Personally I'm with orangekay on the GIMP (and thanks for the morning laugh). The GIMP was built to run in Linux, and it has all the Linux sort of conventions for everything. It does not work remotely like any Mac program you have ever used, nor is it particularly like the Photoshop GUI. If you are used to Mac programs and Photoshop conventions you will have a lot of habits to break.
There is a version that has been tinkered with to be both more Mac-like and more Photoshop-like in its conventions, called GIMPshop. It is donationware. There is also a non-free version of GIMP that runs in the Mac GUI, as opposed to the regular GIMP which runs in X11, called MacGIMP.
http://www.gimpshop.com/
http://www.macgimp.org/
http://www.gimp.org/
Try out the GIMP and see what you think. An interface is very much a matter of familiarity and taste. Perhaps you would like it.
You might also want to take a look the "new kid" which many people like (I didn't, but if you prefer the Elements6 interface to the older Photoshop interface you might). It's called Pixelmator:
http://www.pixelmator.com/
It is in the same price range as Elements.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder
PS--Aperture is not an image editing program in the sense of making composites, applying special effects, and so on. It does basic corrections to color and lighting of digital photos, and is mainly a tool for organizing and batch processing massive numbers of digital photos.
Message was edited by: Francine Schwieder