Photoshop replacement? Please!

When I saw the story on Pixel, a cross-platform Photoshop replacement, it hit me again how ready I am for something to replace Photoshop.

Photoshop, at $649, is way too expensive for a typical web developer. I can see how an artist who spends most of his time in Photoshop would easily pay that price, but for a designer who works primarily in HTML and CSS, and only need to make the occasional web graphic, that’s just too much.

But more than the price, it is also too feature bloated for this type of use. It has too many features, and at the same time, saving for the web, with ImageReady, seems an after-thought.

Something like TextMate for image editing would be ideal. Something designed for the web, not print. Something scriptable and configurable. Something Mac-native. People doing hard-core photo work can still use Photoshop, but web developers and web designers, it seems like there’s room for a small, cheap replacement.

Pixel could be it, although the first peek didn’t convince me it was. I have yet to use it for anything real, though.