
The Layer menu option enables adding or duplicating layers, adding layer masks, locking layers, and otherwise manipulating images using traditional layers.

Users administer color adjustments, canvas trimming, canvas rotation, canvas sizing, image sizing, color depth, and color profile adjustments and settings using the Image menu. Simple image rotation commands are available from the Edit menu, as are fill, stroke, transform, and flip commands. (Note: At the time of this article’s publication, Pixelmator is being offered for $14.99.) And, at just 93 MB, Pixelmator enjoys a smaller footprint (which is convenient for business professionals possessing smaller SSD drives in their Macs) than the 2.3 GB Elements/Premier combination. At just $29.99, Pixelmator offers an easy-to-learn alternative for performing the basic tasks previously described.

Many users are familiar with Adobe Photoshop Elements, which runs $149.99 in the Apple Store, with Adobe Premier included. That’s where Pixelmator 3.4, an Apple Essentials app, comes into play. For more complex needs - retouching, adding text, applying effects, correcting color, publishing edited images to social media sites, etc. For simple tasks - cropping, resizing, converting file format, scaling, etc.
Pixelmator online free free#
Frequently (and I lump myself into this group), it’s tempting to use a low-grade free program. Most business professionals at least occasionally require the assistance of a capable image- or photo-editing application. The Apple Essentials app Pixelmator is easy to learn and won't strain your budget.
Pixelmator online free for mac#
Many people could ditch Photoshop for Pixelmator Pro without having to look back.Pixelmator enables capable image editing for Mac users on a tight budgetīasic image editing tasks are frustrating without a professional-grade editing platform. If you don’t want to pay for a monthly subscription and aren’t editing images for a living, Pixelmator Pro is a solid alternative. It’s hard to compete with a company that has thousands of employees.īut it doesn’t mean that Pixelmator Pro is useless. So is it a Photoshop killer? I don’t think Photoshop users are going to switch to Pixelmator Pro because Pixelmator Pro doesn’t have all of Photoshop’s features. If you consider today’s news as Pixelmator’s first paid upgrade, the app has evolved quite a lot since 2007. Pixelmator 1.0 was originally released ten years ago. As an existing Pixelmator user, it’s harder to find what you’re looking for. If you hide those columns, Pixelmator Pro looks like a simple image viewer. You can see your layers on the left and your tools on the right. Everything happens in a single, unified window. The user interface is much cleaner than it used to be. It supports iCloud, tabs, sharing extensions, wide color and everything you’d expect from a modern macOS app. The app now supports more file formats, such as RAW files with multiple layers, HEIF photos and improved support for Photoshop images. It’s not a life-changing feature, but it’s nice. I tried it with a few photos of objects on the web, and it worked as expected. More interestingly, the app tries to understand the content of your layers to automatically name your layers - if you’re adding a clock, Pixelmator Pro is going to name your layer “clock”. Just like Apple’s Photos app, the app can now automatically detect the horizon to adjust your photo. Pixelmator Pro also leverages the Core ML framework for a couple of smart features. You can also share presets with others by drag-and-dropping this preset into another app. If you want to edit multiple images with the same adjustments and effects, you can now save a preset and apply this preset to multiple images. Photo editing is non-destructive, which means that you can open a photo again and revert to the original photo if you’re not happy with your color adjustments - you can also go back and revert individual changes without undoing all your work. The app has been developed in Apple’s own programming language Swift 4 and is optimized for your GPU thanks to Metal 2, Core Image and OpenGL. Pixelmator Pro has all the tools you’d expect from an image processor, such as a smart selection tool, retouching tools, painting tools, all sorts of color adjustment effects and more.

While Adobe is still struggling to release Photoshop patches for macOS High Sierra, Pixelmator Pro is already using Apple’s latest APIs. It is a fully native app that takes advantage of most of Apple’s native APIs. I’ve been using the app for a couple of days, and it excels where the original Pixelmator used to excel. You can buy it today for $60 on the Mac App Store or try it for free. As the name suggests, it is a more powerful, refreshed version of the company’s original image-editing app. The team behind Pixelmator is releasing a brand new app today called Pixelmator Pro.
