By Dan Moren

August 24, 2015 11:17 AM PT

Acorn 5 slices, dices, filters, crops

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

As I mentioned in last week’s Dock Tales post, Flying Meat’s Acorn has long been my go-to image editor. And good news! There’s a brand new version, Acorn 5, with lots of fancy schmancy new improvements: shape processors–non-destructive filters that you can use on vector shapes–Curves and Levels as filters, Photoshop brush imports, and more snapping–shapes! selections! guides! layers!–than you can shake a stick at. There are also a ton of other smaller fixes that might appeal to you, you know, if you’re into that sort of thing.

You can grab Acorn 5 from either Flying Meat’s own store or the Mac App Store for $25.

I can’t say enough good things about Acorn. Photoshop is often considered the industry standard, but I simply don’t need (and can’t really figure out how to use) most of the tools that Photoshop offers, so Acorn wins the day for me.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Twitter at @dmoren or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. The latest novel in his Galactic Cold War series of sci-fi space adventures, The Nova Incident, is available now.]

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