Ever gone looking for the basic image retouching app in OS X? It isn't there. The Seashore Project, an open-source image editor, sits somewhere between Microsoft Paint and Photoshop and plugs the gap nicely. And of course, it's free.
The Seashore Project is an open source image editor for OS X that nicely plugs the gap between Photoshop and iPhoto.
Written in Cocoa and based on the image technology that powers The GIMP, it offers a good selection of tools for manipulating your pictures.
When you first start the app, it offers you the chance to set defaults for image size, resolution and colour mode. Together with the many presets built-in to the app, this offers a quick around much repetitive fiddling.
The interface will be familiar to anyone who has used Photoshop or other high-end editors:
It has more tools than I was expecting. Seashore features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes and supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. Effects include blur, Gaussian blur, invert, greyscale and posterize options and more.
Other features are covered in a comprehensive PDF help manual.
I'm going to give it a go for a month and see if I really miss the feature-rich but deathly-slow Photoshop experience.
Seashore is freeware and available from its Sourceforge page.