Using Adobe Photoshop to fix pictures destined for Flickr is akin to driving a Ferrari to the corner store for a quart of milk: It's fun to rev the engine, but the power under the hood remains largely untapped.
Mac users seeking a simpler alternative should check out Pixelmator, which duplicates many of Photoshop's most useful features for the amateur photographer, for a fraction of the price.
Available now as a $60 download, Pixelmator offers a bevy of color- and brightness-adjustment tools, photo effects and support for dozens of file formats.
Pixelmator was created by a small team of programmers in London led by two brothers, Saulius and Aidas Dailide. It's been one of the most hotly anticipated apps in the Mac community this year. It drummed up significant buzz after the Dailide brothers posted a video demonstrating its abilities, and it garnered positive reports on Mac blogs from early beta testers.
Like others in its class, Pixlemator supports layer-based editing: a standard feature in digital-imaging tools that lets you stack multiple elements on top of one another and adjust the transparency of the various elements independently.
All of the common image-editing brushes, drawing tools and selection tools are represented. There's a rubber-stamp tool, crop tool, lasso selection tool, magic wand and paint bucket. Basically, everything you'd need for some intermediate-level post-production photo editing is here, including plenty of tools for color correction, level adjustment, cropping and resizing.
Pixelmator supports all major image formats as well, including the Photoshop-native PSD and the EPS printing standard. There's no support for Camera RAW or for CMYK images, though the Pixelmator website says these are planned for a future release.
Also, it's worth noting that Pixelmator is a Macintosh-only offering, and no Windows version is planned. That's because the application uses Core Image, the graphics-processing engine that's built into the Mac OS X operating system, to power its back-end pixel-crunching. Also, rather than relying on application-specific palettes for picking colors and fonts, Pixelmator uses Mac OS X's native pickers. You can use Mac's Automator to run batch operations for resizing, adjusting and renaming images. It can even browse the albums in your iPhoto library.
This tight integration with the Mac operating system results in impressive performance. Huge files (30- or 40-MB TIFFs) open quickly, and the app remains responsive even when you're dragging large selections around on the screen. Pixelmator's Mac-like design sensibilities -- shiny, rounded corners -- make the application feel familiar the first time you load it up and start using it.
Another reason Pixelmator feels familiar is because it also looks a lot like Photoshop. From the floating toolbars down to the menu structures, Pixelmator mimics Photoshop's blueprints to a T. This is helpful, especially when you're trying to find a specific function or tool, but it also smacks a bit of imitation. But Photoshop is so much a part of the photo culture, who can blame them?
The real differences between Pixelmator and Photoshop show up when you start editing images. For one thing, there's limited support for keyboard shortcuts. Though you may never use them, keyboard controls are a huge part of my workflow, and I found myself holding down the Shift, Control, Option and Command keys out of habit. No dice -- holding down Shift doesn't preserve dimensions when transforming a selection, and you can't use the Shift key in tandem with a brush or selection tool to draw a straight line between two points.
Many of the controls lack precision, too. While most Pixelmator users will be performing simple adjustments, some will be disappointed that most palettes only have one or two sliders. Pro-level tools offer more detailed controls, especially for tweaking highlights, shadows or specific color ranges.
I have some minor quibbles with the user interface, like the fact that the various palettes don't dock to one another or use tabs, which quickly clutters up the workspace. Also, the pointer doesn't change to reflect the shape or size of the brush.
There's also the occasional hiccup (repeatedly clicking the mouse with the blur and sharpen tools led to a spinning beach ball and a hung application) and the fact that Pixelmator uses quite a bit of memory. But these are issues which should be ironed out as the program matures. For a 1.0 release, Pixelmator is stable enough to not be annoying.
So even though it's a bit light on the advanced features, Pixelmator fulfills the needs of the intermediate user quite well, and I recommend it. True photogs who shoot in RAW format will probably choose to stick with Apple's Aperture ($300) or Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom (also $300) for post-production tasks. And if you're working in print, you'll need CMYK support and ultimate control over the tiny details, which means you'll always need Photoshop.
Windows users can turn to Adobe Photoshop Elements, a $100 baby brother to the $650 Photoshop. A Mac version of Photoshop Elements isn't due until next year, and Adobe's plans for an online photo editor based on Photoshop aren't yet fully baked.
Meanwhile, Pixelmator is a welcome addition to the toolbox. And at only $60, it's a pretty cheap date.
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