Unless money is no object, there’s probably no need to shop for a Ferrari if all you need to do is go to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee.
Likewise, if you need to create some basic graphic images (and I mean very basic) then you can invest in Photoshop and Illustrator and devote the years it takes to master their feature set, or spend a few bucks on Pixen and learn to walk before you run. That means Pixen is a good choice for anyone to learn to use the Mac’s graphic capabilities.
Pixen features a dozen of the popular graphic editor tools common to Photoshop and others, but dropped into a floating palette that’s not the size of the Euro zone.
There’s Pencil, Eraser, Eyedropper, Zoom, Rectangular Selection, Magic Wand, Lasso, Move, Fill, Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse.
Pixen is modern enough to have Color Palettes, Layers, Patterns, and Custom Backgrounds. The Grid and Alignment Crosshair makes precise pixel placement easy.
You can also assign tools to the right and left buttons on your Mac (or trackpad) mouse. And, Pixen can use pressure-sensitive drawing tablets.
The app’s claim to fame might be how easy it makes .GIF animations frame-by-frame. Even the animations can be exported as .GIFs or sprites.
You can spend more for a Mac graphic editor, but not less. Pixen is open source. The Mac App Store version is more or less donation ware, but the app is available for free from the Pixen site.
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