With Adobe Photoshop, in all its various forms, dominating the hearts and minds of graphics professionals, photographers and amateur image twiddlers, you'd think there wouldn't be room for a fresh face in the image-editing pantheon. If so, you'd be wrong, with new arrival Naked Light hoping to gain traction by approaching image editing from a non-Photoshop standpoint.

Part of its claim to fame is a drag-and-drop-driven, node-based approach, which lets users employ nodes as building blocks in a composition that can include images, filters or a set of brush strokes. Image nodes, and generator nodes like gradients and text, start off a row of nodes, with filter nodes taking an input and modifying them. Users can simply drag filters to reorder them, with Naked Light displaying the result in real time.

Photographers not thrilled with having to relate to images defined in pixels will appreciate the program's ability to layout images, and define tools and filters, in units such as inches, millimeters and picas. Because Naked Light has no set resolution, users can zoom in up to 64× to work on tiny details. Related to this is the application's hybrid raster and vector painting engine, which stores all vector data collected from a mouse or tablet and can later redraw all brush strokes, at any resolution. Such brush strokes are laid out at subpixel precision, which the developer claims results in "the smoothest, finest renderings of any paint program."

The developer of Naked Light is particularly proud of its Live Filters and points outs the superiority of its approach to that of Photoshop in several regards. For example, while the current version of Photoshop limits users to one mask for all Smart Filters, every filter in a Naked Light image can have its own mask.

Naked Light for Mac OS X Leopard is currently available in open beta.