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Posts tagged with "pixelmator"

Pixelmator Pro 1.6 Released with New Color Picker and Improved Way to Select Multiple Items

Pixelmator Pro 1.6 has been released with an all-new color picker that streamlines color management in the app, plus an improved way to select multiple objects in an image.

The lion’s share of Pixelmator Pro 1.6 is focused on the app’s new color picker that consolidates multiple tools in one place. The color square section of Pixelmator Pro’s color picker allows users to pick a hue, adjust its saturation and brightness, displays HEX and RGB values, provides for the creation of color swatch collections, and displays the six most recently used colors.

Pixelmator Pro features a brand new color picker.

Pixelmator Pro features a brand new color picker.

There’s also a dedicated color picker tool at the bottom of the tools on the right-hand edge of the app’s window. With the new tool open, the eyedropper remains active, improving the process of picking colors. The new color picker tool also keeps your swatches and color-picking settings available in the sidebar.

Pixelmator Pro 1.6 includes a number of other refinements too. Among them, multiple objects can also be selected now simply by dragging over them, and there’s a new tool for replacing missing fonts in a project more easily.

I’ve only spent a short time with Pixelmator Pro 1.6 so far, but even with my limited use, the new color tools a clear improvement. By consolidating everything into a custom picker, selecting and managing colors is vastly simpler than in the past. To learn more, check out the Pixelmator team’s post that additional details about the update.

Pixelmator Pro is available as a free update on the Mac App Store.

Pixelmator Photo Adds Direct iCloud Photo Library Access, Batch Editing, and New Export Features

Pixelmator Photo for the iPad has been released with a trio of new features that greatly increase the power of the app. With the update, you can now now edit images in your iCloud Photo Library non-destructively without creating duplicates. There are also new batch-processing workflows and better options for exporting images. It’s an interesting mix of updates that I expect will appeal to a wide audience even though there remain iPadOS features I’d like to see adopted in the future.

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Pixelmator Pro for Mac Adds an Apple Photos Extension, New Zoom Tools, and Other Features

Pixelmator Pro released a significant update today that integrates the Mac app with Apple’s Photos app using a full-featured extension, adds enhanced zoom functionality, new cropping options, and more.

Pixelmator Pro is one of my favorite image editors on the Mac, but until today, I typically edited images in it that I pulled from an SD card or exported from Photos. That’s no longer necessary because Pixelmator Pro has been updated with a Photos extension that lets you use all of the app’s tools directly within Photos.

Photos extensions allow third-party developers to integrate their apps with Photos. Few of the photo editing apps I’ve used work with Photos though, which is a shame because Pixelmator Pro shows how much can be done with a Photos extension.

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Pixelmator Pro Updated with New Layers Features

Today the Pixelmator team released a layers-focused update to Pixelmator Pro, their Mac image editor.

The update allows users to add any of seven colored tags to a layer to help identify them. The feature also supports Adobe PSD color tags on import and export.

To make navigating projects with lots of layers easier, users can now filter layers based on several criteria including the new color tags, images, shapes, text, RAW, and groups. At the bottom of the layers sidebar, there is also a search field for locating layers by name.

Pixelmator Pro 1.3 supports clipping masks too. The feature allows users to apply the contents of one layer to the shape of another layer or group of layers. Clipping masks can be created from text, shapes, groups of layers, or nested shapes.

Finally, you can also adjust a layer’s opacity and blending mode using the controls at the bottom of the layers sidebar. Adjustments made are previewed live in the app’s main window.

Pixelmator Pro is available on the Mac App Store.

Pixelmator Photo Is Coming to the iPad Later This Year

I use Pixelmator Pro almost every day on my Mac. A lot of the time, that’s for simple edits to screenshots, but I also use it for more complex layered images and editing photos. I’ve enjoyed the iOS version a lot too, but with the introduction of Pixelmator Pro on the Mac, development of the iOS version slowed. I still use the iOS app, but it’s in need of an update, which is why I was so pleased to see Pixelmator Photo teased at today’s Apple event in New York.

Pixelmator Photo will be out later this year. The app, which was first mentioned when Pixelmator Pro launched almost a year ago, is an iPad-only photo editing app that appears to closely follow the design of the Mac app and include much of its functionality too. In addition to being highlighted during Apple’s keynote today, Pixelmator Photo was on the iPads in the hands-on area after the event where Federico had a chance to try the app for a short time and was impressed.

Pixelmator Photo's image editing UI (right) is very similar to Pixelmator Pro's on the Mac (left).

Pixelmator Photo’s image editing UI (right) is very similar to Pixelmator Pro’s on the Mac (left).

According to the Pixelmator team’s preview webpage, the app:

features a collection of nondestructive, desktop-class photo editing tools, a set of stunning, machine learning-enhanced film emulation presets, a magical Repair tool to remove unwanted objects from your photos, support for editing RAW images, and more.

Pixelmator says the app will include non-destructive color adjustments including Levels, Curves, Hue & Saturation, Selective Color, and Black & White as well as Repair and Cropping tools. The app will also support RAW image editing and the ML Fix feature recently introduced in the Mac app. Machine learning will also be used to simulate analog film with a set of presets and power cropping suggestions.

Apple showed that it’s committed to offering pro-level hardware in the iPad line with the new 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pros today. Apps are the other half of the equation, and it’s encouraging to see Pixelmator Photos announced along with Adobe’s Photoshop, and other apps that will take advantage of Apple’s new hardware.

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

Pixelmator Pro First Impressions: A Beautiful Modern Interface with Advanced Image Editing Tools

Five years in the making, Pixelmator Pro debuted today with an all-new look and host of new features. The new interface eliminates visual clutter and anchors tools in side panels, so you always know where they are. Much of the app’s chrome has been eliminated too, putting your project in the spotlight where you can focus on it and not the app. It’s a modern, clean style that makes the app feel spacious and professional.

Pixelmator Pro adds a raft of features as well. Layer styles, color adjustments, and effects are all highly customizable, can be saved as presets, and shared. I’ve only had a little over 24 hours to put Pixelmator Pro through its paces, but based on my first impressions, it’s an impressive debut that I expect will replace the original version of the app as my go-to image editor.

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Pixelmator for iOS Adds Drag and Drop Support and HEIF Compatibility

Following just a few days behind Pixelmator for Mac, which recently received support for HEIF and editing files stored in Apple Photos, Pixelmator for iOS was updated today with the aforementioned HEIF support – Apple’s new file format for images in iOS 11 – as well as drag and drop support on iPad.

Drag and drop enables, as you might expect, moving images and graphics out of or into Pixelmator. Dropping images into a work in progress will import them all as new layers. Depending on the size and number of images you’re dropping, there may be a brief delay before they appear in your working document, but overall this action works well. When it comes to dragging content out of Pixelmator, you’ll need to do it with a single layer at a time – once you’ve lifted a layer, you can’t use drag and drop to pick up any additional layers. In a document containing many different layers, this can be fairly limiting, but there is a type of workaround: you can merge layers together in the sidebar to then drag the newly merged layer out of the app as a single image. Unfortunately, this only solves the problem if you want both layers permanently combined into one when dropping them elsewhere.

This layer merge technique is the only way I’ve discovered to drag a final image, containing multiple layers, out of Pixelmator and into another app – if you don’t want to first merge all layers together, you’ll have to use a more traditional data transfer technique like the share sheet. I would have liked to see drag and drop enabled within Pixelmator’s main image browser for moving a completed image out of the app, or for importing photos into the app to edit later. Currently, long-pressing an item from the image browser simply engages rearrange mode.

One nice side effect of drag and drop support is that when dealing with layers that don’t fit inside your canvas – such as an image you’ve dragged in that’s larger than the canvas itself – previously it was difficult to easily determine how large the full layer was. But now, grabbing the layer and watching it lift from the screen will provide a view of the full image, regardless of canvas size. Once you start dragging the layer away, it will shrink into a smaller drag preview, but until that move is engaged, the lifted image will be shown in full.

Despite its limitations, drag and drop support in Pixelmator is definitely great to have; before today I have tried several times to drag images into the app only to remember I couldn’t do that yet. Perhaps when the upcoming Pixelmator Pro arrives on the iPad, it will include a richer implementation of drag and drop. Until then, I’m grateful to have one less app limiting my iPad drag and drop experience.

Pixelmator for macOS Updated with HEIF and Apple Photos Support

Pixelmator, which announced Pixelmator Pro is coming later this year, has released an interim update to the current version of its image editor that adds full compatibility with macOS High Sierra.

In addition to bug fixes, Pixelmator 3.7 supports importing HEIF image files. Pixelmator can be opened directly from Apple Photos now too. The feature, which was added to Apple Photos as part of High Sierra, allows users to choose an image in Apple Photos, but edit it in Pixelmator. All edits made in Pixelmator will be saved back to the original file in Apple Photos. Pixelmator posted a video that explains how the feature works:

Pixelmator is available on the Mac App Store.