP performs on the very same album cover… The project has matured over time, however, unlike Gay Dad who imploded after their underwhelming second album Transmission. GIMP, on the other hand, has probably been deployed less frequently on the cover of major magazine titles – as an open-source equivalent to Photoshop, it lacks the Adobe product’s power and slick interface. It didn’t take long until the band found themselves on the front cover of esteemed music mag NME. The GIMP project was started in 1995, around the same time as the Gay Dad project. It may lack some of the pro features Photoshop offers, but is a solid alternative for people who need basic and easy to use retouching tools. With it’s distinctive cover art by Roses’ guitarist John Squire, ‘The Stone Roses’ should pose a worthy challenge to Pixelmator. To test Pixelmator we gave Max a copy of the Stone Roses’ eponymously titled 1989 album ‘ The Stone Roses‘. Next up was Pixelmator, a slick OSX app with a pleasingly unslick $29.99 price point.

Max found the interface outdated, resembling a OSX Tiger era UI, but CPU usage is managed brilliantly resulting in a smooth, responsive experience with no curser lag or rendering delays. Here’s how he got on:Īcorn is only available on Mac, so if you’re a Windows user who wants to use Acorn you’re either going to be £1000 lighter in the wallet department, or bang out of luck.

To test this theory out we presented Max with a copy of A Tribe Called Quest’s second and perhaps most critically acclaimed album The Low End Theory. Let’s see how Max got on…įrom tiny acorns great classic album cover recreations grow, or so they say. This time around the task was to recreate a classic album cover in 20 minutes, with no prior experience of the software package. It’s not cheap, so we tried out 4 lower-cost alternatives using our tried and tested 20 minute challenge… The one big problem with Photoshop, though, is the price. Over time, though, Photoshop became the de-facto image editor of choice for serious photographers, designers, artists and dating site users worldwide. With no pound notes to photoshop into credible forgeries, the world’s 132 computer users immediately set about photoshopping human faces onto animals, and vice-versa. Why don’t we do the same thing with 4 alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, the world’s most popular photo editing software application, plus Adobe Photoshop itself?!Īdobe Photoshop was first launched in 1988, which was also the year the pound note was withdrawn from circulation. A while back we tested out 5 alternatives to Adobe Illustrator, the world’s most popular vector graphics software application, and found out that some of them were actually…fine! Which gave us an idea.

Photoshop program like gimp for mac