From the moment the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil were announced, we just couldn’t wait to get our hands on them — we were itching to get Pixelmator working perfectly with both. And now we’re happy to introduce Pixelmator 2.2 for iOS, which feels awesome to use on the iPad Pro and lets you get the most out of the Apple Pencil.
We also added 3D Touch support on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, a new Pixel brush to create pixel art, a way better crop experience, and more.
Pixelmator on iPad Pro
First off, saying that we couldn’t wait to get our hands on the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil is just a slight understatement. As we waited for them to arrive at our office, everyone’s first words of the day were “Are they here yet?” We were all super excited to try them out and, of course, get an update out for you as soon as possible.
Using the Apple Pencil on the large iPad Pro display, you can do almost everything in Pixelmator with a lot more precision. Like scaling objects, working in specific areas with Retouch tools, tuning the Color Adjustment settings, and, well, doing everything else.
We’ve also added tilt, acceleration and pressure sensitivity support when painting, so using the brushes feels almost like drawing on paper. And, because the iPad Pro is such a powerful device, Pixelmator now supports huge, 16K images up to 100 megapixels, which means you can open and edit incredibly large photos and create even more advanced compositions.
3D Touch Support
On the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, we’ve added some really useful Quick Actions on the Home Screen and support for the new Peek and Pop feature in the Pixelmator Gallery thanks to 3D Touch. It definitely saves a few taps when you want to quickly import a photo or take a peek at an images before opening it. 3D Touch also allowed us to add pressure-sensitive painting, which feels really intuitive — you just press harder on the screen to get a thicker brushstroke or less for a thinner one.
Pixel Brush
Pixel artists — this one’s for you. As part of a new Basic brushes collection, we’ve included a brand-new Pixel brush. So now you can create awesome pixel art images with Pixelmator on your iPhone and iPad! The magic behind the brush is that, no matter what brush size you choose, the pixels you draw on the canvas automatically snap to the ones nearby. Making cool pixel-art images this way is really easy. Here’s what we’ve just created:
And it’s a free update for existing users, so visit the App Store, download the latest version and enjoy!
At Pixelmator Team, we take a great deal of pride in developing a high-quality, powerful and reliable app. Our goal is to make it the best in the world. In order to achieve that, we have no problem putting off new features to work on improving performance. Over the years, this has proved to be the right approach. However, we’d like to discuss one issue in a little more detail.
Just over a month ago, after the release of the final few beta versions of OS X El Capitan, we ran into a serious crashing issue on certain Macs. On these computers, the app would crash for no apparent reason, even when working with very basic images.
We immediately put everything else on hold to get to the bottom of this. We started looking for where we could have gone wrong, and we came up empty. It was tough to say the least. It was also tough seeing the App Store ratings we had worked so hard to earn take a hit because of this issue.
So, we went back, pored over the crash reports you sent us and, eventually, the cause became clear: Intel HD 3000* graphics card drivers. Even though the problem isn’t with Pixelmator, we haven’t given up on finding a workaround. We did find a way to reduce the crashing but that meant having to make the app run very slowly on those Macs. Unfortunately, nothing else seems to have worked yet.
Realizing that this isn’t something we can solve on our own, we reached out to Apple for help, and they’ve been great so far. If you haven’t done so already, please e-mail us at support@pixelmator.com, and we’ll contact you the instant we hear about a fix.
As always, we are 100% committed to making your favorite app even better. To cheer you (and ourselves) up a little bit, we’re currently preparing an update that will include a Retouch Extension, bringing Pixelmator’s incredible Repair Tool to your Photos app.
* The following models with Intel HD Graphics 3000 graphics cards are affected: MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011), MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2011), MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2011), Mac mini (Mid 2011).
It’s here! Our latest and greatest version of Pixelmator has just hit the shelves of the Mac App Store. It brings some very exciting updates, including full support for OS X El Capitan, the new Split View feature, and a powerful, Metal-based Photos Extension together with a range of other improvements and fixes. This update really did take a great deal of effort on our part and the things we’ve done under the hood with the Photos Extension are seriously awesome.
OS X El Capitan
With the release of El Capitan, Apple introduced a unified OS X and iOS Core Image technology. And OS X Core Image is the foundation on which Pixelmator is built. As you can imagine, once the foundation is modified, things might get really messy. And they did.
We started to work on El Capitan support since its Beta was introduced back in June, during the WWDC. And today, after more than four months of work, we’re extremely proud to announce that Pixelmator is ready and works great on OS X El Capitan!
Together with that, we’re bringing a bunch of other neat enhancements, such as an enhanced Force Touch support, which makes painting with Force Touch trackpad way smoother, San Francisco as the new user interface font, and the cool new Split View feature, which lets you work with Pixelmator and any other app side-by-side, in full screen.
And there’s more.
Pixelmator Photos Extension
OS X El Capitan has introduced the ability for third-party developers to create Photo Editing extensions. And with Pixelmator 3.4 Twist, just two weeks after the official El Capitan release, we’re adding some amazing, incredibly fast Distort tools to your Photos app.
With the Pixelmator Photos Extension, you can reshape areas of your images to retouch photos, create artistic effects or simply have fun with your photos without having to leave the Photos app. Its really fun to use, and the quality and speed are incredible. All thanks to a few groundbreaking Apple technologies.
One of them is Metal, which allows the Photos Extension to be as good as it can possibly be. It gives the Extension a direct access to the GPU of your Mac, cutting down compute times and making graphics processing lightning quick. It also allowed us to boost the quality of all Distort tools to the very extremes. That’s just something you need to see for yourself.
To be honest, creating the Photos Extension with Metal was a lot of fun so we’re very excited about what the future holds for image editing with this and other amazing Apple technologies.
And there’s a whole lot more to the Pixelmator Photos Extension. You can learn about the details on the Pixelmator Photos Extension page.
So there it is. Go ahead and update to our latest version and enjoy Pixelmator on OS X El Capitan, together with Split View and other great features, as well as the incredible Pixelmator Photos Extension.
This is just the beginning of things to come. We hope you’ll love the new features and we hope you’ll continue inspiring us to improve.
note
If you have a MacBook released in 2011 with an Intel HD Graphics 3000 graphics card, you may continue experiencing some issues. We’re really doing our best to find a fix. In fact, we’ve even asked Apple for help on this and they’ve always been great in the past, so we hope to find a solution as soon as possible. If your MacBook has this graphics card, leave us your contacts at support@pixelmator.com and we’ll get in touch with you personally as soon as we have any news about this.
A few days ago, we released a very cool update to Pixelmator for iOS with some amazing new features. And here is an in-depth overview of the key enhancements you get with the new Pixelmator version and a glimpse into why exactly we made all of these changes.
iOS 9Pixelmator now works great on the new iOS 9.
MultitaskingMultitasking on iPad via Split View and Slide Over.
8K SupportOpen and edit images in stunning 8K resolution.
iOS 9 Support
Simply put, Pixelmator now works great on iOS 9. For those of you who enjoy digging deeper, we’ve put together some more details on the main new features. Read on.
With the Open in Place feature, you can now open a Pixelmator image from anywhere you want to (for example, from iCloud Drive), edit your image in Pixelmator, and save the changes you’ve made back onto the same document. This means you can have all of your most recent edits in the same document.
This might not seem like such a big deal, but it is. Previously, when you opened an image from iCloud Drive, Pixelmator had to duplicate this document and save its copy in the Pixelmator image gallery, which you would then edit (Pixelmator just didn’t have another choice). This meant that once you edited and saved your image, the original document in your iCloud Drive was not changed.
And what if you really needed to have the edited image in your iCloud Drive? In this case, you would have to “Save a Copy” of your edited document back to your iCloud Drive. The worst part was that you had to repeat the same process every single time you wanted to edit an image and wanted to be able to find your most recent edits in the same place. Every time.
The new iOS 9 Open in Place feature allowed us to simplify this process. Now, when you open a document from another location (again, let’s take iCloud Drive as an example), instead of making a copy, Pixelmator gallery creates an alias for the exact same document. Therefore, you can open an image from another location, edit it in Pixelmator, and then save your changes right onto the same document in the exact place you opened it from. How much simpler is that?
The Save to Photos feature is quite similar. It helps you to get rid of all of the duplicating inconvenience when editing images from your Photos app. You can now open an image from Photos, edit it in Pixelmator, and save it back onto the same image. Just a much more clever way to edit your photos.
We’ve also added a feature that improves the ease of sharing your images—the ability to quickly copy the entire image composition to Clipboard.
Previously, you could copy any single layer of your image with just a few taps. You still have that capability. Yet if you wanted to share your entire image composition—for example, a photo with text and shapes—there was no really easy way to do this. You could either merge all of your image layers and then make a copy, or you could export your image into a different file format (for example, PNG) and share it afterward. Not the most efficient workflow.
What we did in Pixelmator 2.1 for iOS is we’ve added a simple feature that allows you to copy your entire image composition, so now it’s way easier to copy and paste the whole image into a text message, an email, or a social channel.
Most of you already know that we focus a lot of attention on making Pixelmator as native to iOS users as possible, and we definitely couldn’t have missed the new iOS 9 default font. So once you upgrade your app, take a few moments to appreciate how much more beautiful yet perfectly native Pixelmator looks with the new and totally modern San Francisco user interface font.
Multitasking on iPad
We also added Multitasking on iPad with the Split View, Slide Over, and Picture in Picture features, which allow you to use Pixelmator for iPad and any other app at the same time.
For example, you’re editing your image in Pixelmator and receive a text message from your friend. Without closing Pixelmator, you open your Messages app with literally a single swipe, quickly respond, and then slide the app away to get back to editing your image. It’s a really fast way to do side tasks without interrupting your workflow.
You can also use Split View and work with Pixelmator and any other app side by side, both at the same time. For example, you can work on an image you’re going to use in your presentation and have your Keynote slides open at the same time. So you can make just the right adjustments and quickly paste your image into Keynote (the new Copy Image feature makes this really easy to do).
One of the most obvious and most useful ways you can use Split View together with Pixelmator is to search for images in Safari, which makes it even easier to add new elements to your composition.
What’s more, with Picture in Picture, you can edit your image while watching a video (for example, an image-editing tutorial or something that inspires you) or while video chatting.
Adding Multitasking support can be quite a burden. If an app is not fluid (that is, not able to automatically adapt to different environments), you have to rethink the way it looks on every Multitasking layout individually. That’s almost the same as adapting every menu item, every button, and every popover for six new devices.
Yet in some cases, it might not be that hard.
The Pixelmator user interface is based on Apple’s Auto Layout technology, so it looked good on all Multitasking layouts almost automatically. All we needed to do was to make some minor design adjustments in the most unusual, tall “second app” layouts.
By the way, we have a few more layouts ready for the near future (any ideas for which new device?)
note
Slide Over and Picture in Picture features are available on iPad Air and later, as well as on iPad mini 2 and later. Split View is available on iPad Pro, iPad Air 2, and iPad mini 4.
8K Image Support
This one is our favorite. Just a while back, Pixelmator allowed you to open and edit images of up to 4K resolution. That’s not too bad, yet we always craved to let you open really large, professional-quality images. It’s just what we thought was the right thing to do. In fact, we’ve been trying to find a way to do this for more than six months!
We’ve spent most of our time experimenting with the so-called Tiles support. We tried to divide a large image into many smaller images (something like stitching separate patches) so your iOS would understand them as separate images and would not apply the size constraint.
Unfortunately, that did not work quite so well for us. After many months, we still could not use this approach with many of our image editing features (for example, Effects). But then we got our hands on iOS 9.
A while back, one of our developers was digging really deep into the new iOS, exploring everything we could use to enhance Pixelmator. He also tried to run some tasks with large textures (translation for humans: large images). And it worked! After six months of hard work and hundreds of attempts to create a unique solution, what worked was our persistence and, well, opening a large image.
It appears that the optimizations we had implemented by that time were more than enough to support the new resolution limit that comes with iOS 9 on all 64-bit devices.
It’s hard to imagine the atmosphere that was here in our office once we ran some more tests and were absolutely sure that Pixelmator can now let you open and edit really—truly—large images! Right in Pixelmator, on your iPad, iPhone, or even on your iPod, if you wish.
This means you can now use a professional SLR camera to take photos of up to 50 megapixels, instantly upload them onto your iOS device, and use pro-grade Pixelmator tools to instantly edit and share them.
We really wanted to try out the enhanced Pixelmator, so this summer, we worked with a passionate mountaineer-photographer, Saulius Damulevicius. Saulius had just come back from an amazing expedition to Chan Tengri (7439 m.), his personal highest peak. He was documenting his entire journey with a professional mirrorless system camera and used Pixelmator on his iPhone to process and share his photos every time he went back to the base camp. He gave us some amazing feedback and some stunning images, too.
And that’s what 8K image support ultimately is—the possibility of editing your professional images right when and where you need to, no matter whether you use your iPhone or a professional camera. You can.
note
8K images are supported on iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, iPad mini 4, and iPod touch 6th generation.
All of these features make us think of how far mobile image editing has already gone and how much there’s yet to be done. Following along these lines, we’re super excited about the new iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and the next-generation technologies that come with them.
It all obliges our team to constantly innovate and focus on creating next-generation, professional, powerful image editing tools. This provides a clear focus for the future of both Pixelmator for iOS and Pixelmator for Mac.
Many huge plans ahead. So stay tuned.
We’re back with more great news.
But before jumping in, we want to thank all of you for your feedback about Pixelmator for iPhone and for sharing your stunning artwork with us. It is absolutely amazing to be able to create something that you enjoy, and it’s just as awesome to see how creative people get when they have the right tools.
So, thanks for sharing!
Today, we’re bringing some great new enhancements to Pixelmator for iOS.
Dynamic Touch
First off, we’ve enhanced all Retouch tools with a cool new feature, which we call Dynamic Touch.
When you touch the screen with your finger, Dynamic Touch detects the finger surface area in contact with the screen and automatically adjusts the brush size when the surface area changes.
It’s really simple to use—touch the screen with the tip of your finger to create thin strokes and use a larger finger surface area for thicker lines. This makes retouching images way faster and more precise.
Repair Tool
Next, do you remember the jaw-dropping, advanced repairing algorithm we recently introduced to Pixelmator for Mac? Well, we’re bringing the same repairing magic to Pixelmator for iOS. This means that now you can use your iPad and iPhone to remove objects from your photos, unbelievably fast and with exactly the same quality you get on your Mac. How good is that?
Pixelmator for iOS 2.0.2 also includes other great enhancements, improvements and bug fixes. You can learn about them here.
Learning resources
But that’s not all! We’re also introducing two great new ways to learn about Pixelmator for iOS features and how to use them.
Learn everything there is to know with the new, complete User Guide or go ahead and watch short, inspiring Pixelmator for iPhone tutorials.
We’ll be constantly sharing new tutorials, so make sure to check back once in a while.
We’re extremely excited to let you know that the hot, new super-powerful Pixelmator for iPhone is out now in the App Store.
And it’s great — it’s a complete photo editing, painting and layer-based graphic design app for your iPhone.
Pixelmator is a universal app that is every bit as powerful as Pixelmator for iPad. It even comes with exactly the same magical Repair tool that we demonstrated at the Apple Special Event last October — and it works just as amazingly on the iPhone.
Pixelmator for iPhone brings not only all the powerful Pixelmator for iPad features to your iPhone, but also some cool new stuff such as Metal-powered Distort Tools and a new Clone tool (long anticipated by our iPad users).
Pixelmator for iPhone is available on the App Store for $4.99 and it is a free download for those of you who already have an iPad version.
Go ahead and download the world’s most powerful mobile image editing app — we are eager to see what you guys create using the new Pixelmator for iPhone.
P.S. As for the near future, an in-depth Pixelmator for iPhone ibook and a bunch of awesome video tutorials are in the works. Stay tuned.
Pixelmator for iPhone is coming. And it’s awesome.
It sports all of the incredible features and power of Pixelmator for iPad, right on your iPhone.
It adds some amazing new features, too, such as the new Distort Tools, powered by Apple’s Metal technology (translation: incredibly fast graphics processing tech, mainly used for creating graphics-intense games).
If you don’t own Pixelmator for iPad yet, now is the best time to get it — not only because Pixelmator for iPad is on sale now (50% off), but also because all Pixelmator for iPad owners will automatically get Pixelmator for iPhone as soon as it is out. Just like that.
Yup, Pixelmator is a universal app and works seamlessly on iPhone and iPad alike.
How good is that!
Pixelmator 3.3.2 is out, featuring lots of new stuff — Photos app support, Force Touch trackpad support, jaw-dropping Repair Tool enhancements, and much more.
We simply love the new Photos app for Mac. That’s why we are excited to let you know that you can now access your Photos library right from the Photo Browser in Pixelmator. It looks good and works great.
The new Force Touch trackpad support is also here for you to play with. You can now paint with pressure sensitivity using a Force Touch trackpad on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. The force sensors detect how much pressure you’re applying, and Pixelmator changes the size of your brush. It feels just like painting with a stylus.
Finally, we are very proud of the unique, incredibly powerful Repair Tool in Pixelmator for Mac, which is now up to 5 times faster. Since we’ve spent so much time perfecting the tech behind this tool.
Stunning, isn’t it? If you don’t believe what you just saw (which wouldn’t be much of a surprise), go ahead and update Pixelmator to 3.3.2. Then, download the photo you just saw in the video and try it for yourself. You can download it here.
The Repair Tool is one of our many fun and interesting secret scientific projects. We even used the new Mac Pro (because it’s extremely fast and powerful) to automatically improve our Repair technology algorithms.
Since there are numerous ways to repair any area of an image, our Mac Pro worked incredibly hard for months to find the best algorithm. It analyzed millions of possible ways to repair areas of various complexity, and then it compared the speed and quality ratio of each final result. Lastly, our Mac Pro—this is awesome—derived a repairing strategy that gives the optimal result every single time. How smart is that?
In other words, the new Mac Pro did a great job. And because it did so well, you can now wipe away unwanted objects in Pixelmator for Mac extremely quickly and with superb quality.
Enjoy the new Pixelmator update and please remember that we feel great when you let us know what you think about our work.
We’ll talk to you very soon about some awesome new stuff. Thanks.
We’re super excited to finally let you know that the new and awesome Pixelmator for iPad update is out now.
Just to remind you — Pixelmator for iPad is the best image editor on the iPad and it is one of the most innovative and technologically advanced iOS apps ever built. And oh, if you are a Mac user and not that interested in iOS, just listen for a sec: All the cool things we now make for the iPad are coming to the Mac. But more on that later.
In the meantime, read on to find out what we’ve packed for you in Pixelmator for iPad 1.1 Aquarelle.
Watercolor painting technology
This thing is unique for the iPad, extremely innovative and super advanced. The secret behind it is that while you paint with the new watercolor brushes, the Pixelmator painting engine simulates applying wet paint onto paper. And just like in real life, when strokes overlap, their colors blend with each other and create an entirely new color with a soft gradient in-between.
Watercolor is great for painting, experimenting or for adding an artistic touch to your photos, since hey, even not-so-great paintings look awesome when painted in watercolor.
The new Color Picker
It’s not just simply a Color Picker. It is the most beautiful Color Picker ever. In addition to all the standard color choosing options and elegance, it also features an ability to quickly access your recently used colors and the new Color Grid. Color Grid lets you pinch into a chosen color to get a grid of its shades, so you can choose colors with much greater precision, and most importantly, have fun while doing it. You’ve just got to watch this Color Picker video.
2x Faster Painting Performance
Since its very first day, Pixelmator for iPad Paint Engine has had the best-in-class performance. With the new watercolor technology and major performance improvements, it just got even better. Yup — up to two times faster! We did that not because we needed to, but because we could.
Best-in-class Photoshop support
16-bit, CMYK, Grayscale Photoshop images as well as Photoshop images with masks are now also supported. In other words, you won’t find a better app for working with the Adobe Photoshop file format on iPad or any other tablet. Even Adobe Photoshop Touch is eating our dust.
And many more amazing details
We have also added many other smaller but very handy features, such as an ability to insert a photo as a new layer from iCloud Drive, lock image transparency with Lock Alpha, open RAW image preview, use a refreshed Eyedropper tool, see a live brush preview, enjoy much better overall stylus support, and have full support for Adonit styluses.
If that weren’t enough, we also added many other subtle tweaks that you can read about in our Pixelmator for iPad 1.1 release notes.
Pixelmator for iPad is awesome. We hope you’ll love the new updates as much as we enjoyed creating them. Please check it out ASAP and let us know what you think.
Learn more about the new Pixelmator for iPad or view in the App Store.
The first awesome major update of Pixelmator for iPad 1.1, codenamed Aquarelle, is coming.
Codename Aquarelle pretty much says it all about the release – it is beautiful, colorful and, well, you guessed it: in addition to many awesome new features and improvements, it also includes a fantastic watercolor painting technology.
We prepared a short sneak peek video of watercolor in Pixelmator 1.1 Aquarelle.
Watercolor painting is magic. It takes advantage of our new super advanced blending techniques to paint watercolor on your iPad as realistically as in real life. The new watercolor brushes that come with 1.1 Aquarelle are also simply amazing. Even if you are not that much into painting, just by simply playing with the new brushes, you will most definitely create some awesome artwork. And, if you are good at painting, you will create magic – that’s for sure.
Watercolor brushes alone make this update super awesome, but we have some more goodies packed in Pixelmator for iPad 1.1 Aquarelle. Stay tuned for more, or subscribe to the Pixelmator Newsletter to be the first to know about this awesome new update.
Oh, and by the way, Pixelmator 1.1 Aquarelle is going to be a free update for all existing Pixelmator users.
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Open in Place
Save to Photos
Copy Image
San Francisco
Slide Over
Split View
Picture in Picture
