photo editing

[sophinisba]

Can anyone recommend some free photo editing software for a Mac? I don't need to do anything fancy, really, just crop and resize things and add some text to an image from time to time. (Someone recommended Acorn but that's not working out for me at all, ugh.)

ETA: Oops, sorry, didn't mean to disable LJ comments. Attempting to fix that now.

Comments

[shopfront]

Have you tried GIMP? I find it pretty damn effective for a free program.

[sophinisba]

Am downloading at this very moment!

[anatsuno]

Maybe Picasa (from Google) now exists for Macs? It didn't use to but I think nowadays it might. Also, there are a few good online ones, like um, picnik.com I think? *not so helpful*

[sophinisba]

Thanks, GIMP and ImagePlay have not worked, so I'm giving picnik a try now. :/

[lotesse]

I use ImagePlay, which is opensource. It's a little weird, but once you get used to it you can do about anything.

[sophinisba]

Thanks! The GIMP doesn't seem to be working so I'm giving this a try now.

[minoanmiss]

Maybe this, which is web-based:
http://www.picnik.com/

[sophinisba]

Thanks, anatsuno mentioned that one too. And GIMP won't download and ImagePlay keeps crashing, so I guess I'll try for a fourth program tonight. (And if that doesn't work I think I'm posting this five-minute podfic with an unedited image as the cover for God's sake.)

[emei]

I haven't gotten around to re-installing GIMP after I got my new computer, but that used to work well for me. You just need to make sure you've got the right plug-in thingies (X11 or something like that) and always start it before you start GIMP itself.

But I mostly use iPhoto these days so otherwise IDK.

[sophinisba]

I've been using iPhoto for the year since I've had this computer but it seems really limited.

My computer says it doesn't recognize the GIMP dmg file I downloaded. Do you think that might be for lack of the plug-in thingies?

[emei]

iPhoto doesn't feel useful for icon-making or anything not pure photography, yeah.

Very possibly! I'd say poke around the website where you downloaded the GIMP file and see if they've got a list of plug-in thingies/additional programmes etc, and give it a try.

[thedeadparrot]

There's a guide for installing GIMP on Mac OSX: http://darwingimp.sourceforge.net/guides/install_leopard/

I also have a basic GIMP tutorial here: http://thedeadparrot.dreamwidth.org/443182.html

It's geared towards making icons specifically, but it should cover a lot of the functionality you might want to use.

[sophinisba]

Ooh, thank you! I've given up for tonight but those links look really helpful.

[roga]

I use PhotoScape (PC, but I assume you can get it for Mac) which is a loooot simpler than GIMP/Photoshop. I do really simple stuff -- rotate, crop, resize, contrast/brightness, that's basically it.

[sophinisba]

Can you put text on your pictures?

[roga]

I don't usually do it, but I can, yes. I can also put them into frames, which I hardly ever do but it's nice -- there's a whole range of designs.