I'm an occasional Photoshop user. My usage patterns tend to be weeks of non-use, then a few days of frantic abuse. With my new MacBook, I feel unclean running anything in Rosetta, and with the upgrade fees for Photoshop CS 3 (first native Intel version), I had to take stock and a long hard look at whether I really needed Photoshop at all.

I have tried GraphicsConverter in the past. I'm sure it is a workhorse, as some have described, but I found it confusing, unintuitive, and overly-complex. Oh, and its as ugly as hell.

Pixelmator was a breath of fresh air. Its clean, simple to pick up (for a Photoshop user), and can do pretty much 90% of what I used to use Photoshop for. Its also a first-class Mac application, and runs like lightning on my MacBook.

For £40, it was a practical no-brainer for me.

My only problem is with that 10% of things I used to do in Photoshop that Pixelmator doesn't support. Small things, like being able to move an object when you size it; having edge boxes to size an object when you're in 'move' mode, etc... I can get around these things, but they do cause me to stumble and have a less than perfect experience.

As far as image manipulation apps go, however, you're not going to see anything finer for the price. Pixelmator is exceptional, and exceptional value for money.