Review: Pixelmator

by Honda Wang • 10/09/2007 at 08:14 AM

First impressions can be misleading, and Pixelmator is not an exception. Granted, it’s one of the best image editors I have ever used, but for those expecting a Photoshop competitor, you may be disappointed.

What’s Great
Now don’t get me wrong, I love Pixelmator for what it’s meant for: basic, yet powerful image manipulation and editing. This light and speedy app does what it does incredibly well, and better than any equal-level competitor on the market.

Pixelmator makes use of Apple’s Core Image to make it the world’s first GPU-powered image editing software. This innovation makes it fast, real fast. Not only did this app boot in less than three seconds, it also applied any filter I chose to a photo at an amazing speed. Photoshop takes, at the very least, two or three times as long to do the exact same thing.

Choices, and More Choices
Pick an image, any image. You’ll probably be able to open it. Pixelmator supports the obvious: JPGs, PNGs, and it also has the ability to open PSD files and many others you’ll most likely never encounter in your lifetime. It offers a great amount of flexibility over almost all of the images that you have on your Mac. The main format that isn’t supported by Pixelmator, but still used by many people, is the RAW/NEF camera format.

Even though it shines as a simple image editor, it also features powerful tools and filters that make the $59 price tag seem almost too modest for this great app. The magic wand tool works perfectly, and the gradient tool has an interesting, innovative method of adjustment and application. Pixelmator also comes with excellent built-in filters that achieve beautifully smooth effects with virtually no render time needed.

Integrated = Powerful
Included with this powerful package is a built-in photo browser that can look through your photos in iPhoto. For me, I don’t have too many photos stored in folders, so being able to run through my iPhoto library with the photo browser is a great feature without having to open up iPhoto to get the picture I want.

Something even better is its Automator integration. There is a plethora of Pixelmator actions in Automator that you can use with one or one hundred photos, it doesn’t really matter. Even though Photoshop already has available Automator actions, it’s the fact that Pixelmator can execute actions in such quick procession that makes it a more powerful tool than Photoshop when using Automator.

Delicious
A cool little feature of Pixelmator that screams “Delicious Generation!” is the use of your Mac’s iSight to immediately add a layer to your image from your iSight. It’s not really useful. It’s just...cool; providing all the excitement of a Japanese photo sticker booth.

What’s Not So Great
There is absolutely no doubt at all that Pixelmator is a great app, but it’s missing those key features that prevent me from completely switching over.

No Shortcuts?
There are those keyboard shortcuts that you learn to love and you love to use in Photoshop. But with Pixelmator, there are none of those familiar shortcuts to use. In order to transform your image, you must use an overcomplicated interface to scale your image or whatever else you’re doing to it. This process could have been simplified by just using something along the lines of Photoshop’s Free-Transform tool activated by “Command + T”.

To make this more counter-productive, you cannot use the “Shift” key to automatically restrain proportions, you have to manually click on a restrain proportions button. There is no “auto snap” feature in Pixelmator, so you must painstakingly move the image manually where you want it to be--or just the general area where you want it to be.

Typography Sucks
There really isn’t any pretty way to say this, but Pixelmator offers no real power over managing text in the interface. Whereas in Photoshop you can adjust the kerning, line height, font size, colour, and more by simply selecting the layer and changing those elements; in Pixelmator, there’s absolutely nothing for text manipulation.

This is a huge downside for people like me, who constantly use type in our graphics, and who need exact and specific changes to the text--whether small or large. Pixelmator’s lack of any useful typography tools just leaves us out in the dust.

Over-hyped?
Some of the hype of Pixelmator is deserved, but not all of it. Pixelmator lacks features that will never make it a true competitor to Photoshop or a Mac killer app. Pixelmator is only unique to any other image editing application because it’s GPU-powered. Otherwise, it’s just a moderately-priced and pretty image editing application.

One of the biggest offenders of over-hyping is CrunchGear. CG is completely wrong to label Pixelmator a Photoshop-killer. To put it in standardized test terms: Pixelmator is to Photoshop as Kwik-E-Mart is to Walmart. The Kwik-E-Mart is a lot faster than going to Walmart, but the big W offers so much more than the Kwik-E-Mart will ever be able to.

The Verdict
Pixelmator is not going to be my default photo/image editing software. It cannot currently replace Photoshop for me. But, there will be times when I need to quickly edit a photo, and that’s where Pixelmator really does shine, speed and ease of use.

Let me restate that Pixelmator is an awesome image editing application. It literally loaded in less than three seconds when I first booted it. The only problem is that I already have Photoshop, and I love Photoshop to death. If only I were a regular guy that wanted something fast and easy to use for editing photos, then Pixelmator would be perfect for me.

Right now, there really are just two choices of commercial image editors that I suggest. That’s Pixelmator and Photoshop. If you aren’t a professional, you can’t afford Photoshop, or you just don’t need the power, then buy Pixelmator. Otherwise, Adobe Photoshop CS3 is the way to go.