Who Needs Photoshop?

Ok, maybe that headline is a little harsh. Photoshop, you know I love you. We’ve been together for over 10 years, and no other software can take your place. Not yet, anyway…

Still there are three pretty decent alternatives in the form on online software which are looking to give photoshop a run for it’s money.

Phoenix - http://aviary.com/tools/phoenix

This Image editing software by Aviary boasts that Phoenix offers “All the Photoshop features you actually need, at a fraction of the price.” It also offers built-in collaboration which is pretty cool. It’s currently in beta, and I don’t see any cost associated with it. It does tend to load slowly.

SUMO Paint - http://sumopaint.com/web/

This free image editing software claims to be the finest painter software online. It loaded quickly and seemed pretty straightforward. It seems to be flash-based, which just goes to show how powerful that flash platform continues to be.

Pixlr - http://pixlr.com/

Pixlr is also a free online photo editor. This one opened pretty quickly and looks like it can do the job relatively well. These guys seem the most focused on just creating a killer app without much pretense. They’re also on twitter: http://twitter.com/pixlr

All three of these had many of the same features as Photoshop, e.g. layers, filters, brushes, etc. A few of them were a bit choppy on the mouse movement so drawing a circle looked a little funny (Phoenix was the worst offender), but otherwise, I could see them becoming viable alternatives to desktop software. I’m sure Adobe has something in the works.