This site may be of interest:
<http://geoffhankerson.com/mac-photoshop-alternatives>
Pixel and Pixelmator look great. Don't forget Graphic Converter as
well. That bit of software has been on the Mac for a long time, and
works fine with Intel Macs. Chances are you might already have it on
your Mac.
Seeya
Rod!
On 22/11/2007, at 5:42 PM, Peter Bull wrote:
Thanks for that info Glenn. I am thinking of upgrading my trusty e-
Mac to a new iMac, but I have been scared of all the stories on
WAMUG lately about how software won't work with it. I use Photoshop
occasionally but just for fun and I can't justify shelling out
$2-3000 when most of what I want to do is crop pics or create some
snappy buttons or graphics for a web site. Can Keynote be used to
produce artwork for printing? For instance, business cards, and
does it produce pdf files.
Regards,
Peter Bull
21 Silvereye Close
East CanningtonWA 6107
Phone (08) 9356 7231
Mobile 0427 474 013
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 22/11/2007, at 10:03 AM, Glenn Nicholas wrote:
For Mac users who would like to do more with graphics but find
Photoshop/Gimp out of their league, you should check out Keynote.
Keynote is part of the $99 iWork package (along with Pages and
Numbers - think Powerpoint, Word & Excel equivalents). But the
graphics capabilities of Keynote are almost equivalent to a 4th
package - graphics - being included in iWork.
Keynote looks on the surface to be a presentation tool (and a far
more impressive one than Powerpoint).
But if you need to use graphics, what about features like this:
create graphics with multiple layers, use partially transparent
shapes, add drop shadows, add reflections, create text logos,
create frames for pictures, remove backgrounds ...
Before Keynote this was hard, and pretty much required Gimp or
Photoshop (way too hard for most users, and in the case of
Photoshop, pricey as well)
There are some great videos on Apple's website that show some of
the graphics features of Keynote I am talking about (but not all
of them).
http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/ (to see how to remove
backgrounds from images)
http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/#keynote (see Applying Image
Effects)
A key feature that is *not* documented very well is the ability to
create your graphics on a slide, and then export that slide as a
graphics file (tiff, jpg, png, gif). Once you have exported it as
a hi-res .tif file for example (this format retains transparent
backgrounds), you can use a free tool like ImageWell (from
extralean.com) to crop/resize the image and shrink the filesize to
whatever you need.
These features make it easy to create simple graphics such as
webpage headers, buttons, text logos and so on.
So I'm calling out Keynote as 'Photoshop for the rest of us'. No
doubt you can do heaps more with images using Photoshop than mere
mortals using Keynote. I respect Photoshop and realise it has
incredible capabilities. But for me the learning curve and
investment of time required has always been a barrier (let alone
the price tag), and you don't always want to hire a graphic
designer if you want something relatively simple.
The $99 price tag and the incredible ease of use that go with
Keynote make this an outstanding piece of software - it is even
very good at producing presentations :) (I originally bought it
for the voice-over recording facility, letting you easily publish
a presentation with voiceover to the web)
Numbers and Pages are excellent as well. If you are a seasoned
Microsoft Office user, you may well be surprised. Numbers in
particular has a refreshing approach to spreadsheets that is ideal
when you need to use a spreadsheet to present a business case or
tell a story of some kind. An associate of mine who recently
switched from Windows to a Mac laptop has jumped right into using
Pages because he finds it so much easier to use than Word.
So if you are interested in a great graphics tool 'for the rest of
us', check out Keynote.
Glenn.
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