Mac App Suggestions? Art

Cafe Society
1

For the longest time I used Microsoft Photodraw V2, it was almost an afterthought that came with FrontPage and it just clicked with me.

It was procedural, vector based, and handled layers. You could pull in an image, create a drop-shadow, fade out the image on a 45 degree gradient and rotate it, then arc text around it. Then, depending how you exported it, it made an excellent file for web, and another for color printing, etc.

Course, it’s an orphan app, and I’ve been out of the web business for 5 or 6 years now, and have a need to do some art for a web project. What’s cheap/free/good nowadays for the Mac? Most of the stuff I’m seeing just seems to be geared to retouching pictures…or is Photoshop or Gimp and they seem to have some learning curve associated with 'em.

2

Sounds like you want a vector illustration program, which is different than photoshop type programs which are pixel based. A fairly cheap one is Intaglio although of course I prefer Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop is really the standard for pixel based, and I wouldn’t say that it has a steep learning curve, unless you are trying to do really advanced things. It’s easy enough for everyday stuff. A good place to look for mac software is versiontracker.com which is easy to search by category and free/shareware/payware.

3

I think you’ll like DrawIt. Vector-based, and uses all the Core Image filters to get any kind of effects you want. The free version should let you evaluate it well enough.

Edited to add - At €29, it’s not too expensive either.