Acorn
Acorn is a lightweight, Mac-native image editor from Flying Meat designed around speed and simplicity. It provides essential painting and retouching tools, real layers, non-destructive filters and adjustment controls, vector shapes, text, and selection tools without the overhead of a full creative suite. Acorn is used by designers, photographers, and Mac users who need to polish photos, prepare screenshots, composite layers, or perform quick image edits. The app emphasizes a focused workspace with GPU acceleration and supports layer-based editing with full opacity and blend-mode control.
AI Recommendation
1 suggestionAcorn 8 is a Universal Binary with native Apple Silicon support, so if you are running an older Intel-only build of Acorn 6 or 7 under Rosetta, you will see significantly better performance and battery life by updating to version 8 or later. The simplest way to update is to visit flyingmeat.com/acorn/ and download the current version 8.5.1 directly, or if you have Acorn already open, use Help → Check for Updates to pull the latest build through Flying Meat's built-in auto-updater. Your existing projects, preferences and brushes will migrate without any manual effort. If you prefer to track development releases, Flying Meat also publishes preview builds at flyingmeat.com/download/latest/ with an opt-in auto-update toggle for early access to new features.
Recommended reading