Pixelmator: an Amazing Tool for an Amazing Price

Posted September 17th, 2009 / By Jonathan Cutrell in Tips, Tools, UI Design

If you’re serious about interface design, you are serious about the tools you use to do it. But if you are anything like me, you also like to get the most out of every dollar (or euro, or peso, or seashell…) that you spend. And let’s go ahead and reveal the elephant in the room – Photoshop is expensive. Don’t get us wrong here… It’s a fantastic tool to use. But you don’t always have to shell out hundreds of dollars for great tools.

Enter Pixelmator, the image editor “for the rest of us.” The Pixelmator team was kind enough to allow us to take a look at their program to let you know what is up. The very first thing is the beautiful interface (of course). With it’s sleek dark windows, the program itself is very classy in feel and on the heavy end of professional. The Pixelmator team also included some very cool animated elements during regular use of the program that make the user experience more enjoyable while increasing the functionality.

Note: Pixelmator is for Mac users only – sorry PC. This is definitely a request that we’d push to the Pixelmator team.

Upon downloading and installing Pixelmator, we first noticed the fantastic icon. Illustrative and clean, the icon fits nicely with our other Apple program icons.
Next, we decided to take it for a little test run, just to see some of the main features and get a feel for the application and interface. There is a whole lot to love about Pixelmator, ladies and gentlemen.

Get It Started…

After opening Pixelmator, you are nicely welcomed with the option of opening an existing project/picture, creating a new document, or simply going to a “no-document” mode. This is often how I personally leave my image editor, which allows me to quickly open a file without waiting on the program to start. Very nice route to include, indeed.

If you create a new file, you are given the option of making it one of quite a few presets, or going with a custom size. Also nice for making sure you get the dimensions right. One thing that is lacking here, however, is the option of setting a CMYK color profile. This isn’t largely important for interface design, but still a consideration if you ever work in print.

The full interface includes windows that are easily draggable. The only thing we didn’t like about this setup was the inability to dock the windows. It is very sleek; all of the windows disappear except the document window when the desktop or another application is selected/active.

Perhaps the most impressive part about Pixelmator is the quality and number of great effects/filters. Quite a few that are not seen in Photoshop can be found here in Pixelmator. Some filters and other effects that we noticed in particular are common transition effects (like a page curl), image manipulation effects, and generators.



Pixelmator also has support for Quartz Composer effects.

These effects have a really cool interactive interface. “Cables” connecting from the effects window to the document window allow you to move the target point to have more control over different aspects of each effect. (There’s really not a great way of explaining this interaction; download the trial, or continue reading. We’ll include this link again at the end of the post.)
We noticed while working with the effects in Pixelmator as well as some of the tools (such as the selector wand, paint bucket, and gradient) that the image updates live. This means you can see the gradient form as you drag the gradient tool across the canvas. A cool feature to the selection and paint tool is the ability to “click and drag” to change the tolerance level. The resulting fill or selection is updated as you drag, so that you know exactly what tolerance to use. This is one of the best and most profitable features in all of Pixelmator. The live updating far exceeds the trial-and-error style of Photoshop. If you’ve ever had to use Command+Alt+Z (back one step) and Command+D (deselect) in Photoshop 100 times in one session, you will find Pixelmator to be a breath of well thought out, fresh air.
Another great feature that Photoshop users have come to require is the use of blending modes. Pixelmator comes equipped with blending modes for your layers as well as blending modes built-in to some of the effects.

One of Pixelmators most important features, however, is not within the creation of the file itself or the effects, but rather in its ability to read and export to 59 different file types including its native .pxm and, quite importantly, .psd files. For those of you who are unfamiliar, .psd is the Photoshop filetype. This means that a Photoshop user can send a Pixelmator user a PSD file without worrying about whether or not they can open the file.

More Features

The best way for you to learn about the features of Pixelmator would be for you to go ahead and download a copy. After you install it, check out Pixelmator’s website for tutorials, forums, and plenty more! Here are some more features we liked in Pixelmator:

• Color correction tools, including curves, contrast, etc. Some auto-correction tools as well
• Similar shortcuts to Photoshop
• Quick masking
• Apple color picker (may be more familiar to non-Photoshop users)
• Easy to use image slicer for web
• “tool options” panel changes according to what tool you have selected
• Create a new layer from iSight camera
• Cost: $59

Take the Bad with the Good

Okay, we would be cheating you if we said Pixelmator was perfect. No software is perfect. But there are a few things that we’d love to see implemented into Pixelmator that are not currently available.

• Layer groups
• Lockable layers
• Better color correction tools (for picking black, mid, and white points)
• Increased functionality of curves
• Editable Adjustment layers
• More support for vector, Smart Objects
• Layer styles (drop shadow, etc)
• Better control of sliders and menus – up and down arrows to change between fonts or increase or decrease a slider amount

Conclusion

Pixelmator may not be perfect, but it is a wonderful image editor that has powerful tools for interface designers. There are a lot of things about Pixelmator that are better than Photoshop. Overall, Pixelmator is easily worth the measly $59 it will cost you. Don’t take our word for it – try it out yourself before you buy it. Pixelmator’s website is loaded with examples, so you can se what is possible with the great image editor. We find it to be a great compliment in a lot of ways to Photoshop, and will keep Pixelmator in the dock from now on.