Photoshop alternatives

If you can't afford Photoshop or simply don't want to use it, then there are a number of good alternatives in the market at the time of writing this book. They have their advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage for using software, other than Photoshop, is that Aperture will likely not support the native file formats of these applications. This unfortunately means that you will need to save a flattened version as a TIFF or JPEG, in order for it to be loaded back into Aperture, meaning you will lose any application-specific functions, or even just layers. You could always save a native file to a different location as a back up, but your workflow becomes quite disorganized in that case.

Having said that, there are some great applications out there at the moment, and most of them are relatively inexpensive. In the following pages, we will look at the details of two of the most popular third-party image editing applications in the market right now, and we...