Pixelmator Review - First Impressions
On an impulse I bought Pixelmator, the highly anticipated image editor for Max OSX, without even bothering to download a trial. $59 isn’t much money after all, especially compared with the $800 or so you’ll have to pay for Adobe Photoshop. I’ve been running Photoshop CS2 on my Mac Book Pro over the last year, and I’ve been becoming more and more frustrated with Rosetta performance. I’m a web developer, not an artist, so I constantly switch between some rather memory hungry apps (IntelliJ Idea, Firefox, Photoshop etc.). Switching to Photoshop always slows my computer down to a crawl. Adobe released Photoshop CS3 this summer, but I haven’t been able to afford a copy. Depending on how well Pixelmator stacks up I may have just saved myself a whole bunch of money. Maybe.
Am I compatible?
I work with web graphics, and my Photoshop abilities are limited to rather basic pixel-pushing, simple drawing, photo retouching and typography. I’m not an expert, but I’ve used Photoshop almost daily for some odd ten years. Pixelmator is not a “Photoshop-killer” - it lacks many features some would consider crucial, such as CMYK processing and RAW import. But I’ve never used more than a fraction of the features in Photoshop. Over the next few weeks I’ll find out what crucial stuff I miss in Pixelmator. Pixelmator will take a while to get used to: keyboard shortcuts that are deeply ingrained in my reptile-brain will have to be relearned, and I’ll have to find work-arounds for some of the techniques I’ve used in Photoshop.
I have tried opening a variety of PSD files, with few problems. Pixelmator doesn’t support layer effects such as drop-shadows and adjustment layers so that kind of stuff dissappears (without warning). I use layer effects extensively, so this is kind of a bummer.
Speed
Pixelmator is blazingly fast. It loads faster than most apps on my MacBook Pro. Bam. It’s there. Nice. Switching to and from Pixelmator from other apps is also quick and painless.
Beauty?
Pixelmator has a very clean and simple interface that borrows heavily from Photoshop. That means switching from Photoshop is a bit easier, but I can’t help thinking that a more innovative approach to the interface would have been nice. Photoshop has been around for a long time, and it’s interface may be the norm. Pixelmator had a chance to start from scratch instead of mimicking the behemoth. Pixelmator is one notch more elegant, but still rather conservative. I can understand the reasoning, but I’d love to see new ideas and a new approach to image editing interfaces.
Features
I haven’t used Pixelmator for more than a few hours, and I’m still learing keyboard shortcuts and tools. The first impression is that Pixelmator is simple to use, has a minimalistic but powerful toolset and most of the features I need. Over the next couple of days I’ll use Pixelmator as my primary image editing tool. I’ll post updates to this review as I go along.
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