At $80 it's hard to find much to complain about. Unlike Lightroom, Aperture does not offer built-in lens-distortion correction out of the box, but there are several Aperture plugins available on Apple’s site that offer that and many other features.Įarlier versions of Aperture were notoriously system-intensive, requiring a lot of processing power to run, but Aperture 3 is much improved.
Aperture blends advanced features such as RAW processing, manual retouching, custom-printing elements, and tagging/organization tools with novice-friendly options such as facial recognition, geotagging, and one-click filters.
Mac users beware though - you'll have to make do with ACDSee Pro 3 for now. ACDSee Pro 6 doesn’t offer many of the facial-recognition, geotagging, and distortion-correction whistles and bells of Lightroom and Aperture, but both pieces of software offer extensive RAW-format support out of the box. If you’re using Windows and looking to replace the one-two punch of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom entirely, ACDSee Pro 6 (a Lightroom alternative) and ACDSee Photo Editor 6 (a Photoshop alternative) may get you some of the way there for a fraction of the price.ĪCDSee Pro 6 offers RAW processing, image tagging and organization tools, and exposure/color enhancements, while Photo Editor 6 is the more-Photoshop-like tool for layer-based, pixel-level edits.
But for the rest of us - people that just want to retouch images, manipulate composition, adjust colors and saturation, apply canned filters and effects, and remove that kid who wandered into the foreground of an otherwise-perfect photo - they may prove to be very useful. None of these applications is a true one-to-one 'replacement' for Photoshop CS6, particularly if you're a graphic designer or video professional. In this article we'll be taking a quick look at ten other pieces of image manipulation software that you might not know about, but which are well worth exploring. As we've said before, it has become a verb - we commonly speak about 'Photoshopping' images regardless of the software that we actually used to do it.Īdobe’s recent announcement that everything beyond Photoshop CS6 will need to be rented as part of its Creative Cloud lineup has caused a fair amount of disquiet (some of which has been pretty loud), but Photoshop isn't the only game in town, and never has been. Adobe Photoshop is one of those weird products that has an cultural significance far beyond its actual purpose.