A relative of mine recently got a fairly sophisticated digital camera and sought my counsel on what sort of photo correction and image editing software to use. He’s been getting along with the version of iPhoto that OS 10.4 installed on his G5 iMac, but he’s not finding it to be quite adequate for the sorts of image manipulation he wants to do. Unfortunately, since he’s not running Leopard, he doesn’t have access to the enhanced image editing features in the OS 10.5 version of Preview.

My short answer to this sort of query is always that if you can afford the reasonable cost of Photoshop Elements 6, it’s your best bet, as it offers most of the capabilities that most amateurs, or even many professionals, would ever use from Photoshop CS at a fraction of the price. PSE is, in my opinion, one of the great commercial software bargains of all time.

Adobe has unfortunately let Mac users fall behind again, with version 7 of Photoshop Elements now out for Windows but not for the Mac. However, Photoshop Elements 6 is so good and so powerful that we really have little to complain about. But if Elements isn’t something you’re interested in, here are a few other options.

Pixelmator

If you’re on a constrained budget, or just prefer to keep your software overhead costs down, a very decent alternative to PSE is Pixelmator, which I reviewed here in February. Pixelmator packs an awful lot of power and versatility into a leaner, swifter, more nimble package than ponderous Elements, although with a more modest and limited feature set, for $30 less. Recently I’ve found myself using Pixelmator more often than PSE, largely because it starts up so much quicker and I can usually do what I need to with it.

ToyViewer

ToyViewer is a core tool in my production applications suite. On a typical workday, I probably use ToyViewer dozens of times, mostly for small and short-duration chores like resizing pictures and changing file types, but ToyViewer can do 90+ percent of the image correction stuff I routinely need to do with graphics, and I don’t know what I would do without it. Well, actually I do. After I upgraded to OS 10.4 back in 2005, there were a couple of months before ToyViewer’s developer, Takeshi Ogihara, got a Tiger-compatible version of ToyViewer released. I tried several lightweight graphics programs as substitutes, but found nothing as slick, quick and suited to my needs as ToyViewer was. I’m addicted to this cool little jack-of-all-trades graphics utility.

Color It!

Color it! is quite a bit more powerful than its interface lets on, with basic to semi-advanced image correction tools and filters. For quick and convenient editing or image creation it’s tough to beat. On the other hand, it doesn’t support layers. I don’t find this much of a handicap for most of the stuff I do, but if you need layers support, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Color It! also does not support PDF files, which can be seriously frustrating these days now that the PDF format has become more of a standard. The workaround is to use Preview or ToyViewer to convert images from/to PDF.

Seashore

I pondered including GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), a powerful, professional-grade, open-source image editing program that is the image-editing standard for the Unix world, but it seemed like overkill for this roundup, so let’s go with Seashore. It’s an open-source bitmap graphics program built in Cocoa for OS X by Mark Pazolli based on GIMP technology with a nice selection of basic tools and layers support. There are no automated photo image clean-up and optimization/enhancement tools, but Seashore features gradients, textures, clone and smudge tools, and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes, supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing, and uses the same native file format.

Funtastic Photos

Funtastic Photos, which I reviewed here last fall, is a powerful, easy-to-use little photo editor app with a vast array of photo correction and enhancement tools. These tools tap into OS X graphics technologies like the Quartz graphics engine, Spotlight, and ImageIO Kit, and offer advanced photo enhancement technologies. Funtastic Photos sells for $34.95.

So what is the best upgrade from iPhoto from a photo editing standpoint? Photoshop Elements is the most powerful and comprehensive alternative. There are others that have their devotees as well, such as Flying Meat’s Acorn, and the Java-based Open Source ImageJ, which runs in 64-bit mode on Intel Macs running Leopard.

They’re all good tools with respective strengths and limitations. Several of them are freeware, and most of the others downloadable as demos, so it’s worth trying more than one to see which appeals to you most. My own inclination is to use several different graphics apps, depending on what the task is.

Last month, reinstalling Leopard on my G4 PowerBook broke Photoshop Elements 6, and one reason I’ve been able to procrastinate about the necessary application reinstall (there oughta be a better way, Adobe — nothing else broke) is that Pixelmator is getting so darned good that I haven’t really needed Elements for anything yet.

PSE 6 still offers several high-end features that aren’t supported in Pixelmator — automated panorama merges, group shot merge, cutouts, red-eye correction, advanced black & white conversions, the new Quick Selection Tool, and camera lens distortion correction. However, for most image editing tasks, Pixelmator, a Mac-only Elements challenger by UK-based developers Saulius and Aidas Dailide, is coming on strong. Updates are released every couple of months, with the latest version 1.4 “Sprinkle” being the program’s fourth major update. With this update, a new painting engine, Adobe Photoshop brushes support, a clouds filter, and document presets were added.

“The World’s First GPU-Powered Image Editor”

Pixelmator, claimed to be “The World’s First GPU-Powered Image Editor,” is engineered to tap into powerful OS X native graphics technologies like Core Image, which use your Mac’s hardware video muscle for image processing, as well as Open GL and ColorSync. The relative power and sophistication of your Mac’s graphics support will determine, to an extent, Pixelmator’s performance. If you have a high-performance graphics accelerator with lots of video RAM, you will find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations very lively, but I’ve found the program quite usable even on a 1.33 GHz PowerBook.

What grabs you when you start up Pixelmator the first time is its user interface: windows bordered in translucent black, black tool palette backgrounds, and colorfully-styled tool icons that magnify and show tool tips OS X Dock-style on mouseover. I found the spectacular appearance a bit distracting initially, but have gotten used to it.

Layers and Smart Palettes

Like Photoshop, Pixelmator is a layers-based image editor that supports linking and blending layers, changing opacity, and creating clipping masks or layer masks to hide some layer portions. You can quickly create layers from photos, other pictures, selections or even iSight input.

Pixelmator’s Smart Palette Hide feature eliminates palette clutter when using adjustment tools or filters, making all unnecessary palettes temporarily dissolve when any of adjustment tools or filters are in play, allowing you to focus on just one image and your chosen tool.

I especially like Pixelmator’s color correction tools, which allow you to fine-tune color values like hue, saturation,color balance, luminance, color levels, channel mixing brightness and contrast.

Pixelmator’s Curves adjustment is notably nicer and more intuitive to use than PSE’s. There is also an Auto Enhance command if you want to let the program make the value-judgments with one-click convenience.

Pixelmator has more than 130 filters and special effects, and supports over 100 different file formats including PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, EPS, and you can open and save Photoshop files with layers data preserved.

Organizing Principles

Pixelmator doesn’t have anything in photo organization support to rival Photoshop Element’s Adobe Bridge CS3 organizer application (previously only available with Adobe Creative Suite applications) that lets you browse through your hard drive to locate photos you want to open and edit, but you can use Pixelmator’s Photo Browser palette to access images in your iPhoto Library, events, albums, Smart Albums, and your Pictures folder.

Pixelmator 1.4 requires Mac OS 10.5.5 or higher, is available as a free 30-day demo and can be registered for $59. Version 1.4 is a free update to current registered users.

Gallery: Pixelmator 1.3 “Tempo” beta preview