Painting my way out of a corner

One of the things I rely on my Windows PC at work to do is actually pretty simple.  I take screenshots of apps, web pages, Word docs, or what have you, then I fire up a simple (read: quick) photo editor or paint program (my current favorite is PhotoFiltre), put a circle around something I want to point out and maybe a note, and finally, send it off inserted in an email or doc or what have you.  Pretty easy.  I thought it’d be the same for the Mac.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.  Although there seemed to be hundreds of Windows apps to do what I was looking for, there are substantially fewer for the Mac.  I did quite a bit of searching before I found a few (free) apps that looked like they might fit the bill.  It turns out that only one of them can actually do the specific job I was describing above.  (Or at least only one was obvious enough for me to figure out how to outline and annotate.  There may be ways to do it with the others, but I couldn’t do it.  Maybe one of you know? 🙂 )

I’ve decided to go with ImageWell for now.  It makes it fairly simple to draw an outline and add text.  Here’s an example…

In fact, I didn’t even have to do the ol’ Vulcan death grip (Cmd-Shift-4) to get the screen shot.  ImageWell allows you to do that right from the app, so they make it really simple.  Highly recommended if you’re looking to do this specific task.

For other photo and image editing operations, I would probably stick with more traditional photo editors.  A couple of free ones I found and liked while doing my search are Seashore and Pixen.  I have both of those installed on my MBP in addition to ImageWell.  What about the GIMP you ask?  Well, I was looking for something quick and easy.  Maybe some of you can do these actions in your sleep, but I’m not that much of a GIMP maven.  When I have a little more time, I’ll try grabbing this version of the GIMP and try it out.  For now, when I want to do some heavy-duty image editing, I may just drop into Parallels and use PaintShop Pro.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m all into fast, easy and free. 🙂

(Final note: not that PaintShop Pro is free.  I have a license through work.  I’m not into stealing…)