Keeping the original Pixelmator app after installing Pixelmator Pro

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2019-04-15 14:47:20

Dear all,

I have purchased Pixelmator Pro as soon as it was available on the Mac App Store; however, for some reason, I continued to use the original Pixelmator app since I barely use Mac for editing. I mostly rely on my iPad Pro for photo editing using Pixelmator and Affinity Photo (and now Pixelmator Photo which is a real time saver by the way).

I plan to improve my usage on desktop, so as someone who is used to editing on iOS mostly, would you recommend the start my tutorials directly on Pixelmator Pro? Would I miss anything by deleting the original Pixelmator from my Mac?
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2019-04-15 16:47:25

Hi.

I’m a long-time Pixelmator user who moved over to Pixelmator Pro Shortly after it was released. As Classic Pixelmator was a mature product and with lots of features and Pixelmator Pro was released with a smaller feature set with features being added incrementally, I would often go back to Classic Pixelmator in the early days to do something that I wasn’t able to do in Pixelmator Pro. Over time I’ve been doing this less and less and now use Pixelmator Pro almost exclusively for the following reasons:
1. It is largely non-destructive. If I tweak the colour balance of a layer and change my mind later, I can change the parameters of that change and even completely remove it later.
2. I like its user interface more. Not only is it more compact allowing me a larger editing area but I find it more pleasing to use. The more I can enjoy the work I do, the better.
3. It is in more active development. If a new feature arrives, it will be in Pixelmator Pro first and may not even hit Classic Pixelmator at all. From what I can tell, Classic Pixelmator is still well maintained, it’s just not growing like Pixelmator Pro.

But there are still reasons to keep Classic Pixelmator around.
1. It still has more effects than Pixelmator Pro and there maybe something you want to do that you will miss if you delete Classic Pixelmator.
2. It integrates directly with Apple Photo, exposing some of its functionality within the app (I haven’t used this for a while so I think it is still the case). It also exposes more to Automator.
3. It has the same file format as Pixelmator for iOS so you can share files between them. They don’t have the same feature set so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some gotchas if you edit heavily between the platforms but, as someone who works heavily on the iPad, this might be something you might find useful.

Hope this helps.

-Stef.
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2019-04-17 14:23:26

Hi st3f,

Yes, thank you so much. That helps a lot. I will try to use Pixelmator Pro for everything to see if I need anything and compare with the original Pixelmator.
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2019-04-21 00:28:20

Great little article - Stef