Pixelmator Pro 1.2 Quicksilver has just been released, adding full macOS Mojave support, a beautiful new light appearance, ML Enhance, batch processing via Automator, and a whole lot more. Everyone at the Pixelmator Team is really excited about this update, so we just wanted to tell you guys about what we’ve added and why we think it’s great.
Light appearance, refreshed dark appearance, and macOS Mojave support
We all love macOS Mojave and the new Dark Mode. And in Pixelmator Pro 1.2, the interface has now been beautifully redesigned to fit right in alongside native Mac apps, like Safari and Keynote, in Dark Mode. We’ve also added support for accent colors, so the colors of various sliders and buttons in Pixelmator Pro will change to match your preferences. No less than you’d expect from the ultimate Mac app.
Of course, now that there’s a Dark Mode, there has to be a Light Mode too. So it was the perfect time for us to add a light appearance to Pixelmator Pro. It’s something we’d been thinking about for a long time and the new light appearance brings the classic Mac app look and feel to Pixelmator Pro. You can always change appearance in Pixelmator Pro preferences and even have it update automatically according to your System Preferences.
ML Enhance
The new ML Enhance feature lets you automatically enhance photos using a Core ML-powered machine learning algorithm trained on 20 million professional photos. The idea behind ML Enhance is to balance the exposure, correct white balance, and improve individual color ranges in a photo to give you the best starting point for making your own creative edits. All in all, ML Enhance intelligently fine-tunes a total of 37 color adjustments, so all you need to do is add your own finishing touches. See it in action in the video below.
Batch processing via Automator
Automator support has been a pretty popular request over the past few months and Pixelmator Pro now has five powerful Automator actions for you to use. So you can make complex edits to many images at once without ever opening Pixelmator Pro! We’ll be releasing a tutorial about this in the coming days, which will also touch upon Automator basics. If you’ve never tried out Automator, stay tuned for the tutorial and get ready to pick up some new and useful Mac skills!
What’s next
As ever, we’re always dreaming up what else to bring to Pixelmator Pro and we’re actually already working on the next few updates — we can’t wait to make Pixelmator Pro even better. For now, we really hope you love this update and if you have any comments or feedback, we’d love to hear it here, on Twitter and Facebook, via email, on the Mac App Store, and, well, pretty much anywhere else you might want to share it with us. As always, the update is free for existing users and it’s available for you to download from the Mac App Store today.
P.S. Pixelmator Pro is still on sale for another week (until Friday 26th), so if you haven’t bought it yet, now’s a great time.
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Hey everyone! We’ve got a few different pieces of exciting Pixelmator news for you today — we’re having a back-to-school sale, shipping an update to Pixelmator Pro, and releasing our next update as a public beta. Read on for all the awesome details.
Pixelmator Pro 1.1.4 out now
A couple of weeks ago, we revealed a few juicy details about the next Pixelmator Pro update and gave you all a chance to try it by signing up for our beta program. The beta testing went really great and the 1.1.4 update is now available on the Mac App Store. Woohoo!
We’ve added a whole bunch of gorgeous new effects, like the beautiful Light Leak effect and all kinds of other new features and improvements. You can learn a little more about the update itself on our beautifully redesigned What’s New page. And see the new Light Leak effect in action below in our latest tutorial video.
Beta program — next update now available
Speaking of the Pixelmator Pro beta program, today we’re also making the next Pixelmator Pro update available for public beta testing. Version 1.1.5 won’t have quite as many new features and will focus most on performance — especially in large images and images with lots of layers. Performance, in this case, covers pretty much everything: opening documents, zooming, moving and resizing layers, and everything in between. You’re welcome to sign up for our beta program and help make Pixelmator Pro even better.
Sale!
That’s right, we’re having a sale! To mark the beginning of the school year, Pixelmator Pro is on sale for 50% off, so, starting today, it’s available from the Mac App Store for $29.99.
Edit: The sale has now ended and Pixelmator Pro is back to its usual price.
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What’s next?
What else do we have in store? Well, things have been moving at a lightning quick pace recently and we have no plans to slow down. We’re getting close to finishing up the 1.2 major upgrade (free for existing customers, of course) — it’s going to have full macOS Mojave support and some other really fantastic new additions. We’re not going to reveal exactly what’s in store just yet, but the public release of macOS Mojave is just around the corner, so you won’t have to wait too long.
Today is a very exciting day for us at the Pixelmator Team — we’re launching a Pixelmator Pro public beta program, giving you a way to test upcoming features and, in the process, help us make Pixelmator Pro even better!
To mark the occasion, we’ve also decided to show you a few things from the upcoming update, which you’ll be able to try in this beta. Point updates are usually a little smaller than major releases, but in this one, we’ve packed in tons of great new features. For example, new Light Leak and Bokeh effects, an Auto Selective Color adjustment, a way to copy Effects and Adjustments between layers, and (really!) a whole lot more.
New Light Leak and Bokeh effects
Two of the biggest new features are the new Light Leak and Bokeh effects. The gorgeous Light Leak effect was always a favorite in the original Pixelmator it’s now coming to Pixelmator Pro, giving you an easy way to add a sunny, old-school feel to any of your photos.
The beautiful new Bokeh effect was inspired by the Bokeh effect in Pixelmator for iOS and we think you’re really going to love it in Pixelmator Pro too! There are eight stunning Bokeh styles to choose from and, because Pixelmator Pro is a nondestructive editor, you can easily add multiple bokehs to the same image and edit each one individually.
Tons of other new features
The full release notes for this update are going to be pretty huge, but here are a few of the most awesome new things in Pixelmator Pro 1.1.4:
- • Tons of new effects. We’re adding Spin Blur, Clouds, Noise, Threshold, Mask to Alpha, and several effects from the Tile and Distortion categories of the original Pixelmator.
- • There will now be a way to switch histogram type when using the Color Adjustments tool. Simply Control-click the histogram and choose a different type (RGB, Luminance, or Colors).
- • We’ll be adding an ML-powered Auto button to the Selective Color adjustment. Now you can selectively improve individual colors in an image using the awesome machine learning technologies we’ve been working on and talked about in the last blog post!
- • You’ll now be able to copy all effects or adjustments from one layer and paste them onto another with a single click.
Pixelmator Pro beta program
So, this is going to be a fantastic update and, if you’re up for it, you can get your hands on it early by checking out the public beta. We’re opening it up to all owners of Pixelmator Pro as well as owners of the original Pixelmator.
Beta Program
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P.S. We’re still big fans of big surprises, so we’re not planning to test absolutely every new Pixelmator Pro feature publicly but we’re really excited to see how this goes!
Pixelmator Pro includes one of the best collections of color adjustment tools in any app on any device. And we want to make them even better. In Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon, we added some super cool Auto buttons next to three color adjustments: White Balance, Lightness, and Hue & Saturation. Although those buttons may be small, there’s a lot of machine learning power behind them and we wanted to talk a little bit about one in particular — Auto White Balance.
Fixing white balance
When editing photos, fixing the white balance is almost always the first thing photographers do before moving on to any other edits. It’s important to get it right because all your later edits depend on it. And if you’re not used to doing it, it’s not all that easy — there are two different sliders that are influenced by each other and it’s not that obvious what they do. I mean, adding yellow cancels out a blue tint, how does that work?
So, in Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon, we’ve added the machine learning-powered Auto White Balance to make fixing the white balance in any photo as simple as clicking one little button. Behind that button, there’s a 200-layer-deep neural network trained on millions of image pairs and integrated via the awesome Core ML.
Magic machines
Did you know that neural networks are practically magic and no one knows how they really work? Basically, getting machine learning models to do what you want them to requires you to test them on really huge datasets. The models then make complicated, seemingly random connections based on your tests and their quality depends on how good your tests and datasets are.
In this case, we needed millions of images with bad white balance and good white balance. It probably goes without saying that there’s no giant repository of badly white balanced images to just download. Even if there was, we’d still need to get someone to fix each one and that’s not exactly efficient either. For that reason, we had to find a different approach. We decided to take millions of good images and create a separate algorithm to ‘break’ them in as natural a way as possible to mimic real-world white balance issues.
Neural network training
Once we had our image pairs, we could start training. Except there was another little problem. Most neural networks work with small, fixed-resolution images, which usually have to be square. That meant we needed to turn every photo into a uniform small square image. But if the photo is portrait or landscape, potentially important details at the edges of the image would be lost if we cropped them. If we simply stretched them, then they wouldn’t look like actual photos people edit.
To get around this, we took each image and applied content-aware scaling. This separate algorithm identified features in the original images (for example, a sky, some trees, or people) and scaled them according to their importance to the photo. The content-aware scaling makes for some pretty strange-looking images — people look a little like weird aliens — but the neural network likes them a little better. Now we could start training and getting our model to learn. And once that was done, we could start testing how accurate our approach was.
Quality and accuracy
Most image editing apps have some sort of non-machine learning automatic white balance correction tools and we compared our approach with the results you get in those apps. We measured quality using the industry standard CIEDE2000 metric and found our Auto White Balance tool to be at least 50% more accurate, and usually between 2 to 10 times better than those standard tools. And we think our approach passes the eye test even better. Just looking at the results, the Auto White Balance adjustment seems to be much more natural and visually pleasing.
RAW friendly
One awesome feature of Auto White Balance is support for RAW images and any extended data within them. Our trained neural network uses extended-range information to correct white balance issues in RAW images with improved accuracy. Sweet!
Here are the Auto Color Adjustments getting a mention during the Platforms State of the Union at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose.
Better than humans
To round things off, here’s a fun fact. The new Auto White Balance correctly fixes the white balance in the infamous “dress” photo, which became an internet phenomenon in 2015. And that photo isn’t even in the training dataset! This is an especially good example of white balance and lighting issues which are tricky even for humans to solve. And Pixelmator Pro now makes it effortless with the help of breakthrough machine learning.
If you want to try out these awesome machine learning features on the dress or any of your own photos, you can download Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon — it’s available now from the Mac App Store and it’s a free update for everyone who has already bought Pixelmator Pro.
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The Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon, a massive update to the world’s most innovative image editing app for Mac. The update adds a modern way to easily prepare images for the web, brings machine learning-powered Auto Color Adjustments, support for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, a new Slice tool, SVG support, a new Tutorials page to help with learning Pixelmator Pro, and much more.
“Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon is an absolutely massive update with tons of great new features,” said Saulius Dailide, one of the founders of the Pixelmator Team. “With the innovative new Export for Web features, it’s now easier than ever to prepare and optimize images for the web. And Pixelmator Pro continues to push the boundaries of image editing with the new Auto Color Adjustments, which take advantage of the latest advances in machine learning and computer vision to automatically improve photos.”
Pixelmator Pro now gives you everything you need to prepare and optimize your images for the web. You can use advanced compression techniques to compress images to the smallest size possible without losing quality. Export presets let you quickly optimize images with your favorite settings. As you adjust any export settings, Pixelmator Pro displays a live preview of the optimized image right in the Pixelmator Pro window. Quick Export lets you instantly export a web-friendly image optimized with your most-used settings at any time. And the new Slice tool makes it much easier to prepare web designs by letting you divide entire designs into smaller images, optimizing each one separately.
With the new machine learning-powered Auto White Balance, Auto Lightness, and Auto Hue & Saturation adjustments, you can automatically perfect the colors of a photo with just a click. The machine learning algorithm was trained on millions of images to identify the contents of a photo, finding the best colors, lighting, and contrast to make every image stand out. Integrated via Core ML and powered by Metal, the Auto Color Adjustments deliver lightning fast performance and stunning quality.
Full support for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar gives you quick access to all your favorite tools and all kinds of useful options. You can apply color adjustment or effect presets, select colors for your brushes, and even share your image, all right from the Touch Bar. And whenever you switch tools, the Touch Bar automatically changes to put the most useful options at your fingertips, which makes using Pixelmator Pro simpler and easier than ever.
Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon includes many more incredible new features, including support for opening and exporting vector images in the SVG format, live previews when formatting text and adjusting layer blending options, a Select Color Range tool that lets you make selections of similarly colored areas in an image, support for exporting HEIF images, a new Tutorials page to help with learning Pixelmator Pro, and much more.
The Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator Pro, a brand new Mac app that redefines image editing on the Mac, providing professional-grade editing tools in an incredibly intuitive and accessible design. Pixelmator Pro 1.0, codenamed Whirlwind, includes a modern single-window interface, nondestructive, GPU-powered image editing tools, machine learning-enhanced editing features, and more.
“We’re incredibly excited to finally release Pixelmator Pro on the Mac App Store,” said Saulius Dailide, one of the founders of the Pixelmator Team. “Its innovative, user-centered design makes editing images on a Mac simpler than ever. And with its GPU-powered and machine learning-enhanced editing tools, Pixelmator Pro is built for the future.”
The modern, dark single-window interface of Pixelmator Pro has been created exclusively for working with images. A streamlined, macOS-inspired design provides a completely native Mac app experience and is fully consistent with the look and feel of macOS. And a reimagined, user-centered workflow design makes the professional editing tools in Pixelmator Pro especially accessible, even to first-time users.
Completely nondestructive color adjustments, effects, styles, and layouting tools in Pixelmator Pro give users the freedom and flexibility to go back and modify or delete individual changes at any point in the editing workflow. Thanks to the new presets feature, you can create endless combinations of multiple adjustments, effects, or styles, save them to your favorites and reuse them in any of your images. Drag-and-drop sharing also makes it a breeze to share presets with others.
Pixelmator Pro pushes the boundaries of image editing, using breakthrough machine learning to deliver more intelligent editing tools and features. Integrated via the new, blazing fast Core ML framework, machine learning lets Pixelmator Pro detect and understand various features within images, bringing a number of groundbreaking advancements, such as jaw-droppingly accurate automatic layer naming, automatic horizon detection, stunningly realistic object removal, and intelligent quick selections.
Designed exclusively for the Mac, Pixelmator Pro uses the Mac graphics processor in tandem with the latest Mac graphics technologies, such as Metal 2, Core Image, and OpenGL, to deliver blistering fast, GPU-powered image editing. Built with Swift 4, Pixelmator Pro is a next-generation app that takes full advantage of the latest technological innovations in hardware and software.
The Pixelmator Team has packed a wide range of features and innovations into Pixelmator Pro, such as full RAW support, including support for multiple RAW layers; HEIF file format compatibility; superior support for Adobe Photoshop images; complete macOS integration via full support for iCloud, Versions, Tabs, Full Screen, Split View, Sharing, Wide Color, and others; Metal 2-powered painting tools and dual texture brushes; powerful retouching, reshaping, selecting, type, shape and vector tools; and a lot more. In addition, a number of free updates adding major new features to Pixelmator Pro are already lined up for the very near future.
Pixelmator Pro 1.0 Whirlwind is available exclusively from the Mac App Store for $59.99.
Pixelmator Pro requires macOS High Sierra and a Metal-compatible graphics card. Full system requirements and more information on Pixelmator Pro can be found at www.pixelmator.com/pro/
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We’ve just released another awesome new film about Pixelmator Pro — this one’s all about the color adjustments.
Enjoy!
Art Deco is a style of visual arts characterized by sleek and streamlined forms, bright, vivid colors, and symmetric, geometrical compositions — discover more about it in the latest article on artistic styles.
We love the new iPhone X. So we took our time to polish the Pixelmator for iOS interface and make sure it looks and feels great on the brand new iPhone X screen.
The update is now ready for you to download from the App Store. It also includes a number of bug fixes and performance improvements. And, as always, it’s free for all those who have already purchased Pixelmator for iOS.
View in App Store
Yup, November 29th. That is the day Pixelmator Pro will be released.
We can’t wait for you to get your hands on what might be the most beautiful, innovative, and inspiring app we’ve ever made. It really is that great.
We didn’t announce the Pixelmator Pro release date earlier because we wanted to take as much time as necessary to build a solid v.1.0. Pixelmator Pro is huge and there are just so many new things and technologies to take care of to make sure everything works as it should. But the current Pixelmator Pro 1.0 Whirlwind beta version I’m running is already rock solid so why not announce the release date is most likely to be November 29th.
Oh, and Pixelmator Pro 1.0 Whirlwind will launch with a price of $59 as we want as many of you as possible to be able to afford it. However, we don’t think the price will stay that low for too long. It will go up as soon as we ship free updates with major new features (that are not yet announced but are in the works already) as well as Pixelmator Pro for iPad (which is a great friend of Pixelmator Pro for Mac), Vectormator, and more. The intended original price for Pixelmator Pro is $99 and we plan to ship big updates quickly.
Get ready for November 29th by subscribing to our awesome newsletter or adding the date to your calendar.
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And just so you know, you might well be taking part in image editing history here…
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