In recent months, a lot of new image editors have appeared on the Mac platform. New APIs from Apple such as Core Image have allowed small, indie developers to create quite sophisticated image editing tools.

I've seen a few reviews of these applications, but the reviews mostly concentrate on user interface concerns. I'd like to do something different here; Instead of simply looking at their UI, I'd like to look at how these applications handle tasks I typically do. In this review, I'll look at three different tasks:

1. Stitching a few shots to create a panorama image
2. Adding a fancy title to a picture
3. Creating a simple pixel image

I will not look at fixing levels, exposure and the like, since iPhoto does a pretty good job at that, and I think most people will use these editors in conjunction with iPhoto or even Aperture or Lightroom, using them to do tasks that involve layers and selections and pixel-level operations, features which iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom don't provide.