Acorn

Acorn is an inexpensive Photoshop alternative for macOS that works with both raster and vector images. It has most of the basic features of Photoshop, like layers and raw camera file support, but compared with Adobe’s cutting-edge AI-powered application, Acorn feels dated and limited. Our Editors’ Choice winners for photo editing software are Adobe Photoshop for all-around, full-featured image editing, Adobe Lightroom Classic for pro photo workflows, Adobe Photoshop Elements for enthusiasts, and Apple Photos for entry-level macOS photo editing. Another good low-cost alternative is the web-based Photopea.

How Much Does Acorn Cost?

Acorn carries a one-time purchase price of $39.99 (which is frequently discounted), making it extremely affordable compared with most desktop photo editing applications. In fact, it’s one of the cheapest ways to get layer editing aside from free software like Photopea and GIMP.

Many competitors, including the biggest name in the game, Adobe, require subscriptions. An exception is Photoshop Elements, which goes for a one-time list price of $99.99. The big kahuna, Photoshop itself, costs a minimum of $9.99 per month, but that subscription also includes Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and 20GB of cloud storage. If you don’t need layer editing, Apple Photos is surprisingly powerful and boasts the company's typically slick design.

Getting Started With Acorn

Getting the application is a simple matter of either downloading it from Flying Meat Software’s website (yes, that’s the name of the company that makes Acorn) or acquiring it in the Mac App Store. You need a Mac running macOS 10.14 or later. If you purchase the app from the Flying Meat webpage, you enter your product key and don't need to go through additional setup.

The Acorn Interface

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When you first run Acorn, you see a small dialog box that helps you get started. From it, you can open an existing image or begin creating a new one. The dialog also includes options for opening the program’s documentation and tutorial videos, contacting the company, and viewing its social media accounts.

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The editing interface is like most photo apps, with a toolbar down the left rail and tool settings and layer sections on the right. I like that it's possible to adjust the relative sizes of the panels, but undocking them and moving them around (as you can with ACDSee Photo Studio and Serif Affinity Photo) isn't an option. And there aren’t any preset or customizable layouts for your workspace like, for example, one for color grading and one for text entry. Another quibble is that setting sliders don’t snap back to their default position when you double-click them, as they do in Adobe’s photo software.

Acorn allows multiple images open in tabs, just like in Photoshop. It lets you show guides, grids, and rulers, with snapping for the first two. Undoing and Redoing an action uses the standard Cmd-Z or Edit menu option, but Acorn lacks Photoshop’s extra helpful history panel. You get most of the big keyboard shortcuts in Acorn—Z for zoom, V for move, C for crop, T for text, and so on. As in Photoshop, holding down the Space Bar temporarily switches you to the useful Hand tool from wherever you are.

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When starting a new image, you either choose a preset from standard print and online dimensions or set your own dimensions, resolution, color bit depth, and background color. You don’t get template thumbnails or designs to choose from as you do in Photoshop and Photopea. Acorn supports 16- and 8-bit-per-channel color depths for higher-spec work.

The program lets you open Photoshop native files, but you only get some of the features of those. I tried opening a PSD file with several layers, guides, and frames, and Acorn did display the image correctly, with layer contents in the right place, but the frames and guides were gone since Acorn doesn’t have a frame tool. For comparison, Photopea did preserve the guides but also lacks the frame tool, so those were gone, too. In another test, Acorn did preserve Artboards and layer groups in an imported PSD file.

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Opening raw camera files in Acorn works similarly to doing so in Photoshop, with a preliminary window for making initial adjustments to the image before converting it from raw to a format (in this case the .acorn file format). The window is bare-bones compared with Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw interface. Acorn doesn’t have a highlights slider in this window, but it does include a Bias slider, which is unusual. Sometimes, however, I would make edits with these sliders in the raw import window that didn’t show up until opened in the main app.

Acorn provides no tools for organizing your photo collection—even Photoshop comes with (the long-ignored) Bridge utility for doing this. But on macOS, you’ll likely use Apple Photos to organize your collection.

Basic Photo Editing

Getting to the basic Exposure, Contrast, and color settings involves adding an Effect for those functions. The dodge and burn tools in the toolbar helpfully let you brighten and darken specific areas of an image. Curves and Levels give you more control over lighting, and a histogram panel that appears with the latter is editable with controls at the ends and center for the same purpose.

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The Crop tools works well enough and lets you rotate your image as well, but it can't extend the canvas the way Photopea and Photoshop can. Standard transforming tools like scale, rotate, and resize are provided along with a Perspective option that lets you drag corner handles to distort your image into a more pleasing angle.

For selections, you get the standard rectangle, circle, and freeform tools, as well as a Magic Wand that worked well in testing. But forget about Subject Select, which you find in more cutting-edge software like Photoshop or CyberLink PhotoDirector. A couple of standard pixel-level tools at your service are Smudge and Clone Stamp, but where’s Spot healing, let alone advanced content-aware tools that let you remove objects automatically from your image?

No AI Helpers

Many photo apps these days include generative AI tools that can expand or even add objects or scenery to your images. And I’m not just talking about Photoshop; CyberLink PhotoDirector and Photopea both include these tools, and both cost significantly less than Photoshop.

AI-assisted tools aren’t limited to creating new image content. Photoshop and other programs use machine learning AI (called Sensei in Adobe’s case) to do things like accurately select people and objects in your image to remove the background, or remove an object and replace it with image content that matches the background of the existing image. Acorn's Instant Alpha tool is sort of like object removal, though it doesn’t recreate the background but just makes the area of the removed object transparent.

Effects in Acorn

The program includes a full selection of filters such as Blur, Distortion, Gradient, Halftone, Stylize, Tile, Comic, and Random Noise. I appreciate the search box atop the list of filters that appears after you click + to add one. The Noise Reduction filter worked acceptably if not automatically, but it gives you sliders only for Noise Level and Sharpness. I prefer having separate sliders for Color and Luminance, but an auto-noise-reduction tool is most welcome and missing in Acorn.

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Acorn doesn't include a whole lot of retouching options, let alone the AI face-editing tools you find in several more advanced photo applications. Some interesting effects in the Distortion section include Circle Splash, Glass, Light Tunnel, Torus Lens, and Twirl. You also get Comic, Fuzz Stroke, and Gloom in the Stylize group. Film looks and posterize effects are among Acorn's Color Effects.

Working With Layers in Acorn 

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Acorn supports the layers, masks, layer groups, and Artboards that are familiar to Photoshop users. And its choice of blending modes number to a generous 24, compared with Photoshop’s 27. Acorn has no adjustment layers per se. Instead, you add filters for standard things like exposure, color, and levels. It’s somewhat awkward. Whereas most photo apps surface the basic brightness and contrast right up top, with Acorn you need to dig three layers down into a menu to apply these basic corrections.

Drawing Tools in Acorn

Brush options are reasonably robust. One cool brush tool in Acorn lets you load your own image for a custom brush shape, something you can also do with Corel PaintShop Pro. You can adjust your brush’s softness, jitter, and squish—that last one simulates a felt tip pen’s tip angle.

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Text Tools in Acorn

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Acorn lets you use any font on your computer and has adjustment tools for kerning, spacing, alignment, and antialiasing, as well as fill, stroke, and shadow effects. You don't get glyph options, so you can’t choose whether to display “fi” as one or two characters. One impressive text option is Text on a Circle—something not possible in Photopea.

Vector Editing in Acorn

I was able to successfully open both Illustrator AI files and SVG files with Acorn. On the toolbar are two vector drawing pens, Bezier and Freeform, along with line, rectangular, circular, star, and arrow shapes. It’s nowhere close to what Adobe Illustrator offers, but it’s similar to the vector options in Photoshop, which is not primarily a vector tool. Acorn's “processors” do cool things like duplicate shapes into a spiral pattern.

Output and Sharing

Unlike many photo applications these days, Acorn doesn’t provide any online storage for your images. It also saves edited files in its own .acorn format, which is far from widely supported. It does, however, let you export to many standard formats, including JPG, PNG, HEIC, WEBP, and TIFF. The ability to save your work as an animated GIF is especially welcome. Acorn includes a generous selection of output color profiles, including ACES CG, P3, Web Safe Colors, and Adobe RGB.

Acorn’s Performance and Help

In testing, Acorn performed snappily on my MacBook Air with M1 processor. For some actions, though, like closing an image, the program feels a little slow.

I appreciate Acorn’s thorough help pages and tutorials, which in some ways top Adobe’s web help, which can be confusing at times. Adobe can send you to a help page for the wrong product or to user comments rather than actual help if you’re not careful.

Verdict: A Low-Cost, Low-Power Alternative to Photoshop

Acorn can do many things that Photoshop can, but you lose a great deal in both usability and state-of-the-art tools. In fact, it’s one of the few pieces of software I’ve tested in the last few months with absolutely no generative AI features, and that even includes programs that cost far less than Photoshop like Photopea and PhotoDirector. Acorn may be all that some users need, but our Editors’ Choice winner among photo editing software, Adobe Photoshop, provides a far smoother experience along with loads of more powerful tools.