Pixelmator Pro review: An affordable alternative for professional Photoshop users

Best Prices Today: Pixelmator Pro

Pixelmator Pro is a popular and affordable Photoshop alternative from Adobe, not least because it’s available as a one-time purchase that doesn’t require a monthly subscription like Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. But over the years it has evolved so that it is no longer just a Photoshop alternative. Pixelmator Pro can also be used to edit videos and create professional layouts.

It’s a bit difficult to keep track of the Pixelmator lineup as the Pixelmator Team developers tend to keep changing the name and also produce multiple versions of the app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The old Pixelmator Classic for Mac now seems to have been discontinued, leaving only Pixemator Pro on Mac. And, on the mobile side, the iPhone and iPad versions of the app have merged into a single app which is simply called Pixelmator. And, just to complicate matters, Pixelmator Team recently launched a brand new photo editing app called Photomator that works on Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

We review a number of Photoshop alternatives here: Best photo editing software for Mac as well as some free options here: Best free photo editing app for Mac.

On the Mac side of the fence, Pixelmator Pro offers an impressive array of editing features, including AI-powered tools that can simplify tasks like removing blemishes or unwanted details from an image. It even has an option to remove an image’s background entirely – which we often find very useful when preparing product shots for our own igamesnews reviews.

The interface won’t be immediately familiar to you if you’re used to Photoshop. This can be good or bad: if you have Photoshop shortcuts and workflows in your muscle memory, it can take a long time to relearn, and when a feature is missing, it can be frustrating. On the other hand, that means Pixelmator gets rid of 30 years of baggage and can think differently. Pixelmator Pro sticks to the most important features and doesn’t try to recreate all of Photoshop’s functionality exactly. Instead of four different ways to do one thing, you get the best/easiest one. And everything that’s important to most people is there: layers with layer masks, blending modes, adjustment layers, drawing and painting tools, auto exposure, distortion, and more.

On the left, you’ll find the Layers palette, which is essential for using many of the app’s most powerful features. You can create raster (bitmap) and vector layers.

Pixelmator Pro presents a clean and sparse experience, keeping your focus on the image.

In a narrow column to the right are the tools. There are precise tools for selecting objects and colors, as well as preset and customizable brush styles, all of which are neatly laid out in a palette that spans the right side of the main editing window.

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One of the most eye-catching AI features is called ML Super Resolution and uses machine learning to magnify low-resolution images. With some images it’s almost magical, but when we tested in 2021 the results were mixed. Faces appeared to have been painted over, straight lines became wavy, and although noise and pixelation were removed to make the image “cleaner”, it looked unreal in return. See the image above for example.

ML Crop is an automated cropping feature based on the golden spiral that should help you achieve images with effective composition. When we tested this, we didn’t get any results that we wouldn’t have gotten manually. Which is as it should be.

The program provides a useful selection of text and vector graphics tools, so you can design documents that go beyond pure photography. You can use masks to isolate specific parts of a layer or image, there are powerful and precise histograms to adjust color and lighting.

There are also some useful little touches, like the color histogram. Have you ever tried to adjust a color in an image, but you don’t see much effect? Making green areas greener, for example, sometimes requires decreasing blue or cyan tones, but it’s not always visually obvious. As you manipulate colors, the Colors histogram gives you an idea of ​​the prevalence of colors in the image to help you target which ones to adjust.

Pixelmator Pro has a unique way of displaying effect control points. When you apply a new effect, such as a vignette, a control point appears in the middle of the screen, glued to a virtual wire connecting it to the Vignette controls in the Effects panel. It even appears with a small physics-simulated bounce. In this case, the point controls the center of the thumbnail area. Other controls, such as Perspective Transform, bind multiple control points to sections of the effect, such as Top Left, Top Right, etc.

Most of the edits you make in Pixelmator Pro are non-destructive, meaning if you regret it later, you won’t have to go back to that particular step. For example, when you change aspects such as exposure or saturation or add an effect like a vignette, the changes are not etched into the pixels of the image. They can be edited or deleted at any time on a per layer basis.

But this does not apply to everything, for example not a change of perspective. This is also the case in competing programs, but the most annoying thing for those who work with text in images is that Pixelmator Pro, unlike Photoshop and Affinity Photo, cannot keep text editable when you change the perspective of the text. For example, if you want to put text on a sign in a photo, you can’t fill temporary text, position it, and change its perspective so that it appears in the same plane as the sign, and then change the text. As soon as you change the perspective, it is rendered and becomes pixels.

Updates in the latest version

Rather than getting a major update every year or so, Pixelmator Pro tends to release regular updates that add a few new features every few months.

The developers are alert and over the years have added many requested features that were not initially there when it was first released in 2017.

The version 2 update in 2020 offered a fully customizable and refreshed user interface. Nearly every UI element, from the toolbar to every menu and switch, has been updated and refined. The update added over 200 new presets and over 50 vector shapes for color adjustment, effect, style, shape and gradient tools.

Update 2.0.6 (in 2022) added new video tooltips that can help explain how many core tools work and direct you to online tutorials if you need a little more help .

Version 2.1 brought the ML Crop tool (discussed above). This auto crop tool uses machine learning to get the best results. You choose things like aspect ratio and whether cropping should follow a rule of thirds or the golden spiral. Cropping in general also becomes faster, especially for large images with many layers.

In version 2.1, the text tool has also been improved with additional settings such as size, spacing and ligatures. The paint tool has gained a brush gallery and a search function, and a brush can be used to draw lines and edges. The program has also acquired a quick fill function: drag and drop a color from the color palette directly onto a layer and suddenly the whole layer is filled with this color.

Version 3.0 mainly focused on adding new templates and mockups to create different types of documents and projects. These include templates for posters, cards, logos, social media projects, general graphics, and even print templates for magazine covers. You could say that with this update, Pixelmator has taken over InDesign and Pages (Pages and InDesign are still more efficient at their work, and Pages is free). Version 3.1 added full compatibility with macOS Ventura.

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However, v3.2 was a big update that introduced the ability to import and adjust the look of video files as well as static photos – Pixelmator Pro this time adding support for video editors. Basic video editing tools include operations such as trimming, cropping, and color adjustments. You can add text, images, shapes and apply masks to videos. Pixelmator Pro also comes with video templates for quick projects and YouTube posts or even professionally made movie titles. Export options include the ability to create GIFs from videos and popular formats like MP4 and MOV. We have found the layer management to be a great advantage when editing video as many effects, filters and other applications can be easily placed on the imported movie and checked before the final result is exported.

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Version 3.3 arrived in February 2023 and added a new color removal tool.

Usability

Our only real complaint is that Pixelmator tends to just throw features on the screen and then let you figure out how everything works. It’s not the most intuitive program for newcomers, and it tends to fill the screen with commands and palettes and just assume you know what you’re doing.

There are plenty of tutorials and help files on the Pixelmator website, but we can’t help but think that Pixelmator Pro needs something similar to the guided edits found in Photoshop Elements, which provide simple step-by-step instructions for using some of them. the more complex tools and features of this program.

Verdict

There’s no doubt that Pixelmator Pro’s powerful suite of editing tools represents excellent value for money, and the video editing features that arrived in early 2023 make this app even easier to recommend. Additionally, a seven-day free trial is also available.