Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image.

For me, the star of the show is the fascinating Data Merge, which is a bit like Mail Merge for images. If you’ve ever needed to create the same image several times but with different information — nametags, for example, or personalized gift cards — this is a life-saver. You open your template image, identify your variables, then hand Acorn a CSV file with the relevant data and it will process through them, assigning text where needed and even putting images in assigned layers. It’s the kind of wild automation tool that might not be something you need every day, but when you do need it, there’s really no replacement.

The rare sweet spot that Acorn hits is that it’s super-approachable to new and casual users, who just need an image editor sometimes, and super-powerful for power users who want to dig in.