October 1, 2019

First major Pixelmator Photo update out now

The Pixelmator Photo 1.1 major update is here! And it really is a big one. We’ve added full compatibility with iPadOS 13, full-featured batch editing, an all-new and improved workflow, export resizing, and some smaller improvements and fixes.

iPadOS 13

Everything seems really cool in its own right so it’s difficult to pick just one headline feature but let’s start with iPadOS. iPad OS 13 support is a very big part of this update and with our Files-based design, you can now take full advantage of support for external drives and new external locations.

Batch Editing

Batch editing is huge! We’ve brought a really full-featured batch editing experience to iPad that’s, let’s face it, even better than what we currently have on the Mac with Pixelmator Pro. A lot of that is down to Pixelmator Photo being a dedicated photo editor, of course, but it’s amazing to see all the incredible machine learning features now being available for batch editing on iPad.

All-New Workflow

The one new feature that might not be as flashy but will directly affect every single current and future Pixelmator Photo user is the all-new workflow and direct integration with your iCloud Photos library. Gone are the days of having to import photos and manage separate Pixelmator Photo files, everything is now simple and intuitive.If you’re editing in your Photos library, edits are automatically saved to the same images you open. Nondestructive edits are preserved too! And if you’re editing in Files, Pixelmator Photo does some magic to save changes back to the same image while preserving nondestructive edits in a linked file.

Export Sizes

Finally, we’ve also added the ability to export images at different sizes, which is a nice little extra that we found time to squeeze in between all the other huge things and foundational changes to Pixelmator Photo.

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We really hope you’ll enjoy the update and we can’t wait to surprise you with more awesomeness in the future. Until next time!

September 20, 2019

Pixelmator Pro 1.5 beta out now

A few months ago, WWDC 2019 bought some really incredible Mac software and hardware announcements. A brand new, ultra-powerful Mac Pro, the stunning Pro Display XDR, and of course the awesome software news with macOS Catalina and all its new features.

Now, after several months of hard work, we’re almost ready to release a major update to Pixelmator Pro, adding support for all this. And today, we excited to share a public beta version of Pixelmator Pro 1.5 (codenamed Avalon) so you can test it out before the update hits the Mac App Store.

In our blog post after WWDC, we focused mostly on Mac Pro, Pro Display XDR, and Sidecar, but this update has a whole lot more than that. For example, there’s ML Denoise, which removes noise from photos while intelligently preserving details using, you guessed it, advanced machine learning! What’s more, ML Denoise can even remove JPEG compression artifacts. There’s also some major performance improvements, including a completely redesigned and always responsive zoom engine, painting tool improvements, and faster effect rendering. We’ve even squeezed in full support for SF Symbols!

This is going to be another awesome update and if you’d like to get an early look at it before everyone else, all you need to do is sign up for our public beta. Feedback is always welcome at beta@pixelmator.com!

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September 11, 2019

Pixelmator Photo 1.1 public beta now available

Exciting news incoming! Pixelmator Photo 1.1 is close to being finished and is shaping up to be a really fantastic first major update, bringing batch editing, an all-new editing workflow, and a whole lot more.

We know library and file management workflows are incredibly important to pretty much every photographer out there, so that’s been our primary focus with Pixelmator Photo 1.1. Thanks to the all-new workflow, you can now enjoy a completely Photos-centric editing and file management experience without having to import photos into Pixelmator Photo. That means no more of those pesky duplicate files cluttering up your iPad. And you can even revert or delete photos in your library right from Pixelmator Photo.

Naturally, for every previously edited photo that you open, you’ll still be able to find your previous edits as we’ll automatically save and link them to the images in your Photos library. What’s more, if you prefer editing images in the Files app, this new workflow magically links edits to images in Files, too.

And you want to know something crazy? That’s probably not even the biggest new feature in this update. We’ve also added seriously powerful, machine learning-powered batch editing — we think you’re going to love it and we’ll tell you a little more about that later.

We’ve really enjoyed hearing your feedback in our previous betas so we’re opening up 300 extra spots for this update. If you’d like to help us out, sign up using TestFlight below. For the rest of you, it shouldn’t be too long before you can get your hands on this incredible update!

Join Beta

July 23, 2019

Pixelmator Pro updated with incredible new Photos extension

It’s finally ready! The Pixelmator Pro editing extension for the Photos app is now available in Pixelmator Pro 1.4 Hummingbird, an amazing major update released today. The update also brings a new Zoom Tool, an improved Crop tool, and a wide range of additional new features and improvements. This is no ordinary update and no ordinary Photos extension.

Photos editing extension

Yes, the Pixelmator Pro editing extension is actually the entire, full-featured Pixelmator Pro app inside Photos. Every tool and feature is available, including RAW support, layer-based editing (of course), and even the ability to save layers and adjustments directly to your Photos library. Be sure to check out our quick guide to the editing extension.

Zoom and Crop tools

The brand new Zoom tool is a great addition to the Pixelmator Pro toolbox. It’s got a beautiful  navigator to help move around images while zoomed in and some handy commands. And the Crop tool has had a pretty drastic redesign, adding a new Delete mode, redesigned crop presets, and the ability to crop to custom sizes. The new Delete mode lets you permanently crop away unwanted image areas (while the Hide mode lets you nondestructively hide them beyond the canvas). We’ve put up a couple of quick tips about these new features on our Tips & Tricks page and you can find more info about them in our Help manual, too.

You’ll also notice the presets have been moved from the Presets bar into the Tool Options pane. We’ve done this to free up more space for editing — in fact, in this update, the Crop tool isn’t the only to have received a preset makeover, the Slice tool has also been refreshed, as have the Paint and Erase tools. And we’ll be doing the same for the remaining tools in future updates.

Other goodies

We’ve also included a wide range of additional improvements in this major update. For example, you can now insert layered files right into existing Pixelmator Pro documents — even using drag & drop! The template chooser now includes a range of image size templates for iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch devices. And we’ve even improved performance quite significantly for documents with many layers.

This major update is free for existing Pixelmator Pro users so simply open up the Mac App Store, update, and enjoy these wonderful additions!

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Upgrade discount

For all you users of the original Pixelmator, not too long ago, we created a Mac App Store bundle that can be used to purchase Pixelmator Pro with a discount. So if you’re thinking of finally grabbing a copy of Pixelmator Pro, now’s a great a time as any. You can find the upgrade bundle on the Mac App Store.

June 18, 2019

Pixelmator Pro development update

What an exciting week it was in San Jose! And not just because of our design award but also because of all the awesomeness announced at WWDC. A couple of the most exciting things are the new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR, for which we’re already working on adding support. Today, we wanted to share a quick update about what exactly we have in store.

Pro Display XDR

First, Pro Display XDR. For a quick bit of background, the XDR stands for extreme dynamic range. Thanks to the incredible hardware packed in the display, it can sustain screen brightness of 1000 nits, with a peak brightness of 1600 nits. In image editing workflows, this is going to be especially useful when editing RAW photos. All RAW photos have extended dynamic range that usually isn’t displayed, though you can make it visible manually. Often, this is done by compressing the dynamic range of the photo — making the brightest areas a little darker — because regular displays can’t show things like a really bright sky with all the details intact. With a future Pixelmator Pro update and Pro Display XDR, you’ll be able to see previously invisible highlight detail in RAW photos simply by turning on XDR mode in Pixelmator Pro without having to make any edits or changing the rest of the photo.

Of course, along with that, you’ll also be able to take advantage of the new display’s true 10-bit color depth (that’s over a billion colors) and P3 wide color gamut. Both of which Pixelmator Pro already supports thanks to its use of native color management. We can’t wait to get one of these displays for the office and see all this in action!

Mac Pro

Mind-blowing device number 2 is the new Mac Pro. There aren’t really any superlatives that seem appropriate here but up to four internal GPUs with 128GB of high-bandwidth graphics memory? Up to 1.5TB of RAM? This thing is just insane for graphics work. And because Pixelmator Pro is built from the ground up on Metal, we can take advantage of all the power this new Mac Pro offers. 

We’ll be updating our internal architecture to ensure overall performance increases significantly with each additional GPU, whether that’s internal within the Mac Pro or an eGPU. What’s more, Pixelmator Pro will be able to use the GPU connected to the specific display on which a document is open. So if you move a window from one display to another, all the data will immediately be transferred between GPUs.

Sidecar

Finally, Sidecar. Of course Pixelmator Pro will fully support Sidecar! Which is awesome for all you photographers, digital painters, and illustrators out there — you’ll be able to have an extremely powerful, accurate, and responsive graphics tablet with you at all times that you can also use as a secondary display. Pixelmator Pro will support pressure sensitivity, tilt, and acceleration of Apple Pencil when you paint and it will also support the double-tap gesture. Super cool all around.

These updates are lined up to be released late this summer and in the fall, before the new devices are available and in time for macOS 10.15 Catalina. And for now, we’re also working on finishing up the 1.4 major update that we teased a couple of weeks ago. Keep an eye out for news and sign up for our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss any big ones. It’s going to be a fun summer for us at the Pixelmator Team!

June 4, 2019

Pixelmator Photo wins Apple Design Award

Wow! Pixelmator Photo is an Apple Design Award winner. It’s been an incredible first day for us here at WWDC and we can’t believe our week in California has started out with such an amazing honor.

It’s no secret that, when it comes to fans of Apple, we’re about as big as they come. We take great pride in designing apps to be as native, powerful, intuitive, and beautiful as possible. And we take a lot of inspiration from all the amazing things Apple does. So to be recognized by the same people is the most special, amazing feeling possible. It’s almost impossible to put everything into words. Just… wow!

And our week at WWDC is only beginning — we’ve got a long day ahead today with all kinds of awesome sessions to attend and we’ve already started working on adding support for the fantastic new features announced yesterday morning. We hope you’ll love what we have in store for you over the coming months. And make sure to check out the story about us and other Apple Design Award Winners on the App Store!

May 30, 2019

Sneak peek at Pixelmator Pro 1.4

Today, we want to share an early look at the next major Pixelmator Pro update. We’ve been working on it over the past 6 months and it’s one of the craziest, most awesome things we’ve ever done. Here goes.

So, what is it? It’s a Pixelmator Pro editing extension for the Photos app. But this extension is unlike any other. We’ve put all of Pixelmator Pro — everything — inside Photos. Do you want to nondestructively edit your photos using our incredible photo editing tools? You can do that. Would you like to combine several different images and save your changes, layers and all, to your Photos library? Go for it. If you use iCloud, your changes will sync across your Mac devices. Heck, you can even create designs and slice them up using the Slice tool, exporting optimized images directly from Photos.

Crazy. Powerful. And just plain cool. That’s not the only thing we’ll be adding in Pixelmator Pro 1.4 but this was simply too awesome not to share. The release date is penciled in for the end of next month. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

In other news, we’ve also just launched a Pixelmator Pro upgrade bundle on the Mac App Store. Bundles are a relatively new addition to the App Store on macOS and we’re taking advantage of them to give a discount to existing Pixelmator users wishing to upgrade to Pixelmator Pro. Visit the Mac App Store to check out the new bundle.

P.S. If you’d like to stay up to do date with Pixelmator Pro news and happenings, now’s a great time to sign up for our newsletter.

May 14, 2019

Pixelmator Pro updated with new Core ML-powered ML Match Colors feature

Hello, everyone! Today is no ordinary Tuesday — in our quest to create the most intelligent and advanced image editor in the world, we’ve added another incredibly cool, machine learning-powered feature to Pixelmator Pro. The feature is called ML Match Colors and it matches the colors of different photos using breakthrough machine learning. To see just a little of what it can do, check out the ML Match Colors film below.

Awesome, isn’t it? ML Match Colors does this magic by fine-tuning 37 different color adjustments, including things like Exposure, Shadows, Highlights, individual color ranges, and more. So it matches both colors and lighting! And it’s so easy to use. Just drag and drop any photo onto the Color Adjustments pane to match its colors. Fun fact: this feature is powered by the same machine learning algorithm we created for ML Enhance, so it has been trained on 20 million professional photos.

In addition, ML Match Colors is available in the Edit menu as Paste and ML Match Colors, so whenever you paste an object, you can automatically match its colors to the new image. If you’d like to see that in action, take a look at one of our newest Tips & Tricks.

In Pixelmator Pro 1.3.4, we’ve also added a Free Transform tool, which is something quite a few original Pixelmator users were missing in Pixelmator Pro. And just like with every feature from the original Pixelmator, we’ve made it more advanced and more powerful in Pixelmator Pro. For one, we focused on preserving every detail, even in extreme transformations. So the quality of our Free Transform tool is second to none. What’s more, any nondestructive edits applied to layers are preserved after transforming. And layers can be resized using three different image scaling algorithms — Bilinear, Lanczos, or Nearest Neighbor!

This is a free update — as usual — so head on down to the Mac App Store, download the latest version of Pixelmator Pro, and let us know what you think!

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P.S. As you may or may not know, we’re always working on a few different things at once and I’m happy to announce that a major update to Pixelmator Pro — version 1.4 — is not all that far away. It’s going to be very Photos-oriented but maybe not quite in the way you’d expect. Trust me, it’s super cool and we’re planning to share a little sneak peek in the coming weeks.

April 9, 2019

Pixelmator Photo now available on the App Store

The big day is here. The incredible, AI-powered Pixelmator Photo is now available to download from the App Store!

All those of you who pre-ordered the app have already received it — we hope you’re loving it! The rest of you, head on down to the App Store, download Pixelmator Photo, and let us know what you think. We really do love hearing your feedback.

And know that this is only the beginning of the Pixelmator Photo journey. We’re already working on improvements, new features, and thinking about where to take the app in the future. It’s going to be a fun ride!

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Note:

We know some of you aren’t able to download the app on iPad Air 3 and iPad mini 5 devices, even though you were able to pre-order and can also run the TestFlight builds just fine. Strangely, we’ve also had reports from a few different people that they were able to download the app on those devices without any trouble. For those affected, please email us at support@pixelmator.com and we’ll get you a copy of the app via TestFlight for now — apologies for the inconvenience, we’re doing our best to get to the bottom of this!

April 2, 2019

Pixelmator Photo now available for pre-order, coming April 9th

The date is set. On April 9th, the incredible, AI-powered Pixelmator Photo will be released on the App Store. And you can make sure Pixelmator Photo makes its way onto your iPad the second it becomes available by pre-ordering it today. If you want a little taste of what the app’s about, check out this short video we whipped up.

The initial price of Pixelmator Photo will be $4.99. That’s a one-time purchase. No subscriptions and no in-app purchases for additional tools. And, for pre-orders, we’re knocking 20% off the price so you can get it for $3.99. $3.99!

All the feedback we’ve had over the beta period has us incredibly excited for the release as well as the future of Pixelmator Photo — the future of photo editing on iPad. If you have an iPad and take photos, Pixelmator Photo is a must-have. Just 7 short days to go until you can all get your hands on it. We can’t wait.

Pre-Order