Acorn 8 brings subject selection, Live Text, Data Merge, more
Not unlike text editors, image-editing software is a category that provokes strong feelings from its users. There are your Photoshop fans, Affinity users, and those who adore Pixelmator.1
Personally, I’ve been a longtime user of Flying Meat’s Acorn—and I do mean longtime: all the way back to version 1.0. Even though I’m primarily someone who deals with words, Acorn is an app that I find myself using daily, often for something as simple as cropping or resizing an image, but I’ve also used it for more complex tasks like designing book covers.
The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image.
For me, the star of the show is the fascinating Data Merge, which is a bit like Mail Merge for images. If you’ve ever needed to create the same image several times but with different information—nametags, for example, or personalized gift cards—this is a life-saver. You open your template image, identify your variables, then hand Acorn a CSV file with the relevant data and it will process through them, assigning text where needed and even putting images in assigned layers. It’s the kind of wild automation tool that might not be something you need every day, but when you do need it, there’s really no replacement.
Acorn 8 has a bunch of other great additions, including an on-canvas ruler, support for JPEG-XL, and compatibility with Look up Tables (LUT) that let you quickly apply image color adjustments. And, be still my beating heart, there’s improved support for Shortcuts, for everything from cropping and resizing images to adding watermarks and dynamically assigning text.
There’s currently an introductory sale for Acorn 8: for a limited time, it’s just $19.99 instead of its usual $29.99, and there’s also a bundle with Flying Meat’s equally excellent Retrobatch batch image processing app. Plus, you’re supporting a small independent Mac developer, and that’s a good reason in and of itself.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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