Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple.
We’ve been inspired by Apple since day one, crafting our products with the same razor-sharp focus on design, ease of use, and performance. And looking back, it’s crazy what a small group of dedicated people have been able to achieve over the years from all the way in Vilnius, Lithuania. Now, we’ll have the ability to reach an even wider audience and make an even bigger impact on the lives of creative people around the world.
What to expect
Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.
Thank you
We want to give a big thanks to our amazing users for your support over the past 17 years. Your feedback has played a huge role in shaping our apps into what they are today. As we step into this exciting new chapter, we can’t wait to share what’s next.
Pixelmator Pro 3.6, codenamed Archipelago, is here and brings incredible new masking capabilities, including AI-powered background masks, support for vector masks, new on-canvas mask controls, and much more. These new features are designed to make working with masks easier for beginners and faster for pros, so everyone can make the most of nondestructive editing when creating their own designs.
Masking in Pixelmator Pro 3.6 has been reengineered from the ground up to offer quicker and more convenient ways to add and refine masks. For example, you can now instantly mask a layer or create a mask from a selection by simply double-clicking it on the canvas using the Arrange tool. You can then effortlessly resize and reposition the mask, or even adjust its corners, making tasks like rounding image corners or cropping individual layers in multi-layer compositions much faster and easier.
For refining masks, you’ll now find all the necessary tools conveniently located at the bottom of your screen. The new on-canvas controls appear whenever you select or create a mask, allowing you to quickly adjust its transparency or edge softness, invert it, add new masks, and more. And, with support for multiple masks, you can work with as many masks as you need, using blend modes to combine them in different ways.
AI Background Masks
The new AI-powered Hide Background feature now lets you nondestructively remove image backgrounds with just a single click. The intelligent subject detection algorithm automatically finds the subject in an image and adds a precise background mask to hide everything else. You can always hide or reveal any additional details of the subject or background by simply refining the mask. This means your original image always remains intact and unchanged, giving you the freedom to make adjustments and experiment with edits as much as you like.
Vector Masks
The new vector masks in Pixelmator Pro make it easy to quickly mask layers into specific shapes, opening up new editing workflows. Vector masks consist of paths and use shapes to hide or reveal parts of layers. When you add a vector mask, the areas inside the vector shape remain visible and the areas outside are hidden, creating a cookie-cutter-like effect. To mask a layer, simply select a shape from the special new Mask menu at the top of the layers sidebar, or create a mask from scratch using the Pen tools. You can also easily switch between different mask shapes by selecting them from the Shape browser conveniently located at the bottom of the screen.
Vector masks are also fully editable, allowing you to adjust each individual point just like you would when editing regular shapes, and offer resolution-independent scaling, making them perfect for designs that need to maintain high quality at any size, like graphics created for web or print.
We’re really excited to bring you these powerful new features that make working with masks faster and easier than ever. As always, the update is completely free to all existing Pixelmator Pro users. And, If you haven’t tried Pixelmator Pro yet, be sure to give it a go. It has just hit an impressive 43,000 5-star ratings on the Mac App Store!
Pixelmator Pro 3.5.8 has just been released, now letting you edit text in PDFs just like regular text layers, including in Apple PDFs exported from Safari, Keynote, or Pages. The update also adds the ability to create freely customizable outlines around text layers and adds a new collection of bento grid templates, ideal for showcasing product updates or new app features.
Text Editing in PDFs
In one of the recent Pixelmator Pro updates, we’ve added support for vector PDFs, letting you import image, shape, and text elements as separate layers. Now, we’re expanding this support even further by making it possible to edit the imported text elements as regular text layers. This means you can now easily replace, format, and style any existing text in PDFs using all your favorite Pixelmator Pro tools.
Typically, text in PDF documents is not directly editable. Instead, it’s stored as vector shapes to keep documents looking consistent across various platforms and apps. To make text editable again, Pixelmator Pro extracts the different types of data embedded in the original PDF which then lets it recover the original text content, fonts, and formatting. Even if some of these elements are missing, for instance, if the original font is not installed on your Mac, you can still import the text, select a different font, and continue with your edits.
Extended Support for Apple PDFs
The new text editing capabilities in PDF files now allow for even more seamless integration between macOS iWork apps and Pixelmator Pro.Whether you are creating a presentation in Keynote, writing a document in Pages, or working in Safari, you can export your work to PDF and continue editing it in Pixelmator Pro. All of the text in your project will remain fully editable and keep its original fonts, including the SF Pro font that is used throughout the Apple ecosystem.
Take a look at how much smoother importing PDFs created using Keynote works now compared to the previous Pixelmator Pro version.
Customizable Text Strokes
The Style tool in Pixelmator Pro has also been improved, bringing an easy way to create custom outlines around text layers. You now have the option to add strokes inside, center, or outside of the text, choose from various stroke ends and corners, and even add dashed strokes to your text. With these new features, you can experiment with different style combinations to create beautiful typography designs in your projects. The nondestructive styling options also make it easy to stack multiple different strokes of different styles together and rearrange them at any point, while keeping your text fully editable.
Bento Grid Templates
In the fresh new Bento Grid templates collection, you’ll find 12 eye-catching templates for web, social media, and more — all featuring the wildly popular Japanese lunch box-inspired design. The templates are perfect for highlighting exciting new product features, announcing app updates, or showcasing other creations in a neat and organized way. Each template also includes a variety of alternative color palettes to perfectly match your product or a specific theme.
And that wraps up all the new features. If you’d like to try them out yourself, head over to the Mac App Store to download the latest update. As always, it’s free to all existing Pixelmator Pro users.
Pixelmator Pro introduces support for Adobe Illustrator (AI) and Illustrator EPS files, letting you open these files with all their layers, including text and shape layers, fully preserved, and easily edit them in Pixelmator Pro. Additionally, this update includes performance improvements, ensuring an even faster image editing experience when switching between tools and opening documents in Pixelmator Pro. In preparation for the upcoming holidays, we’ve also included a stunning collection of holiday templates in Pixelmator Pro.
AI File Support
Pixelmator Pro now supports native Illustrator data in AI documents. This means that when you open AI files in Pixelmator Pro, all layers and layer groups are preserved, allowing you to seamlessly edit shapes and even text layers. This enhancement greatly expands the capabilities of Pixelmator Pro, letting you open AI files without the need for Adobe Illustrator and convert AI files into other formats when needed.
Illustrator EPS File Support
Pixelmator Pro now offers full support for Illustrator EPS files, which is another file format produced by Adobe Illustrator. While this format is older and no longer supported on macOS 14 Sonoma, it’s still commonly used for sharing vector graphics. With Illustrator EPS file support in Pixelmator Pro, you can open EPS files with all the layers intact and easily edit shapes, text layers, and more. Additionally, you can use the Convert Image action in the Shortcuts app to effortlessly convert EPS files into various other formats.
Improved Performance
We are committed to enhancing your experience with Pixelmator Pro, and as part of our ongoing efforts, we are introducing further performance improvements. This means you can now enjoy quicker tool switching and faster document opening, making Pixelmator Pro work at lightning-fast speeds!
Holiday Templates
With the holidays around the corner, we are excited to introduce a collection of stunning new holiday templates. These templates are crafted to simplify the process of creating beautiful holiday cards, posters, social media posts, and stories. Our latest release includes 14 brand-new templates, among which you’ll find 8 festive moving design options. In addition, we’ve added 11 new holiday shapes to the Shapes browser in Pixelmator Pro, offering you even more creative possibilities when making your designs from scratch.
The update is free to all existing users. If you haven’t got a copy of Pixelmator Pro yet, you can still purchase it at a 50% discount for the next 24 hours, making it a perfect gift for yourself or your loved ones. It’s our way of wishing you the happiest of holidays!
Pixelmator Pro 3.4, codenamed Camelot, introduces a completely revamped PDF engine that takes PDF support to a whole new level. With this update, you can now open individual pages from multi-page PDF documents, work with vector PDFs, edit individual image, shape, and other elements in Apple PDFs, and more. If you often work with PDF files — we’re really excited for you to try out this update.
A (Very) Short History of PDF
PDF, or Portable Document Format, is a file format created by John Warnock, the co-founder of Adobe, back in 1990 as part of the “Camelot Project.” The project aimed to establish a reliable way to create and exchange documents, ensuring that they always look the same across multiple platforms and devices. Over the years, PDF not only achieved its initial goal but also became one of the most popular file formats for sharing and printing documents.
Import Selected PDF Pages
From now on, you can easily import and edit specific pages from multi-page PDF documents right in Pixelmator Pro. In a simple new import dialog, scroll through the list of pages in your PDF, choose the one you wish to edit and import it. You can also set the page resolution, and adjust its width and height to the size you need. And that’s not all. Thanks to the major PDF engine redesign, Pixelmator Pro now lets you import PDF files with layers. This means that if a PDF you’re opening includes images or shapes, you can now import these elements as separate layers and edit them individually. Or, if you prefer editing PDFs as flat images, you can import them with all layers merged.
Once you’ve edited and exported a PDF page, you can easily put it back into a multi-page document using the Preview app on your Mac. Simply open the original document in Preview, then drag and drop the page onto the list of PDF pages on the left. To create multi-page PDFs from scratch, you can take advantage of the automations available in the Shortcuts app on your Mac.
Edit PDF Layers
With support for vector PDFs, you can now edit shape and image elements in PDFs as separate layers and scale documents to any size without losing quality. This makes it simple to edit, rearrange, and delete elements in existing PDF documents, or create new vector PDFs you can then share and edit in other apps. More complex layer properties like blend modes, opacity, and masks are also supported and will be preserved when exporting.
Up until now, Pixelmator Pro supported bitmap PDFs — an image-based type of PDF. Unlike vector PDFs that support layers, bitmap PDFs open with all their contents merged into a single page which also has a fixed resolution. Because of this, bitmap PDFs have more limited options for editing and may lose quality when upscaling. That said, both PDF types have their own uses, so we’ve put together a quick comparison to help you figure out which PDF format is the best fit for your needs.
Vector PDFs
Editable page layout
Resolution-independent scaling
Editable vector elements
Best for sharing and printing vector-based documents, logos, text, and more
Bitmap PDFs
Embedded page content
Fixed resolution
No content discrepancies when sharing
Best for sharing and printing high-quality images and photographs
While bitmap PDFs are always image-based, vector PDFs can have both vector and bitmap elements (photos or illustrations) in the same document. When upscaling such documents, bitmap elements may lose quality and turn out blurry in the final design. To achieve the best possible quality when upscaling, you can use the AI-powered Super Resolution algorithm which increases the size of images while preserving sharpness and details with the help of machine learning.
Work with Apple PDFs
As part of the PDF engine improvements, we also wanted to extend the existing PDF support on macOS and make it easy for users to edit the PDF documents they create using everyday Mac apps. Pixelmator Pro now fully supports vector PDFs created using Safari, Keynote, Pages, and other iWork apps, and opens them with incredible precision. For instance, you can now export entire web pages to PDF from Safari and they will open in Pixelmator Pro exactly how you see them in your browser. And, best of all, you can edit all image, shape, and other elements as regular layers, using all your favorite tools in Pixelmator Pro.
Full Apple PDF file support unlocks many new workflows and possibilities. As a quick demo of other cool things you can do with this, we’ve exported shapes from the Geometry collection in Keynote to PDF, and then converted them into a new Pixelmator Pro shape collection. And just like that, Keynote shapes are ready to use in your Pixelmator Pro designs!
Convert Files to PDF with Shortcuts
The updated “Convert Image/Video” action in the Shortcuts app makes it easy to convert multiple Pixelmator Pro documents, Adobe Photoshop files, and other files to PDF. With added controls, you can also choose whether you want to convert documents to bitmap PDF or preserve all layers. By combining this feature with existing macOS actions, it’s possible to create workflows that will help quickly create multi-page PDF documents or prepare individual pages for editing in Pixelmator Pro. We’ve created shortcuts for these two specific workflows that you can download below:
These are all the amazing new features in the Pixelmator Pro 3.4 Camelot. We hope you like the update! The update is free to all existing users and is available from the Mac App Store starting today. And, if you don’t have a copy of Pixelmator Pro just yet, now is the best time to get it as it’s currently on sale for 30% off.
Grab your popcorn, everybody — Pixelmator Pro 3.2, codenamed Lumière, is finally here! It brings support for video layers, introducing exciting new ways to create moving designs in Pixelmator Pro.
The update also adds support for new video and moving image formats, includes all-new video templates, improves Motion document support, and more.
Video Layers
Over the years, we brought many powerful, yet easy-to-use image editing tools to Pixelmator Pro and, from now on, you can use these same tools to edit videos, too. Video layers work just like regular image layers, making it incredibly quick and easy to mask or crop videos, add effects, change colors, and more.
Powered by Apple’s AVFoundation framework, Pixelmator Pro brings blazingly fast video playback performance. So whether you’re just sprucing up your iPhone videos or creating multi-layered video compositions together with images, shapes, and text — you can enjoy an exceptionally smooth, real-time editing experience. And the best part is, you don’t need a separate video editing app to create captivating, moving designs.
All-New Video Controls
Use handy, on-canvas controls, to quickly play and pause videos, change video duration, scrub through individual frames, choose a poster frame, or mute audio. Keep the video controls visible at all times, even when you’re editing other layers, or display them automatically when a video layer is selected. For more complex compositions that include multiple video layers, we’ve added advanced settings for playback delay and choosing how the first and final frames of a video should behave.
If you’d like to learn more about the new tools and some of the key video editing techniques in Pixelmator Pro, check out our latest YouTube video where we create a simple, moving composition using video and text layers.
Video Templates
To showcase a few of the cool ways video layers can be used in designs, we’ve created 12 gorgeous, cinema-inspired templates. Quickly replace placeholders in templates with your own videos or even Live Photos to get that blockbuster movie look in stunning 4K, or create eye-catching social media stories. Show every video in its best light by customizing templates using a number of artist-designed alternative elements and color palettes created exclusively for each template.
New File Formats
Pixelmator Pro now supports popular video formats including MP4 and QuickTime Movie, and you can even work with moving image formats such as animated GIFs and PNGs. Share your edited videos or video compositions in any supported video format with a customizable frame rate, quality, and size. When exporting designs as QuickTime movies, you can also choose from a range of compression formats, including HEVC with support for videos with transparency, Apple ProRes 4444 — a popular format in professional video post-production — and more.
Motion Support Improvements
Finally, as this update focuses primarily on video editing, it was a perfect opportunity for us to squeeze in a few Motion support improvements, too. Now, Pixelmator Pro designs exported to Motion will keep any custom fonts, and many of the nondestructive color adjustments and effects will be replaced with equivalent Motion filters. Thanks to these, and many other improvements, creating designs in Pixelmator Pro and animating them in Motion is now easier — and faster — than ever before.
Hey everyone! We’re incredibly happy to announce that today, we’re releasing Pixelmator Pro 3.0, codenamed Muse. It introduces an all-new way to create designs with over 200 easy-to-use templates, 16 fully customizable mockups, AI-powered template editing, document color palettes, and more.
This update is packed full of awesome new features and we cannot wait to tell you more about them, so let’s dive right in.
200+ Design Templates
With more than 200 stunning new templates, you can quickly create high-quality designs in a wide range of different formats, including social media posts, resumes, posters, cards, and others. It takes just a few clicks to personalize a template and turn it into something that’s uniquely yours.
But that’s not all. If you’ve got a small business or you’re creating a personal brand, you’re going to love the new brand templates. You can choose from 12 different brand collections with templates for web, print, and more. In each collection, you’ll find templates created using the same design language which makes it very easy to build a consistent and eye-catching visual identity.
Ready to try out the new templates? We’ve prepared an in-depth video tutorial about working with templates to help you get started.
Fully-Customizable Mockups
Mockups let you easily bring your designs to life by displaying them in beautifully-designed compositions. Find mockups for devices such as Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and printed media, including posters, book covers, and more. Freely customize mockups with a number of alternative lighting effects, or recolor different elements in compositions to find just the right look for your design.
The ultra high-quality mockups are perfect for both personal or professional use. In fact, the Pixelmator marketing team has already given the new mockups its seal of approval and we are now using them to showcase Pixelmator Pro on the App Store! If you’d like to learn more about how you can make your own designs pop using mockups, check out our latest Youtube tutorial.
Smart Replace
To make template editing quick and intuitive, we’ve introduced Smart Replace, an incredibly intelligent feature supercharged with the power of three machine learning features: Remove Background, Auto Fill, and ML Super Resolution. Now, when replacing placeholder content, Pixelmator Pro can automatically remove backgrounds, find the most optimal composition and placement, and upscale images if their quality is too low.
Element Alternatives
Easily customize templates and mockups with a number of built-in alternative elements — lighting, shapes, effects, and illustrations — created exclusively for each design. For example, when working with mockups, you can completely change their look and feel with lighting effects such as Direct Light, Diffused Light, Plant Shadows, and others. If you’d like to try out a few different looks, you can quickly switch between the alternative elements with easy-to-use on-canvas controls.
Document Colors
Templates and mockups come with a set of built-in color presets available from the new Document Colors menu. Using the presets, you can completely change the entire color scheme of an image with just a few clicks. The feature works by changing all nondestructively applied colors in a composition — whether it’s a gradient stop in gradient map effect, a color fill, or even a shadow. You can also customize individual colors in templates or your own designs to create new document color presets.
We had an absolute blast working on this update and hope you’re going to enjoy using the templates as much as we enjoyed creating them. And we’re not stopping there — we plan to continue adding new template and mockup designs to Pixelmator Pro in the future, so keep an eye out for those!
Pixelmator Pro 3.0 Muse is a free update to all existing users and is available on the Mac App Store now. New users can get a copy of Pixelmator Pro for $39.99 at the link below.
