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One of the applications that I have fallen in love with is Graphic Converter. I used it years ago and then I started using Photoshop and didn’t think that I’d use anything else. Then OS X came along and the Photoshop version took a long time to come out. Then I wasn’t able to upgrade to version 7, but I needed to do a lot of image processing as I was working on “When Voices Rise…” and I didn’t want to do a lot of work in Photoshop 6 in Classic as I was using Final Cut Pro 3 under OS X. I scanned hundreds of photos and documents and needed to resize and crop them to make them more manageable. I found Graphic Converter, tried it out, loved it, and bought it. Small, efficient and fast. I used the Browse feature to select images and resized and adjusted them for use. Then when I was authoring the DVD I had almost 100 images that I wanted to use in a slide show for the DVD, but I needed to rescale and resize the images in a non-proportional way and also to place them on a black background. GC’s Batch was able to save me a ton of time doing that. It’s what I use to resize and prepare images for the Web and iStockPhoto when I upload stuff there. It even takes a lot of Photoshop plugins!
There have been a few updates over the last year to GC and I dutifully download them, but I hadn’t been using it a lot. But for some reason I hadn’t poked around in it a lot. Then I had an image open I noticed that there was a new Stamp tool! That was the only thing that I really, really missed from previously using Photoshop as the colour-correction, levels, and other image adjustments work great in GC. The browser has also been updated (in an iPhoto-like way) and there is a neat catalogue HTML export that I may play with as well. I have to check out updates a bit more carefully!