Iris: Image Editing Without Palettes

There are many image editors available for Mac, but most of them use many palettes, which many people don’t prefer. Recently Iris was released, which is a one-window image editor that looks a lot like Apple’s Aperture. It combines all the elements of a image editor into one clean window.

The window in Iris is very simple, with tools on the left side and colors, layers, and options on the right. In the middle is the image you are currently editing, and under that is a bar which displays other open images. This is a great way to get avoid extra windows and it makes it very easy to switch between pictures. The tools are pretty basic to most image editors and you can access more by holding your mouse button on some of the icons. The options section displays different controls for each tool. You can also view colors as different sliders or a color spectrum to make it easy to pick the right color.

Iris has many great tools to use. It has all the basic tools found in many image editors, like marquee, paintbrush, red eye fix, blur, and much more. It also has many adjustment options like levels, brightness, and saturation, as well as a large selection of filters (including blur filters and other styles). When you use a filter or adjustment, a small HUD shows up which lets you adjust the filter and see the effects in real-time.

There were a few problems in Iris that I hope will soon be fixed. For example, some of the image adjustments seemed to be very strong, and it was hard to make slight changes to something as simple as brightness. Also, sometimes the image does not update when I switch pictures or delete a layer. Another issue is that there are not many layer blending options. There are also some bugs with undo and some of the filters.

This is just the first release, though, so hopefully some of these will be fixed soon. If so, then Iris looks like it could be a great choice for people looking for a good image editor for their Mac, even if it isn’t the “ultimate” right now. Iris is available for $79 and a demo is available at the website.

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