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Alternatives to pixel-poking behemoth Photoshop

Pixelmator 3.3.2

Pixelmator is Apple-only: there’s a quite capable iPad version, now with touch-based watercolour painting, and this version for the Mac, which integrates with the new Photos app. That just means you can browse your Photos library in a Browser window within Pixelmator. The Browser has a search bar but no other filters, and when I added new pictures to Photos they refused to show up in Pixelmator until I restarted it.

The white-on-charcoal user interface looks slick, with its tiny bright jewel-like icons, but bizarrely it neither uses an enclosing window nor supports OS X’s Full Screen mode. This means its image window and palettes just float around over whatever other apps are open, like GIMP’s used to do before its developers realised this was driving everybody up the wall and offered a single-window mode.

Here’s Pixelmator launched and ready for action. What? No, me neither. With no enclosing window and self-hiding palettes, it might as well be running in stealth mode – click for a larger image

To add to the confusion, whenever a modular dialogue is displayed the palettes disappear, and a file dialogueue appears automatically whenever no file is open. This even happens if you’re using the Browser and therefore have no need of a file dialogue. I can’t imagine the circumstances in which this would not cause you to repeatedly mutter “what the hell?”

Pixelmator can open raw files, but there’s no raw pre-processing module to rescue detail or tone from the original data before the image is baked for editing. Since 16-bit colour is supported, you still have a lot of headroom, but it seems like missing the point of shooting raw.

Features roughly correspond to those that the general Photoshopper would use most. The Paint Selection Tool feels a bit splashy but, with care, can produce acceptable cutouts; you just don’t get any alternative methods. The Warp Tool applies Liquify-style operations directly to the image.

Although the floating palettes can feel cluttered, they make it easy to browse for images or filters. Tools include a Healing Brush to instantly remove small blemishes – click for a larger image

There are layers, which can have layer styles such as shadows, but no adjustment layers, so most tweaks aren’t editable later. One exception is the Repair tool, which often does a good job of filling over unwanted objects but isn’t very controllable when it doesn’t. This can be applied to an empty layer (using the Sample All Layers mode) rather than directly to an image layer, achieving a non-destructive edit. But you could have achieved the same thing by duplicating the image layer.

Layers can have raster masks, but to create a vector mask you have to add a separate shape layer and group it using a Create Clipping Mask option; there’s no clipping path support. The Effects Browser applies customisable operations such as Levels and Curves, but the Lighten Shadows and Darken Highlights functions are not good at bringing out detail.

You can see how your finished image will look when compressed for web use, but there’s no quick way to compare this to the original – click for a larger image

Image slicing is supported, and the Export for Web option lets you test output settings for formats such as JPEG and GIF in the main image window, with a lot of pauses for previewing. A before/after display would have helped here. You can also upload images direct to Flickr, Facebook and so on.

Pixelmator represents a sterling effort to refine photo editing to the essentials, but it falls short of the tool set you’d need for more than basic work.

Price £23
More info Pixelmator Team