Low Cost Subscription Graphics App Alternatives To Creative Cloud – The ‘Book Mystique
I’m not a fan of the subscription software model, I don’t use any subscription apps. Used to be that you paid your license fee and the app was yours to use indefinitely, or until one opted for a paid version upgrade, usually at a reports reasonable price.
However there’s an unfortunate trend that’s seen more and more developers, especially big, powerful ones, switching from license fees to monthly subscription fees, and when you do the math the prices are unreasonable, at least in a historical context.
In a column last week entitled “Mac Subscription Apps Are Killing My Budget,” Mac 360’s Jeffery Mincey showed how unreasonable, noting that the rental fee is $50 monthly for the full version of Adobe’s Creative Cloud is $50 per month or $600 yearly, which would add up to $1,800 over three years, which was the interval Mincey says he used to upgrade Creative Suite back in license fee days, or one third the cost of what he’s now paying in CS license fees. And that’s for just one app.
However there are alternatives. For a powerful substitute for the Creative Cloud module we used to call Photoshop, there’s the oddly-named GIMP(acronym for: GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source, high-end image editing and creation refuge from Adobe Creative Cloud’s open-ended, wallet-siphoning Photoshop’s monthly subscription-based, distribution mode is now available for the Mac for tasks like photo retouching, image editing and composition and image authoring.The Mac version of the GIMP 2.8.14 can be downloaded at:
http://bit.ly/1DdvwOF
Another low-cost alternative is Pixelmator, a full-featured and powerful easy-to-use image editor. ooPixelmator takes full advantage of the latest Mac features and technologies, giving you speedy, powerful tools that let you touch up and enhance images, draw or paint, and apply special effects.#
Pixelmator’s elegant collection of professional-grade color correction tools let you adjust exposure, hue, saturation, shadows and highlights, brightness, contrast, and more, replace and remix colors and dramatically improve less-than-perfect images with one click.
Built exclusively for Mac, Pixelmator uses a number of macOS features and technologies like Cocoa, OpenGL, OpenCL, Core Image, Grand Central Dispatch, 64-bit, FaceTime camera, Automator, Full-Screen, built-in Sharing and much more. Pixelmator’s interface and image editing engine are fully optimized for the MacBook Pro with Retina display, and the latest Pixelmator 3.6 Cordillera brings full support for macOS Sierra and the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, adds Tabs, includes a content-aware Smart Refine feature, and Deep Images support makes colors in 16-bit images more vibrant and true-to-life on Wide Color displays.
License fee for Pixelmator is a modest $29.99.
For more information, visit:
http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/
Pixelmator is also available for iPad.priced at$4.99 USD or equivalent amount in other currencies.
For more information, visit: https://itunes.apple.com/app/pixelmator/id924695435?ign-mpt=uo%3D8
Takeshi Oghara’s Free ToyViewer is an amazingly useful app for viewing and resizing images and doing basic image editing. It’s been a core tool in my productivity suite of macOS apps for years, and gets used extensively in production. Anyone who works with images on the Mac should have it in their image enhancement and correction toolkit. With version ToyViewer finally gets tabs, meaning that the app will no longer open a new window with each image modification executed, but a new tab will be displayed in the existing window instead. This function will only be effective when the newly displayed image is the same size as the original image. Additionally, in multiple tabs displayed in one window, the display position and the magnification scale are synchronized.
For more information, visit:
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/toyviewer/id414298354?mt=12