Product Review
Reviewer: Zachary Zaletel
Product: Pixelmator 1.5.1
Company: Pixelmator Team Ltd.
Web: http://www.pixelmator.com
Price: $59
Pros: Full featured with useful new capabilities added. A bargain for all that it does.
Cons: Hoping they can eke a bit of additional speed out of their coding (of course it isn’t my machine…). An odd choice and small bug in the Mail integration. I’d like a better histogram.
Product Rating: 4/5 Impressive
by Zachary Zaletel, Alaskan Apple Users Group Member
Conflict of interest disclosure: The Pixelmator Team provided a free copy of Pixelmator for the purpose of this review.
I’ve been checking in with the progress on the Pixelmator from time to time now. When it came out in 2007, I grabbed one of the early versions, along with a few other programs that came out at the time, to see what all the hubbub that Gruber and others were going on about. On my aging G5 iMac at the time, they all looked as though they had promise, but the ol’ G5 was showing its age and was not long for this world. One Mac upgrade and revisions from 1.0.1 up to 1.5.1 later, what changed? It turns out to be both quite a bit, and not a whole lot at the same time.
The biggest changes to the most recent update include the new Save to Web feature as well as new integration to Mail and iPhoto. When I pulled up the ‘Send to’ option under the File menu and selected iPhoto, I was pleased to find a small selection of formats for export. Selecting png and pressing the go button, I saw iPhoto open as expected, start to import, and then crash. Surprised, I sent in the crash report and attempted to export once more. With iPhoto already open, there were no problems. Kinda strange. Likewise, I encountered a bit of weirdness with the Send to Mail function. When you select Mail as your Send To destination, the program presents you with a couple of size options – similar to those at the bottom of a message in Mail if you’ve ever attached an image. I selected original, hit OK, and things worked smoothly. Mail still gave me the option to resize the image, if the selected size wasn’t quite what I needed. Just for kicks, I selected the small image size and tried another export to Mail. This time, a strange black box banded the lines below the bottom of the image. Beyond this, there was no longer an option to further resize the image. Neither of these bugs is a large issue, but Pixelmator is still a comparatively young program where some small bugs lurk. Judging from the pace of updates to the program and activity in the support forum, Sebastiaan and the others on the Pixelmator Team are hard at work both improving Pixelmator and tackling its bugs.
The Save to Web feature works more or less as expected. Working with a few 12 megapixel files, it took a few long seconds to apply the preview options, but if my computer were a year or two newer, I’m sure I could shave those seconds down.
My main gripe? I’d like a better histogram for tweaking photos… though perhaps they’re working up taking on Aperture and Lightroom next.
Gripes aside, the Pixelmator Team has done a fine job, working continuously to create a piece of image editing software that combines many of the strongest attributes of the long standing king (perhaps you’ve heard of it, Photoshop?), while building a new program from the ground up without attendant history, complexity and pricetag. In the intervening two and a half-ish years, they’ve taken the (strongly) working prototype that it built and has attacked it with the buffers, polishing the rough edges off of the interface, while rebuilding the engine at the same time to improve performance, and even hung some fancy go-fast bits that make for a compelling package. Give ‘the image editor for the rest of us’ a try, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
