Roger Fingas
Pixelmator Team on Thursday updated its namesake Mac image editor with two new selection tools, and a Retouch extension for Apple's OS X Photos app.
The Quick Selection tool in v3.5 lets users "paint" an object for selection, through code that automatically detects the object's parts while excluding background imagery. These parts can be individually de-selected for refinement purposes.
The Magnetic Selection tool follows a similar concept, but instead automatically traces the outside edge of an object. While tracing, users can briefly switch to the regular Lasso or Polygonal Lasso tools by holding down the Option key.
The Retouch extension lets users apply Pixelmator's various correction functions to Photos images without having to import them. These include not just Clone and Repair tools, but softening and sharpening options, and the ability to tweak lighting and colors in specific areas of an image.
Pixelmator Team says it has also made numerous bugfixes and other improvements, including redesigning the Stroke effect to be 15 times faster in OS X El Capitan, which has had a similar effect on resizing a selection. Outlines created when using the Color Selection, Paint Bucket, and Magic Eraser tools should be smoother and more precise in El Capitan, and the Distort Extension will now automatically adjust brush size as a user zooms in and out.
Pixelmator for Mac costs $29.99 from the Mac App Store and requires OS X 10.9.5 or later.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Oliver Haslam
1 Comment
I know this app only costs 29.95 and the dev team is probably much smaller in size compared to Adobe's. Still, considering their financial success I think their development speed and ambition is lacking, and this may backfire to attract new users and keep the current user base happy.
If they'd add essential features and usability upgrades they could release a major updates and charge for it.
things like:
- history pane similar to Photoshop
- removal of floating panels (so 90s) in favor of stationary / undockable panes like Photoshop or GIMP
- allowing to move the canvas when zoomed in without the app 'snapping back' because there's no padding around the edges the canvas.
- larger UI elements if preferred. Everything looks extremely small on a 27" iMac.
- eye dropper reporting alpha value
- save as SVG (removed in 2.0 ??)
- auto-select shouldn't prevent me from selecting a layer below a locked layer. Locked should be what it is: locked.
- this app has been built on GPU based rendering and heavily integrates with OS X tech, yet all the effects you apply are destructive. It would have made much more sense to treat all effects as non-destructive and maybe even allow the user to rearrange an effect order in a stack (or use nodes). It's kinda crazy not being able to adjust a blur effect later on in 2016.
- photoshop allows smart layers; each object is its own PSD file. Very handy if you are creating a corporate identity and like to change how a button looks. You simply change button.psd and all the designs incorporating this psd will update to reflect this change.
The above has all been reported to the pixelmator team. For now, Pixelmator is a bit of a hipster toy, and not suitable for serious work.