Acorn

So much of the photo editing software on the market is a reflection of an anachronistic time. Platforms like Adobe Photoshop came around when digital cameras were less accessible, photo editing was a job largely reserved for seasoned professionals, and the target market for these platforms were willing to spend hundreds of dollars for a software package that provided them with the deep feature sets they need to do their job. But now that everyone has a camera on their phone and Instagram has become one of the most prominent ways of communicating with the world, there's demand for intuitive but still powerful photo editing software. Acorn fits the bill well, and with each iteration, they've worked on making their software more intuitive without sacrificing features along the way. The sort of tools that graphic designers use can be intimidating to the casual individual. Watching a Photoshop session in action can be a stressful and confusing affair with a seemingly endless combination of menus and toolbars jockeying for the limited space on the screen and often obscuring the photo you're looking to edit. Acorn dodges this barrier to entry by only presenting you with the tools necessary to the task at hand. This allows you to quickly load up the software and get moving on your project without having to hunt through piles of toolbars to get the results you need. Acorn markets themselves as software "built for humans", and they've clearly put a lot of effort into creating a package that adapts to how users think rather than forcing users to adapt to the logic of the software. But simplistic doesn't have to mean limited, and Acorn comes packaged with all of the fundamentals you could expect from a photo editing platform. The evolutionary model for more established photo editing software has largely been iterative, stacking more and more features atop the complicated framework already in place. While Acorn doesn't sit at the front of the pack for feature sets, they do offer practically everything even advanced users should need to edit their photos. Support for layers allows you to make precision changes without having to worry about destroying your original image in the process and makes it easier to compartmentalize the various aspects of editing when you're looking to perform more advanced tasks. Masks, multistop gradients, and alphas are also supported for those looking to dive deeper into the more complicated functions. Sharing is well supported as well. Acorn allows you to export your image file in one of eight different formats, and you can even import photos from your phone or digital camera. It fits the central philosophy of the software and helps you more readily jump right in and get the job done. Photos can also be shared directly via Flickr, email attachment, or online galleries.