November 11, 2008

Pixelmator Team Releases Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo

Version 1.3 Tempo Features Major Performance Improvements, Click-and-Drag Tools, Improved Adjustment Tools, Smart Palette Hide Feature, and More.

The Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator 1.3, codenamed Tempo, a third major update to the revolutionary GPU-powered image editing tool that provides everything needed to create, edit, and enhance still images. Available today as a free software update, Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo features major performance improvements: click-and-drag technology-based Magic Wand, Paint Bucket, and Magic Eraser tools; improved Hue and Saturation, Replace Color, and Colorize tools; Smart Palette Hide; and more.

“Pixelmator is an awesome tool for anyone to enjoy the benefits of image editing,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “And now with innovative click-and-drag tools, improved adjustment tools, and major performance enhancements it is becoming one of the most innovative, top-quality image-editing tools for Mac OS X.”

Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo delivers performance gains in almost every function of the application. It takes even more advantage than before of Core Image, OpenGL, and the power of other Mac-only technologies so that dramatic performance improvements are easily seen when one is working with large images—opening and saving, using filters and adjustments, and more.

Pixelmator’s new click-and-drag approach in Magic Wand for selecting, Paint Bucket for filling, or Magic Eraser for removing unwanted backgrounds allows the artist simply to drag the mouse and see instant results when working with these tools. Click-and-drag, technology-based tools are easy-to-use and fun, yet they keep all the functionality of same-purpose classic tools.

Pixelmator’s new adjustment tools include the redesigned Hue and Saturation, Colorize, and Replace Color tools. These three tools now feature a color wheel with color buttons nearby. Spinning the color buttons will show users what is changed as those buttons go with other colors in the wheel—e.g., red is replaced with green, green is replaced with blue, etc. In addition to the ability of the Hue and Saturation tool to edit different ranges of colors, Replace Color features a new Radius preview slider which shows a black-and-white preview of how much of the selected color will be changed.

The Smart Palette Hide feature solves the problem of palette clutter when one uses adjustment tools or filters in Pixelmator. It makes all the unnecessary palettes temporarily dissolve when any of the adjustment tools or filters are in play, allowing the user to focus on only one image and chosen tool.

Other new and improved features in Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo include improved Type tool, Stroke, an Action Tooltips feature, minor user interface and compatibility improvements, Spanish and French languages, and some bug fixes.

Pricing and Availability

Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo is available to order for $59 (US). Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo is a free update to current Pixelmator customers.

Comments

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  • xfodder

    woohoo! I’ve been waiting for this release, looks to be quite substantial, thanks guys and look forward to 1.4 😀

    15 years ago
  • Wooster

    “Pixelmator is an awesome tool for anyone to enjoy the benefits of image editing,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “And now with innovative click-and-drag tools, improved adjustment tools, and major performance enhancements it is becoming one of the most innovative, top-quality image-editing tools for Mac OS X.”

    Saulius posted a press release where he quoted himself?

    Elmo: Elmo is going to go see Big Bird.

    ——-

    In any case, great work folks! Can’t wait to get downloading.

    15 years ago
  • xfodder

    dunno if anyone else is also getting a crash sometimes when bringing up the colour selector but pixelmator has crashed twice since updating when i use the color selector

    15 years ago
  • AppleBoy

    My colour selector is OK.
    1.3 is fast : ) Well done guys, great release.

    Looking forward to next update, hope to see Save for Web option.

    15 years ago
  • P.

    Very nice update. The new paint bucket, magic wand, colorize panel are just excellent. Performance is also slightly improved.

    One problem though: french localization is barely usable. Truncated sentences, incorrect translations, broken commands, I had to go back to english. I’d be glad to help, in its actual state, you can’t sell something that bad.

    Cheers.

    15 years ago
  • Wimpus

    Thanks for this amazing update! You guys did a wonderful job… again 🙂

    15 years ago
  • Joshua

    A great update – performance on my system seems to have improved threefold.
    My imediate complaint, however, is that I can now see controls to justify text, but they don’t seem to work at all. This is the feature I have been longing for and it is frustrating seeing it in there finally, but not working! Keep up the good work.

    15 years ago
  • Kristan Kenney

    This is a wonderful release! Thank you to the Pixelmator Team for all of your hard work.

    15 years ago
  • Ryan Gillen

    Still disappointed in no “Save for Web” feature. This would be immensely useful for web design work– is it really that hard to implement?? Acorn has it now.

    15 years ago
  • Fredrik

    Absolutely fantastic. The speed increases are welcome, but the new bucket/wand; my god, that’s just fantastic. Initial thought was that this is better than Photoshop CS3 (for my needs). Works better, is faster, cost is only a fraction in comparison.

    Excellent work!

    15 years ago
  • Saulius Dailide

    Dear Ryan,

    let me ease your dissapointment a bit: a) Save for Web is a feature of 1.5 Spider- we are working on it for a few months now b) Save for Web is useless without precise, easy-to-use and powerful basic tools (i.e. selection tools, type tool etc.) c) nobody at the Pixelmator Team wants to work on Save for Web that looks like and works like everything else available on the market – we want to do something interesting with this feature since we think you guys are really looking forward into it d) Save for Web is not a hard feature (code bureaucracy mostly), but Save for Web we want to ship is really hard to implement, though worth it.
    I hope that explains a bit of why Pixelmator does not have Save for Web yet.

    15 years ago
  • Gustavo Beathyate

    Hi Saulius, so if ‘Save for Web’ will implemented in 1.5, does that mean it will be a free update if I purchase Pixelmater today?

    Thanks,

    Gustavo

    15 years ago
  • Saulius Dailide

    Gustavo,

    don’t buy the app before you find it useful. However, all the updates in 1.X era are free.

    15 years ago
  • Colin Scroggins

    Just wanted to throw my hat in the ring as another person who is anxiously waiting on Save for Web. Until it arrives, I have to hang on to Adobe Fireworks. =(

    Glad to hear that you guys are putting so much thought into it. If you need a beta tester, let me know.

    15 years ago
  • foofoorabbit

    I’m always skeptical about people that use the “when feature x is implemented, I will buy the app” card. I’m most cases, these people never buy an app as they always find excuses not to buy an app. Hopefully the people that are saying “‘Save for Web’ is the only thing keeping me from buying Pixelmator” will honor their word and actually *buy* Pixelmator when 1.5 Spider lands. By the codename, we can assume that 1.5 will focus on the needs of people using Pixelmator for web graphics.

    15 years ago
  • fluffy

    @foofoorabbit: I actually *did* buy Pixelmator 1.1, and I’m glad they’re making progress, but it’s still not useful for what I use Photoshop for (pretty basic drawing stuff). I keep on hoping that they’ll improve the brush tools to make them actually useful for this stuff, but in the meantime I’m still stuck using Photoshop.

    I don’t know if 1.3 finally addresses the problems with the brush, but considering they’ve never addressed that in their blog posts and haven’t ever responded to my comments about such, I’m skeptical.

    On a similar note, while the gradient tool is very “cute” and “cool,” it’s not very useful, what with it being very cumbersome to do things like setting up a quick gradient between the current foreground color and transparent (or background), and I don’t really care for live editing but I do like being able to layer multiple gradients over each other since I basically use it as a shortcut for airbrushing a large swatch. It’s one of those cases where Pixelmator’s attempt at being awesome actually gets in the way of being useful.

    Every time a new release comes out I try it, and quickly find that while it gets some of the advanced stuff pretty well, it completely fails at the basics, and so I keep going back to Photoshop. It’s unfortunate.

    15 years ago
  • Roberto

    I played with the demo, loved it and just bought the license, to replace gimp for my occasional web stuff I need to do. However, AFAIK I can’t use it yet for my intended main purpose, which is editing RAW files from my digital camera, in best case, tightly integrated for roundtrip with Aperture. What are the plan for those features ?

    15 years ago
  • David Svensson

    Great release! You conviced me to buy the app. Now I only want to be able edit or convert text layers from Photoshop as I get a lot of such files. I want to leave PS behind me now. The Pixelmator text tool got a lot better, but I am missing some kind of kerning feature. I guess that is coming.

    15 years ago
  • Leland

    I freakin love you guys. This is the best updating I’ve ever seen. My only major concern (fonts) is fixed. Awesome.

    15 years ago
  • xfodder

    i noticed that the oval tool has anti-aliasing now, but what really needs anti-aliasing is when making rounded cornered rectangles … no matter what i try they always have ugly jagged edges

    15 years ago
  • Radu

    I’m a user of pixelmator and I’ve never posted anything on the site so far. However, this update is amazing. I can finally use pixelmator!!! It’s stable, fast and the canvas is NOT transparent. Wohoo! Amazing job!

    15 years ago
  • Kercal

    Been playing with P1.3 all day and, apart from a few key tools that I hadn’t realised how dependent I’ve become it’s a joy to use. Test is the best update for me, speed is hard to gauge as I also updated my aging 12 inch ibook for a nice new(ish) macbook so hard to say what’s hardware what’s software.

    Anyhow: lovely job, nice one Team Pixelmator. I know we all have the hit list of tools needing bringing in but for me it’s wave filter, polar coordinates filter (I do a particular abstract style that relies on these), text is sorted, nice one, which leaves CMYK as the main biggie.

    Personally I’m a guessin’ I’ll be kissing goodbye to the competition when you get to v2 but I’m certainly enjoying every update you do on the trip.

    15 years ago
  • Carlos Sisi

    After struggling most of the weekend with some photos I had to crop and resize, I have found an inmense relief finding this version much more faster and realiable with big pictures. No slowdowns or freezes before bringing such files to my screen. Very nice release, thanks!

    15 years ago
  • Anthony Pronk

    Love the new options!

    15 years ago
  • Chad

    Great new features. I especially love the Magic Eraser and the ability to change a color. This makes certain image-editing tasks much easier to perform than using Photoshop.

    15 years ago
  • JesperA

    That bokeh image is awesome, would serve pretty well as a desktop bakgrund, any chanse of getting that picture in high resolution?

    Great release anyway.

    15 years ago
  • psulli

    Holy Cats! I downloaded Pixelmator when it was first available and re-upped with a MacHeist. I have to say that 1.3 is such a great improvement. I am crazy pleased. Thank you for your efforts. It is paying off for me.

    15 years ago
  • mikes_corner

    it is a great update indeed, but i am still ticked off by the lack of text support. There is little to none control on text, no kerning, etc. Will this come in later versions?

    15 years ago
  • Gero

    The Speed improvements do come through on my system. It´s not so much
    noticable starting the app but loading images… night and day.

    And I love the popping messages when applying or undoing filters.

    More power to Core Animation I say! This is the first convincing application
    of CA I have seen so far except for the iPhone.

    And yes, I like the palette hiding. Nice touch if you´re fresh out of screen
    real estate. BUT: I´d like the auto-hiding as an option when making selections,
    as well, because right now I have to manually hide the palettes which is a tad
    impractical when trying to select.

    But all in all you definitely do improve with every release instead of just changing
    😉

    15 years ago
  • andi

    indeed, much faster! great job.

    can’t wait for 1.4 with the smudge tool! 😉

    15 years ago
  • Michael

    Ilove all the new tools!
    Really faster!
    But Please another vote for CMYK. I need it!!
    Also CHANNELS!! Advance ones , it is kind of needed BADLY!
    To be honest with you guys, I like gimp channels workflow over Photoshop.
    You simply right click and say, I want a new mask, and it ask from where I want to create that mask or if I want a new one.. pretty cool..
    As many have said.. once CMYK AND Channels are here.. Pixelmator only. 🙂

    15 years ago
  • AppleBoy

    After working for almost 2 weeks with 1.30, I am quite impressed with this update. New tools have really improved my workflow, speed is great, small touches are handy (i.e. popping messages utilizing Core Animation).

    Well done guys, keep up the great work, looking forward to next update.

    15 years ago
  • Michael Ströck

    I bought Pixelmator as soon as was possible, simply to support a low-level alternative to Photoshop, and then bought it again, twice, in bundles. I still have high hopes, and maybe you’ll get there, in about a year or two.

    I’m sorry, but what are all you people gushing on about? You need a reality check. Pixelmator is still utterly, utterly unusable for even medium-sized files. I just tried editing a 14.7 MB JPEG, but no luck. Not a single operation, not even something as basic as the eraser, completes in a reasonable amount of time. It sits there and does absolutely nothing for a few seconds –sometimes 10-15seconds– at a time. I have a current top of the line Macbook Pro – 2 x 2.8 GHz and 4GB of RAM. Other tools (like the magic wand) bring my entire system to a halt. I’m kind of amazed that that much processing power can’t do something that was absolutely no problem in Photoshop — 5 fucking years ago on a machine about 5 times slower.

    Unless you’re doing anything at all except very, very basic cropping and resizing, color correction and format conversion – Pixelmator is still a waste of time. It’s nice to watch all the enthusiasm, but please tone it down a bit – you have a long, long way to go.

    15 years ago
  • pemekscreen

    Hello

    This release is very good. Pixelmator very smooth working on my machine (alu imac) but …. When bezier curve lines ?

    15 years ago
  • Don

    Can the older versions of pixelmator work with Mac OSX version 10.4?

    15 years ago