Stefan Ernst

Mac: The other missing image editing tool, Pixelmator

Pixelmator and the pvc christmas welcome screen

While eating my Ben & Jerry's Phish Food icecream (I very much recommend this!) I stumbled upon another image editing tool that is somewhere between Windows Paint and Photoshop.

Pixelmator
Image editing for the rest of us

It seems a bit less easy to use than Acorn, which I wrote about before, but more straightforward for me, as it is a bit closer to the classic image editing tools I got used to throughout the years.

The general GUI and user experience are, frankly, quite stunning. It's beautiful and uses controls and dialogs that do remind of the newest iPhoto and in part the newest pro apps aswell. The featureset is nice and solid, even includes iSight support and the iLife Media browser, which is VERY handy.

For most of the effects (and there are many for a product of this price range) it uses Apple's Core Image, which is good. It can read and write to almost any format imaginable, thanks to Quicktime and even has basic export options on some formats, as opposed to Acorn, which doesn't even seem to have a possibility to adjust the quality when saving JPEG files.

All in all for now and for real for me this time - it seems to be the missing image editing tool for the Mac. Nice, smooth, stunningly beautiful for a simple app, good to use and just the right set of features for most things. Got me convinced!

It's priced at $59, so seems like a fair deal too!
Just give it a try, I doubt you'll regret it. :)

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