When Pixelmator was first released in the fall of 2007 it was an instant curiosity. A beautiful graphics editor designed exclusively for Mac OS X with the familiarity of Photoshop. I purchased Pixelmator on day one, but its lack of features kept it from replacing Photoshop on my Dock. I regarded Pixelmator as a toy, but to my delight it would quickly outgrow its plaything status. Every couple of months I would rediscover Pixelmator in my Applications Folder, launch the program, download the updates, and experiment with all the new features. The Pixelmator Team never disappointed. Over the course of several releases Pixelmator evolved. Bug were fixed, performance improved, and new features were added. Like Mac OS X each sequential Pixelmator point release came with its own code name, and a long list of new features. Unlike Mac OS X each sequential Pixelmator point releases arrived free of charge for all existing Pixelmator customers.

• Pixelmator 1.1 (Kitten) introduced Core Image support, graphics tablet support, a Quick Look plug-in, and 78 new GPU powered filters.
• PixelMator 1.2 (Draftsman) brought rulers, guides, grids, a polygonal lasso tool, a color balance tool, and a rewritten transform engine.
• Pixelmator 1.3 (Tempo) added major performance improvements including overall UI responsiveness, zooming, and large file support.
• Pixelmator 1.4 (Sprinkle) offered a new painting engine, new brush settings, and the ability to control diameter, flow, and scatter by graphics tablet pressure and tracking speed.
• Pixelmator 1.5 (Spider) adopted web export, slices, canvas trim, and a hex color plug-in for the Apple Color Picker.
• Pixelmator 1.6 (Nucleus) included 64-bit support, layer groups, a new printing engine, camera and scanner import, and Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook output.

These are just a few of the features Pixelmator has added in the last four years. Pixelmator is no longer a curiosity, but a powerful graphics editor that has replaced Photoshop on my Mac. Now that PixelMator 2.0 has been released I have even more reasons to celebrate my Adobe Free Workflow.

Vector Drawing Tools

It took Adobe six versions, and nearly ten years to add vector drawing tools and shapes to Photoshop. The Pixelmator team has made vector drawing tools a major part of Pixelmator 2.0 in half the time.

I love the new non-destructive drawing tools in Pixelmator 2.0. With vector rectangles, ellipses, polygons, and bezier curves I can create non-destructive graphics that are both infinitely scalable and customizable. Web designers will appreciate Pixelmator 2.0’s vector drawing tools for the ease it allows them to create bitmap user interfaces.

Pixelmator 2.0’s vector drawing tools still have a long way to go to replace Adobe Illustrator. At this time vector gradient fills are impossible, and stokes are limited to solid lines. Shapes can combined, but not intersected, excluded, or subtracted. I would like to see the ability to import shapes from other vector drawing programs, and a way of exporting my vector creations from Pixelmator 2.0 without rasterization.

Healing Tool

Adobe added the Healing Brush in Photoshop 7, and Pixelmator is catching up. Pixelmator’s Healing Tool removes artifacts and unwanted details from a photo by seamlessly cloning the area around the brush. Touch up artists have found this tool invaluable for removing blemishes on skin, or damage from old photographs.

Pixelmator’s Healing Tool does a good job at removing obvious defects, but it has a hard discriminating against nearby details you do not want to be replicated. I am glad it is there, but feel Pixelmator’s Healing Tool still needs some improvements before it is ready to take on facial imperfections with the magic of Photoshop’s Healing Brush.

If there is one thing Pixelmator’s Healing Tool does well, it is removing out of place objects from an otherwise perfect composition. Adobe calls this feature Content Aware Fill, and added it to Photoshop last year. Pixelmator includes it as part of the Healing Tool, and it can be used with any selection.

Burn, Dodge, Smudge & Sponge

The Burn, Dodge, Smudge, and Sponge tools have been part of Photoshop for a long time, but now Pixelmator has them too. Each tool offers the same precision as its Photoshop counterpart. The Burn and Dodge tools allow you to expose for the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows, while the the Smudge and Sponge tools offer the same viscous finger painting experience as software costing six times the price of Pixelmator.

Red Eye Tool

The red eye tool may not sound like a professional feature, but every photographer needs to fix red eye at some point in their career. Adobe reluctantly added this feature to Photoshop in CS2, but now Pixelmator users can remove Red eye automatically, or one pupil at a time.

Tools Customization

Photoshop’s tool palette is iconic, but there has never been a way to easily customize it. Starting in Photoshop CS4 Adobe offered users the chance to make their own tool palettes with Flash, but who wants that? Pixelmator makes palette customization as easy as swapping around icons on the iOS Home Screen. Combined with the Tool Option Bar Pixelmator gives users access to the right tool or setting no matter there preference.

Pixel Tool

FatBits was always my favorite part of MacPaint, and now Pixelmator has a Pixel Tool for creating artwork one pixel at a time.

This tool is invaluable for touching up Egg Freckles dithered images, but until Pixelmator can resize my drawings while preserving hard edges I am reluctant to scale my pixelated creations.

New Eyedropper Tool

One of the features I miss most from Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the Pixel Grid. Luckily for me Pixelmator’s new Eyedropper tool gives me the precision I need for swapping colors or examining my artwork one pixel at a time. With the Brush, Pencil, or Pixel Tool selected the Eyedropper Tool can be brought to the foreground instantly by holding the Option key.

New Type Tool

Pixelmator is more than a tool for the production of great pixels it is also a great option for setting raster type. Photoshop added editable type in version 5, but Pixelmator has had it all along. New in Pixelmator 2.0 is the option to kern, align, track and lead characters straight from the Tool Option Bar. It would be nice to be able to convert type to vector shapes as well as raster graphics, but I am sure such details will come in time.

Lion

Because Pixelmator was developed exclusively for Mac OS X it will adopt Apple’s latest features far faster than Photoshop ever will. Pixelmator 2.0 takes advantage of Lion specific features like Auto Save, Versions, and Full Screen mode. With Auto Save Pixelmator gets to skip the manual step of saving, while versions ensures that every revision gets saved without the need for duplicate files.

Finally Full Screen mode in Lion means each graphic you are working on in Pixelmator gets its own screen as well as its own canvas. No more juggling between windows. Adobe tried to simplify window management in Photoshop CS4 by adopting the Application Frame, a feature that makes Photoshop on the Mac act like a full screen application on Microsoft Windows. Why settle for Microsoft’s best when Pixelmator gives you Full Screen access to your work the way Apple intended?

I like to think of Pixelmator as the version of Photoshop Adobe would have made if they still cared about designing great creative software for the Mac. These days Adobe’s main concern seems to be controlling the creative applications market, and that means making software that works for Windows as well as the Mac. I don’t care about Windows software, and have grown impatient waiting for Apple’s best operating system technologies to make their way into Adobe software.

Pixelmator is an amazing story about the little guy taking on Adobe the giant and exceeding at making truly great software that embraces the best parts of the Mac. Pixelmator will not replace Adobe Photoshop for everyone, but for users who can go without some of Photoshop’s more extravagant features Pixelmator is a good match. I am proud to support the Pixelmator Team as they continue to make the software I want to use.