[/caption]\n\nPhotoshop Elements is rumored to be getting updated on October 23rd. It promises to fix the obvious issues with Elements 6 on the Mac and 7 under Windows and offer some of CS4's tricks it will probably crush every alternative except Photoline -- in terms of functionality -- like a bug. Of course Photoline is a true 64-bit application and launches as fast as any of the others, making it still very hard to beat.\n\nPhotoline is at version 15.5 and now appears to be stroking paths and calculating masks from outlines (i.e. stroking paths) in a manner consistent with Photoshop -- i.e. its effects layers look pretty much as good as Photoshop's now. It still features the same bizarrely \"organized\" menus and mistranslated menu item names. (The most galling problem for me is the random use of the terms \"lasso\", \"selection\", and \"mask\" to mean \"lasso\", \"selection\", or \"mask\". Sorry, these are not the same freaking thing.\n\nAcorn is at 2.0, only runs on Snow Leopard, and essentially offers very little new functionality. E.g. its shape layers are still half-assed and buggy.\n\nPixelmator is at 1.5 and -- as a pure bitmap editor -- is starting to look quite useful. But with lame typography, no vector support, and no effects layers, you're going to find doing any serious work in it pretty annoying.\n\nGIMP is still free, still powerful, and still ugly and hard to use. But it's getting better -- I only get three windows now -- a document window with menus, and two palette windows (well they would be palettes in a decent windows system). I do wonder whether in the end I'll just give up and learn to love it the way I have with Blender. (It's not going to replace Photoshop, but it may replace the lightweight alternatives. Ugh, I just realized that it weighs in at 255MB. So, nope, not going to happen. It also fails on launch silently if you run it from disk image.)\n\nPixel is still at 1.0b6 and still hasn't been updated since 2006.\n\nNaked Light is at Preview 5.2 (what is that? 0.52 alpha?)\n\nIris appears to be dead, still.\n\nSeashore is a promising but understaffed attempt to do for GIMP what Camino and Firefox did for Mozilla. Unlike GIMP it's Mac OS X native and pretty usable. Unfortunately, I think building on the GIMP codebase is actually a mistake -- they'd be better off using ImageMagick (which is how Pixelmator was built).\n\nChocoflop is an odd case of quasi freeware product (it has a free option but given (a) the bizarre lack of real ImageMagick integration and (b) the references to the \"free version\", I assume that a commercial version is planned). It seems to be the \"holy grail\" of a Cocoa-wrapped Imagemagick-based kitchen-sink graphics application, but I can't even figure out how to paint a white line in it. I think putting the word \"flop\" in your program's name is probably a good sign that you're not going to be a good UI designer.\n