As someone said, "There is always the GIMP". Gimp is very good in its own right. It has most of the 'core' features of Photoshop (at least from my experience). Most professionals admit that it is a good product, but they just 'prefer' Photoshop (at least some articles and people I've talked to have said this, I don't have any direct proof or quotes). I think that if Apple saw it's market share being eaten into by Photoshop moving to PC, then they would invest the time to make GIMP better. For the most part GIMP is 'raw' and unpolished. The tools are there, but it has no interface that is comparable to Photoshop. I'm sure that Apple could 'Cocoa-ize' it and improve the interface. Of course, they couldn't charge for it due to the GPL...
What I'd like to see is an extension of the system-wide 'Services'...you know, Spell Check, Speech, Find, and then all those other app specific or text-specific services?
I'd like to see graphics-services. They'd work like PS plugins but they'd work in any app that could make use of graphics.
All a service is is a daemon that takes something from one app, does something to it, and spits it out into the same app or another app.
Imagine being able to apply filters and other graphic modifying properties to a pict. Imagine being able to take pdf pict, or jpeg or tiff or png pasted in OmniGraffle or Keynote and applying a blur filter to the pict (or some weird exotic PS-like filter) via Services. All apps would suddenly become mini-Photoshops.
Instead of loading up specialized software, this kind of stuff would be done by the system instead of the app. I'm probably wrong in assuming people would be more willing to write plugins that can be used system-wide than app-specific (like Photoshop)...but this kind of stuff would be amazing.
I guess this is a wild dream and it won't happen soon though.
edit: this whole idea doesn't need to stop at graphic filters...it'd be cool to have a cropping Service and graphic format conversion Service. Heck, Preview does graphics conversion, why can't a Service run a small daemon with the conversion code to convert graphics on-the-fly?
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Mac Gimp is for sale here
I'd like to see graphics-services. They'd work like PS plugins but they'd work in any app that could make use of graphics.
All a service is is a daemon that takes something from one app, does something to it, and spits it out into the same app or another app.
Imagine being able to apply filters and other graphic modifying properties to a pict. Imagine being able to take pdf pict, or jpeg or tiff or png pasted in OmniGraffle or Keynote and applying a blur filter to the pict (or some weird exotic PS-like filter) via Services. All apps would suddenly become mini-Photoshops.
Instead of loading up specialized software, this kind of stuff would be done by the system instead of the app. I'm probably wrong in assuming people would be more willing to write plugins that can be used system-wide than app-specific (like Photoshop)...but this kind of stuff would be amazing.
I guess this is a wild dream and it won't happen soon though.
edit: this whole idea doesn't need to stop at graphic filters...it'd be cool to have a cropping Service and graphic format conversion Service. Heck, Preview does graphics conversion, why can't a Service run a small daemon with the conversion code to convert graphics on-the-fly?