Pixelmator 1.0 Review: First Impressions
Last month I remember salivating heavily when TUAW unveiled a really detailed screencast of Pixelmator in action. If you hadn’t heard Pixelmator is a layer based image editor for OS X that promises to be a real thorn in the side to everyones favorite Adobe product, Photoshop. While that may or not be the case, Pixelmator attempts to hedge the gap between complex image manipulation tools like Photoshop, and, well, everything else. Does it get it right? Read on for my first impressions.
First of all I should say that I love Photoshop and have been using it happily since version 2.0. Nothing is going to convince me to lose this killer app as it is almost always open on my Mac. So does Pixelmator, priced at $59, seriously lay the smack down on Adobe Photoshop? Of course not, but what you need to keep in mind is that it was never intended to. I think everyone’s biggest annoyance with Photoshop is that it is a huge system resource hog and takes forever to load - this is the space Pixelmator is attempting to occupy.
Pixelmator is gorgeous - no doubt about that. At first I didn’t really care for the black glossy look, but it grew on me. I sort of wish this could be changed in the somewhat scant preferences area, but it can’t. Overall the interface is clean, uncluttered, and logical. The traditional tool icons on the left side pane have some very nice transitional effects when clicked, and the designers made good use of opacities throughout the interface. So yeah all of the delicious GUI stuff we all like to gush about is certainly here.
Also here is all of Photoshop’s core tools but they are noticeably pared down. Selections, gradients, brushes, fills, even the magic wand tool, but don’t expect to get the same kind of control Photoshop offers. Having said that 80% of what you will want to do with these tools is built into Pixelmator. I did find myself wanting for things like fixed size selections, and some better cropping tools, but I would expect these to come with future releases. Selecting colors is straight forward as one would expect and all of the system default and developer palettes are here. The font tool is also the familiar system default.
As an aside, one thing that sort of irritates me is this - If you are going to offer me a Photoshop clone, why not provide some of the same shortcuts we are so used to? Surely they could sneak the basics in, but I found that almost none of the Photoshop shortcuts we all know and love work at all. While it’s hard to fault Pixelmator for not blatantly copying PS on this, it became a bit of an annoyance for me. After digging a bit deeper I couldn’t find any time saving shortcuts to really speak of and a look at the Pixelmator manual confirms this. I think that a 1.0 release should have included these, but that’s just my opinion.
With Pixelmator you can open and save in PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, EPS and pretty much all other image formats. I opened some complex PSD files (Photoshop) and everything converted fine except for any of my filtered effects, which makes sense.
Another thing I liked about Pixelmator was its Photo browser window which automatically has my iPhoto images ready to roll.
The filters Pixelmator provides might be its best feature. I think novice graphic designers will really appreciate the simplicity Pixelmator offers applying filters over Photoshop. Filters like Blurs, Pixellate, Edge Work, and Gloom were really fluid and provide a live preview so you can see your changes in real time. But what really stands out is that you can really tell that Core Image is being used as the live preview is incredibly fast, even quicker than some of the equivalent filters in Photoshop. Selecting the focus for your filter is done by moving a rope (for lack of a better term) around on your image, which I found a bit odd. See below.
Pixelmator is only 64mb and initially occupies just 36mb of actual system memory at load up. Startup times are very quick - less than seconds on my MacBook Pro! For a test, I loaded up some really large 2mb images and was fairly impressed with how snappy Pixelmator manipulated them. Filters, masks, brushes, and other CPU intensive tasks were very responsive. Don’t think that once you start working with images that Pixelmator will maintain its light memory footprint. I noticed it eating 400mb of actual system ram while working with some fairly common sized images (640×480). This is really just the type of overhead associated with image manipulation and not the fault of Pixelmator, but it’s worth noting.
This deserves a better explanation as it really is Pixelmator’s coolest feature - at least for me. Core Image is Apple’s native image processing framework and there really have not been many image editors to make use of it yet on the Mac. Dumbing it down - (see this article by John Siracusa for more) basically all of the filters you see in Photoshop are the types of things Core Image can do, only it uses your GPU and can do it in real-time. Photoshop doesn’t use Core Image and all of its filters are essentially built into the application (another reason why it is so huge). Apple promises that apps that use Core Image will really fly and this is one of the striking features of Pixelmator, as it’s blazingly fast even when stacking filtered layers. So it’s worth saying that Pixelmator might be the best image editing app on the Mac to make use of Core Image. I’m amazed it took this long for someone to attempt to fill this space.
I feel the need to dispel a rumor here - There is nothing you can do in Pixelmator that you cannot do in Photoshop. There is also plenty of things missing. So when people say this app is a Photoshop killer I have no idea what they are referring to. Having said that, Pixelmator has most of the more common, and many of the power features of PS. So quite a bit of what I find myself firing up Photoshop for, could now be done in Pixelmator. And all that for 1/10th the price. If you’re a blogger who frequently makes small edits to images for publishing, Pixelmator just might be your tool. I couldn’t help telling myself that I should really start doing my quick edits in Pixelmator instead of Photoshop. I think a lot of people who edit graphics will happily give Pixelmator a chance to live in their workflow, and it already seems to have a large following.
Pixelmator did impress me with what it does, and I have little doubt that it will definitely appeal to a large segment of Mac users. The problem is that the shoes it is filling are incredibly large. Photoshop might even be considered the Macs flagship application, and Adobe’s 17 years of usability and UI tweaks really show their worth when you use competing apps like Pixelmator. Again, it’s obviously not fair to continue to compare Pixelmator 1.0 to Photoshop 11.0 (CS3) like this, so I will leave my review on the key point I opened with…
Pixelmator sells for $59 and is backed by a great group of independent Mac developers. For a 1.0 release Pixelmator provides a very impressive use of Apple’s Core Image technology and it’s a very worthy addition to any graphic designer or photo buffs tool chest. Check out the fully functional trial copy and see if it isn’t your next image editing app for Mac.
This application surely looks promising..I am not the biggest image editing person but maybe in the future will check this one out.
Thanks for the review and detailed impressions.
If they add Guides and Rulers, I’ll be more than happy to buy it … haven’t bought PS for my Mac, since I only ever use a fraction of what it does. Being able to slice and dice psd’s from my designers, using guides and rulers would make Pixelmator worth every penny for me.
I have been using Pixelmator beta for a few weeks. It is very robust and does most (not all) of the stuff that I have required of it in my position as a web/graphic designer. Most of my peers are hesitant to try it out. I am always trying to find something that is open source or light weight–so I am probably biased. I am going to buy a copy for my wife who needs an app a little more robust than iPhoto and a little less complicated than Photoshop. This is probably the best shareware version of a graphic editor that I have seen on the Mac platform.
What this does look like is a Photoshop Elements replacement. I found Elements to be a great photo editing tool for my needs on the Windows platform (before happily switching to Mac earlier this year). Unfortunately, Adobe hasn’t released a universal binary version, yet. Pixelmator might be the perfect app for a Photoshop “light” user. I need some more options than iPhoto but not nearly all the features (or price) of the full Photoshop. I’ll definitely be giving Pixelmator a try.
It has a few bugs here and there and the keyboard shortcuts are exactly the same as Photoshop, but it’s a 1.0 release. What do you expect?……certainly an excellent program considering it was basically developed within a year by one programmer (utilizing many open source/Mac native technologies).
Have been using Pixelmator since beta and have found it very powerful, and has all the features that I need on my Mac for image editing, but it’s more of a Photoshop Elements replacement at the moment.
But with future builds, and hopefully the capital from sales they can invest further or even take on more staff to make follow up applications even better.
Pixelmator has serious shortcomings aside from the obvious gaps in its functionality. What it does, it doesn’t do especially well. E.g. its selection tools are imprecise and aren’t anti-aliased. You cannot easily convert a selection into a layer. It also lacks really obvious functionality that most users need, e.g. there’s no straighten tool. It doesn’t import RAW images. And finally, its interface might look snazzy, but it’s carelessly implemented. E.g. command-L for levels (in Photoshop) is command-shift-L in Pixelmator, even though they don’t use command-L for anything.
While I’m not going to trash my Photoshop CS3, it appears to be a decent product especially for the low price of $59. For serious professionals this won’t do much good, however, for the prosumer group I think this will do great for getting their feet wet.
So far I have enjoyed Pixelmator. It does everything that I’ve wanted to do so far, so lets hope it continues this way. There has been a lot of requests for it to be included in the MH II bundle, so I think there is a pretty good chance that it will be.
I’m a die-hard Photoshop user/freak, etc. There’s a lot that I do in it every day so like you, I’m not about to let it go. That said, I haven’t used Pixelmator yet but I certainly am curious. More than anything I truly enjoyed your review - fair and clear. Nice job.
Rawfile support? Am I totally blind or wtf???
Raw file formats are proprietary, and differ greatly from one manufacturer to another, and sometimes between cameras made by one manufacturer. How the hell do you expect Pixelmator, basically programmed by one person, to be able to support raw in a 1.0 release? Are you completely stupid or what?
I realize that was a little harsh saying that. Forgive me I haven’t taken my meds today….but lighten up it’s a 1.0 release and made by only one programmer and one designer over the course of a year ….actually less because I remember them saying that they started on it in November of 2006.
Pixelmator is actually more expensive and less functional than Acorn, which is written by one programmer / designer. For that matter Intaglio, which is a pretty serious Illustrator replacement, is also written by one guy. Pixelmator doesn’t compare well to these products either.
Score A for hype, C for execution.
Fireworks CS3 has been doing this for years and the CS3 update from Adobe is solid.
I agree, Fireworks is amazing when it comes to web content. I like to work in Photoshop and then bring it into Fireworks for final prep before taking it to the web.
Also, while some figure Pixelmator to be mostly hype, they about over $60,000 in their first day. While that’s not the same thing Spider Man 3 brought in, it’s nothing to sneeze at. That’s around 1,000 new users in just one day.
DMD: L O L!
It’s 2007 now, we all have had RAW format for a while now and its considered as a BASE “function” to decode thoose kind of format(s). At least from the largest camera vendors.
It’s a PHOTO-editing tool or?
Yeah I know…..but there are ALOT of RAW formats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAW_image_format
Photoshop didn’t even support RAW until CS1 and it has to do it through its Camera RAW plugin.
I’d say its a good add-on to your current RAW manager like Aperture or Lightroom, but it’s not really even that yet. I think Pixelmator was released too soon because of Acorn and Iris - the other Mac-only image editors coming out.
They told the beta testers that there would be three seeds before the release of PM, but there were only two. They didn’t really implement a good bug tracking system either. I think PM will be good eventually, but for now I’m just using it as a companion to Photoshop.
1. Both LR and PS share the same engine for RAW conversion (ACR 4.2 at the moment)
2. Aperture is out of the question until they come up with a working coloradjustment instead of oldschool “drag that putter” style without precision, not to mention the editing live on RAW all the time even when its not necessary, try to straighten a horisont in Aperture vs LR or PS for example, totally unusable in a batched flow.
3. I preferr RAW support in front of jingle lassos when adding bling bling effects.
But the GUI is nice
I think anyone can agree that this is not going to be your high end editor…RAW I think would be out of the question, I don’t think they’re gearing this towards the true “prosumer” group, which is fine because there’s plenty of market in the regular consumer group.
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