Sad Cat Software ships Bloom 1.0
Sad Cat Software has officially released Bloom, its promising procedural image-editing software, making it available to purchase on the Mac App Store, and adding a few new key features.
You may be familiar with Bloom, which has been available in early builds for over 18 months, under its original name of Ormr. (It was rechristened after Ormr was deemed “tough to pronounce.”)
A lightweight alternative to Photoshop?
Selling points of the software include its sub-$50 price, and its unusual non-destructive workflow: every edit you make to an image can be adjusted later, and every brush stroke can be edited.
It’s also fully 16-bits-per-channel, and plays nicely with Photoshop: it imports and exports PSD files, preserving layers, layer groups, masks and blending modes.
Bloom also has most of the other features you would expect in a 2D image-editing package, although to find out if it has exactly the ones you’re after, you’ll need to dig into the release notes, since the ‘Tech Specs’ page of the website only provides an overview of the key tools.
However, there is a fully functional one-month demo, so you can try before you buy.
Bloom 1.0 is available for Windows Vista and above, Mac OS X 10.6 and above and 64-bit Linux. A perpetual licence costs $49.99 and enables you to use the software on any number of computers.
