We'll own up to a mistake about this app if you do, too. Our one is that we missed it. We've quite often
enthused about the iOS versions and we use those most days, but somehow we just assumed someone else would have already examined the OS X version. It's famous. It's Photoshop for people who don't want to spend Photoshop money, or cope with Photoshop complexity. Now that
Pixelmator 3.5 is out, let us put this oversight to rights.
Your mistake is calling it Photoshop. Okay, that's our mistake too, but it's everybody's: it is impossible to see Pixelmator -- and especially to see its price -- and not think that this is a cheap alternative to Photoshop. Yet this really is a mistake, because Pixelmator is not some knock-off, bargain-basement copy, it is a richly full-featured and Apple-centric photo manipulation app. It has similar features to Photoshop because it is for editing photos, and you need to do the same things to your images whatever your tools are. It has similar controls to Photoshop because, well, okay, it could be more different in its toolbox.
It has a different feel, like a different ethos, though, and just generally working in images within it, you have an impression that it's lighter, more nimble. It's sometimes quicker to use, though Photoshop is more powerful, and that includes being faster at complex work.
Pixelmator presumably can't touch Photoshop for power tools and features, but we'd have to be a lot better at image work than we are to be sure what the differences are. We just started out trying Pixelmator for OS X by using it for the work we would regularly do in Photoshop on OS X or, as it happens Pixelmator on iOS. There were plenty of differences, but for our typical work we couldn't call it for speed or functionality. Much as we like Photoshop, we could call it in Pixelmator's favor for how simple it was to achieve basic effects.
This OS X version of Pixelmator is better than the iOS edition, and we've already turned to that as our default choice on the iPad. Very nicely, the first time we opened up Pixelmator on our Macs, it had all our iPad images ready to open: Pixelmator uses iCloud Drive.
We did play with more complex functions than we usually use, and we did especially play with the stand-out new features on version 3.5. The most impressive of these is the way that it now integrates with Apple's Photos app: select an image in Photos, and you can share it to Pixelmator to retouch.
The most useful new features, as in the ones that you will simply adopt the most often, are both to do with how you select items on an image. A smart Quick Selection Tool, like Photoshop's Magic Wand, lets you drag over an image, and it will automatically select the bits you want. That's what it feels like, anyway: it really grabs anything that is similar in color to the first place you click in.
When you can select things perfectly, you can edit just those -- and when you can't, any edit you make is off by a few pixels, which are so obvious that they might as well be six-foot banners with neon lights. So any improvement in how quickly you can select one area and not another is great. We found this as tricky to get right as we do in Photoshop, but there is one more thing: an Magnetic Selection Tool. As you trace along, it snaps to the edges of an object you're trying to select.
There are also many bug fixes and small improvements, but nothing we noticed because, like eejits, we've not been using the OS X version before. Eejits. We're serious about Pixelmator being its own app instead of Photoshop Lite, but still, let this be a summary of the review: we're carrying on with Pixelmator 3.5 for OS X over Photoshop for the day-to-day image editing tasks we need.
Pixelmator 3.5 requires OS X 10.9.5 or higher, and
costs $30 on the Mac App Store. There is also an iPhone/iPad version that we've raved about before. This Pixelmator 2.2.1 requires iOS 9.0 or higher, and
costs $5 on the App Store.
Who is Pixelmator 3.5 for:
If you need more than you can do in Photos, but less than you need Photoshop for, go get it.
Who is Pixelmator 3.5 not for:
If you never resize images, import them, change elements, or remove your ex-partners from otherwise perfect shots of the beach, this is no use to you.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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