The manual is not that great and occasionally there is confusion because they are engineers and stick to engineers' ideas of things despite howls of protest from us users - although they are pretty responsive most of the time. It is a little idiosyncratic - the brothers never talk about an image, everything is 'layers' - but that takes about ten seconds to suss that out and not much longer to get accustomed to. Originally it was built for Windows but switched cross platform to include Mac 10+ years ago and now it is Mac to the extent that it even uses OS X's text engine in the Mac, and Windows users are pleased with a bit of Mac-ness smoothing out the interface. The current version is 19.51, so you get the message that it has been around for a while, and it runs on everything from X.6.x up (which pleases me, I continue to stick with X.6.8 - best OS X ever, I reckon!).

They upgrade about every two years (costing about $30, if I remember correctly) but do free point updates in between. You can run it off a USB drive if you like. Want to uninstall? Just drag the app to the trash.

Installation on either platform is a cinch - on the Mac, you just unzip the file and drag the app to your Applications folder. They love what they do, and they make this extremely capable software with every ambition to challenge Photoshop's capabilities (and surpass it in some areas) but no ambitions to challenge Adobe's financial grip on your pocket! It is built and 'marketed' (they actually don't care a damn about marketing!) by two German brothers who are just fanatics for the tightest possible code - the app comes as a 28.2 MB zip file, which expands to about 70.1 MB. PhotoLine is a cheap buy, less than $100, yet a hugely capable, 64 bit app. Need I say PhotoLine also does a very good job on RAW files? See my post about PhotoLine saving my JPEGs.

Photoline 19.51 review