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.
Photomator 3.1 introduces the advanced Smart Deband feature, which enhances photo quality by removing color banding and increasing color depth with just a click. This incredible new feature lets you seamlessly enhance your JPEGs or other photos shot in lossy formats to near-RAW quality. And, to celebrate the back to school season, for a limited time, you can get Photomator and Pixelmator Pro for more than 30% off.
AI-Powered Smart Deband
Color banding appears as distinct bands of color, transitioning abruptly from one shade to another instead of colors blending smoothly. This is commonly seen in low-quality photos with gradients, such as landscapes where the sky dominates the photo or portraits with vibrant gradient backgrounds. The new Smart Deband feature effortlessly transforms these color bands into smooth gradients, keeping the rest of the photo detailed and sharp. While gradients in areas such as the sky are more evident, many subtler gradients in your photos might go unnoticed at first. By using Smart Deband, you’ll also enhance these smaller gradient areas, boosting the overall quality of your photos.
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Editing photos in compressed formats like JPEG can also be tricky as even minor color adjustments can lead to unexpected color artifacts. For example, enhancing the blue in the sky might end up in patchy blue areas rather than a smooth gradient, even if the JPEG seemed perfectly fine before making the adjustments. Since formats like JPEG compress images to retain perceived quality while keeping file sizes small, color artifacts are likely to pop up only during the editing process.
To address this issue, Smart Deband intelligently removes color artifacts and increases the color depth of your photos to 16 bits per channel – this is equivalent to the color depth of a RAW image. While merely increasing color depth doesn’t have a significant impact on its own, it makes a difference when paired with color banding removal. The enhanced color depth means there’s more color information available in the image, allowing the transformation of color bands into smoother gradients. It also ensures that you can edit each shade within those gradients without experiencing further posterization, offering a level of flexibility similar to editing a RAW image.
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Back to School Sale
Pixelmator Pro and Photomator are currently on sale for more than 30% off. You can get a 30% discount on Pixelmator Pro exclusively in the Mac App Store. Also, for a limited time, you can download Photomator on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad and get over 30% off the first year of its annual subscription – you can redeem this special offer directly within Photomator.
We’ve been extra busy here at the Pixelmator Team this summer, and we’re excited to bring you another update, this time introducing some major improvements to the Denoise tool in Photomator and Pixelmator Pro. With a handy new intensity slider and significantly improved noise analysis and removal algorithms, Denoise is now smarter and more capable than ever and we’re here to tell you all about it.
Denoise Algorithm Improvements
The Denoise tool in Photomator and Pixelmator Pro has been redesigned from the ground up with smart under-the-hood enhancements that significantly improve how it recognizes and removes noise from images. In particular, Denoise can now tackle noise of any scale. This means that you’re no longer limited to removing fine digital noise, but can just as easily get rid of analog film grain and even synthetic noise added using image editing apps.
What’s more, by leveraging a UNet-like architecture — a specialized type of neural network — we’ve doubled the size of the AI model which, in turn, makes Denoise twice as smart at filtering out noise compared to the previous version. This helped us fix issues from previous versions where noise would be removed unevenly, or image areas would become too blurry, so you can now enjoy much cleaner images, without unwanted artifacts.
Denoise algorithm improvements
2xbigger AI model
4xsmarter noise analysis
2xbetter noise reduction
Color and Contrast Recovery
From now on, Denoise doesn’t just simply remove noise — it can help recover image colors and contrast, too! Images heavily affected by noise, especially those shot in low light with high ISO settings, can often look faded and flat, or have undesirable color tints. Using Denoise, you can revert some of the noise damage by bringing back the contrast and original colors to photos, giving them more vibrancy and depth.
Denoise can now remove a new type of image artifact known as RAW decoder artifacts. From unwanted color shifts to color banding, these artifacts are not present in the original RAW images but can get introduced in the process of converting the read-only sensor data of a RAW file into a viewable image. By removing RAW decoder artifacts, Denoise offers a great way to ensure your RAW images always maintain the highest possible quality.
With the new Denoise Intensity slider, you can now have more control over just how much noise you want to remove from your images. Lowering the Denoise intensity will preserve more of the original image details but also keep a bit of noise while increasing intensity will make the image smoother overall. If you’re looking to remove noise from multiple images at a time, we’ve also updated Pixelmator Pro’s Denoise action in AppleScript and the Shortcuts app to offer the option for adjusting noise intensity.
We’re incredibly happy with how much Denoise has improved with this update and we can’t wait for you to try it out with your own images! If you’ve already got Pixelmator Pro or Photomator on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, all you need to do is download the latest update from the App Store — it’s free to all existing users.
Updates to both Pixelmator Pro and Photomator have just dropped, bringing support for compressed RAWs from more than 20 Fujifilm cameras, including the highly-requested X-T5 and X-H2 models. The updates also include the ability to open and edit compressed and uncompressed RAWs from the brand-new Fujifilm X-S20 model. This is an incredibly exciting milestone for us – for the very first time, we’re bringing support for RAW formats that aren’t natively supported by Apple!
While Apple devices offer support for many popular RAW formats, the increasingly popular compressed Fujifilm RAWs are currently not supported on macOS and iOS. As a result, you cannot preview or edit these photos on Mac, iPhone, or iPad. To address this, we’ve developed a brand new RAW pipeline, letting you open and edit compressed Fujifilm RAWs in Pixelmator Pro and Photomator. By using Apple’s RAW engine as a foundation, we ensure that this implementation remains entirely native, meaning that working with compressed Fujifilm RAWs will be just as smooth as working with any other image format. You can nondestructively adjust colors, crop photos, remove objects, and even use Shortcuts and AppleScript to batch edit them or batch convert them into Apple-supported image formats. The compressed Fujifilm RAW support is also not limited to Mac – you can open and edit these RAWs on your iPhone and iPad.
List of compressed Fujifilm RAWs supported by Photomator and Pixelmator Pro:
To make sure your specific camera model is supported on your device, check this article.
We hope this makes some folks who shoot on Fujifilm happy! If your camera model is not supported yet by Photomator or Pixelmator Pro, you can share your suggestions for formats you’d like to see us support by filling out this form. As always, this update is free for all existing Pixelmator Pro and Photomator users, so make sure to download it from the App Store.
Today’s a big day! Our team has just released Photomator for Mac. From state-of-the-art color adjustments to intelligent AI tools, powerful Repair and Clone tools, and batch editing, Photomator for Mac is a photo editing powerhouse. Built from the ground up for macOS, it runs incredibly smoothly and fast, redefining the photo editing experience on Mac.
If you’re curious about what makes Photomator for Mac so special, we’re here to share some great reasons that showcase its awesomeness.
It’s packed with powerful photo editing tools
In Photomator for Mac, you’ll find everything you need to edit and manage your photos. It includes next-generation color adjustments powered by an incredibly advanced texture-aware algorithm, powerful retouching tools, batch editing, and much more. Photomator for Mac also brings your favorite AI features, such as automatic photo enhancement, denoising, image upscaling, and automatic subject, sky, and background selections. To make professional photo editing a breeze, Photomator for Mac brings a powerful photo browser powered by Photos and a filmstrip that let you easily browse images and quickly jump into editing them. And, full file browser support is coming later this year.
It’s incredibly fast
Photomator for Mac is built from the ground up for Mac and it makes the most of native macOS technologies, such as Apple Silicon, Swift UI, Core ML, Core Image, and Metal. These advanced technologies make your photo editing experience ultra smooth and fast, even when editing, zooming, or scrolling large images.
It’s available on Mac, iPhone, and iPad
With its full cross-platform compatibility, Photomator offers a familiar experience on all devices – Mac, iPhone, and iPad. All your edits are seamlessly syncing with the Photos library and, with support for iCloud, across all your devices, so you can start editing on one device and pick up on another. And what’s best, if you buy Photomator for Mac, you’ll also get unlimited access to the iPhone and iPad version with the same license.
This only scratches the surface of what Photomator can actually do. Make sure to try it out yourself – it’s free to download from the Mac App Store. If you already use Photomator on iPhone and iPad, you can check the FAQs to find out if you’re eligible for a free version of Photomator for Mac.
Together with the launch of Photomator for Mac, we’ve also released an update to Pixelmator Pro with major improvements to Photomator document support. Using the Edit with Pixelmator Pro feature, you can quickly open an edited photo in Pixelmator Pro with all the nondestructive changes fully preserved and visible. This makes it super easy to round-trip between the apps – for example, you can edit a photo, then send it to Pixelmator Pro to add some text, shapes, paint on it, and more.
If you’d like to check out the differences between Photomator and Pixelmator Pro, you can head over to our Compare page to see a side-by-side comparison and find out whether you need one or the other (or both!) for your specific workflow.
A new update for Photomator is now available, bringing a ton of fantastic new features, changes, and improvements. But hold on, did we say Photomator? That’s right — the app now has a snappier and catchier new name! To complete the makeover, version 2.3 also features a beautiful, refreshed design, but the biggest highlight of this update lies beyond the looks.
We’re excited to introduce an all-new and incredibly powerful selective adjustments feature that will completely change the way you edit photos in Photomator. From now on, you can easily select and edit specific areas of a photo using a variety of selections and masks, and even make selections automatically, using AI. There are just so many great new features in this update, so read along if you’d like to learn all about them, and stick around till the end for one more, very exciting announcement.
AI-Powered Selective Adjustments
The new selective adjustments feature in Photomator makes it easier than ever to create stunning edits, with a whole new level of creative control and precision. You can now select specific areas of a photo you’d like to edit and only make changes to those selected areas. And, thanks to an AI-powered selection algorithm, you can select common elements in photos — people, backgrounds, and skies — automatically.
With a simple tap, the AI algorithm intelligently scans the photo, finds where the subject, background, or sky is, and makes a precise selection of that area for you, so you can jump into making edits right away. For example, in landscape photos where the sky is too bright, you can select just the sky and reduce its brightness without making the entire photo darker.
Gradient, Color, and Brush Selections
In addition to making automatic selections, you can also work with customizable gradient masks, select areas based on their color, or simply paint over the areas you want to edit with a brush. You can create as many selections as you like in different parts of the photo and even combine multiple selections.
Linear and radial gradients
Create straight-line or elliptical transitions between edited and unedited areas of a photo. You can easily reposition or adjust the softness of the gradients using handy, on-image controls.
Color range selections
Adjust specific colors or entire color ranges in photos by selecting them using the eyedropper tool. Even in low-resolution or heavily compressed photos, you can enjoy especially smooth transitions between colors thanks to advanced image processing technologies (the same ones we used to create the Remove Color adjustment in Pixelmator Pro!).
Brush selections
Make especially precise selections in photos by painting over them with a brush. Easily customize the brush by adjusting its size, softness, and opacity. Also, if you accidentally paint over something you didn’t mean to select, you can always erase the selection by switching to the Erase mode.
Effortless Selection Editing
When you add selections to a photo, they will appear as individual layers in the Layers browser. This makes it really easy to keep track of your edits. You can turn these selection layers on and off, and find additional options for renaming, deleting, or rearranging them. In the Layers browser, you can also use blending modes to refine the selections, combine them, or create striking artistic effects. For example, you can automatically select the subject, sky, or background in a photo and then use a brush to paint over some extra details you want to include in the selection.
This wraps up the biggest new features in Photomator 2.3. Check out our What’s New page for the full scoop on all the smaller changes included in this update. To try out the new features, head over to the App Store and make sure you’re all up to date with the latest and greatest version of Photomator.
Photomator for Mac TestFlight Beta is Now Available
For those of you who have been eagerly waiting — Photomator for Mac is almost, almost here. For the final stretch of the journey, we’d love to invite you to become a beta tester for Photomator and help us ensure its official launch goes as smoothly as possible. Keep in mind that we have limited testing spots available, so if you’re interested in participating, fill out a quick form below for a chance to be the first to explore Photomator on Mac.
Hello everyone! We’ve got some exciting news to share with you today. Over the past few months we’ve been working on something slightly different from what we usually do — we’ve teamed up with the amazing team at Peakto to bring you a smart new way to sort and organize your Pixelmator Pro documents, all in one place.
Peakto automatically gathers all the Pixelmator Pro documents on your Mac into a single catalog where they can then be managed in various ways. You can flag and rate documents, search for documents by specific keywords, create new catalogs, or use the power of AI to sort documents based on their content and even colors! What’s more, Pixelmator Pro and Peakto are always in sync so the changes you make to your documents in Pixelmator Pro appear in your Peakto catalogs in real time.
Pixelmator Pro and Peakto are able to work together seamlessly thanks to a clever Shortcuts app integration. Using Shortcuts, Peakto can access Pixelmator Pro document previews without opening the app itself or duplicating the documents. Plus, the document previews are ultra-high quality which makes it easy to find, preview, and work with just the files you need.
To celebrate this awesome collaboration, the cool guys and gals at Peakto are offering a generous 40% discount to all Pixelmator Pro users with a code SPECIAL-PIXELMATOR-40. Starting today, the special offer is available for two weeks on all Peakto versions, including the one-time purchase, monthly, and yearly plans.
Hey everyone! We’re excited to announce the release of Pixelmator Pro 3.3.2, featuring the stunning new Book Club collection of design templates. They’re perfect for bookshops, book clubs, and any readers who want to share their book reviews in style!
The collection brings 17 templates, including posters, cards, social media posts, and stories, that you can quickly customize with just a few clicks. Simply replace the placeholders with your own images and choose from any of the beautiful, built-in color palettes. What’s more, thanks to our AI-powered template editing features, personalizing templates is a breeze. For example, when replacing placeholder images, Pixelmator Pro can automatically remove backgrounds, find the best composition, and upscale low resolution images, so creating great designs is easier and faster than ever.
Make sure to check out the new Book Club collection in the What’s New category of the template browser. The update is free to all existing users and is available from the Mac App Store starting today, so go ahead and try out these gorgeous new templates for yourself!
Pixelmator Pro 3.3.1 adds 12 new, premium device mockups featuring the latest Mac, iPhone, and iPad devices. In today’s update, you’ll find a collection of beautiful, true-to-life mockups and some stunning stylized versions designed by professional artists.
Designed following Apple’s design standards, the new device mockups are perfect for pretty much anything you can imagine — from personal use to web publishing, product marketing, and more. You can easily personalize mockups by replacing the placeholder images with your own designs, or choose from a variety of beautiful shadow styles and background colors to find the look that works best for your design. And, with pixel-perfect screen sizes, you can be sure your designs will always look exceptionally sharp. If you’d like to learn how you can create pixel-perfect designs yourself, we’ve prepared a quick step-by-step tutorial to help you get started.
Photographic mockups
Standard Apple device bezels
Pixel-perfect screen sizes
Transparent backgrounds
Ultra-realistic shadows
Stylized mockups
Artist-designed device bezels
Pixel-perfect design and screen sizes
Fully editable shape layers
Resolution-independent scaling
What’s more, both the device and background in each mockup are fully editable. This means you can easily move the devices on the canvas together with placeholder images and shadows, combine several devices together, or paste them into other designs.
Ready to try out the new mockups? Check out the What’s New category in the Templates browser to easily keep track of any new templates or mockups added to Pixelmator Pro. Pixelmator Pro 3.3.1 is a free update for all existing Pixelmator Pro users and new users can get it for $49.99 on Mac App Store.
Pixelmator Pro 3.3, codenamed Mosaic, has just been released, bringing an all-new Remove Color adjustment for quickly removing color from images and even videos, powerful Clarity, Selective Clarity, and Texture adjustments for intelligently enhancing fine details in images, new stroke styles and more options for customizing strokes, new ways to save edits using sidecar files, and a whole lot more.
Remove Color
Today, we’re super excited to introduce Remove Color — one of the newest and most powerful additions to the color adjustments tools in Pixelmator Pro. With Remove Color, you can get rid of solid colors or entire color ranges in images and videos with remarkable quality and ease. Simply pick the color you want to remove using the eyedropper and watch it instantly — and seamlessly — disappear. Remove Color intelligently works around any compression artifacts in images, so you can enjoy exceptionally smooth and super high-quality transitions between transparent and opaque areas.
Remove Color is not just powerful, it’s incredibly smart and flexible, too. Featuring a state-of-the-art texture-aware algorithm under its hood, Remove Color lets you quickly refine selections with easy-to-use controls. With just three simple controls — Color Range, Luminance Range, and Intensity sliders — you can adjust exactly how much of the selected color will be removed from an image and achieve professional results in seconds. Check out our latest YouTube tutorial to learn how you can use Remove Color to remove a green screen from a video in a few simple steps.
Texture-Aware Color Adjustments
After their debut in Pixelmator Photo, the Clarity, Selective Clarity, and Texture adjustments are coming to Pixelmator Pro, together with improved Shadows, Highlights, Exposure, and Brightness adjustments. Just like Remove Color, these adjustments are texture-aware and have been designed to understand how humans perceive light, shadows, and colors. Thanks to this perception-based approach, the edited photos look especially natural and true to life.
Clarity & Texture
The new Clarity and Texture adjustments let you enhance the fine details in images in subtle, yet powerful ways. By increasing texture, you can make fine details in images look sharper and more focused. And increasing clarity will make images clearer and more defined.
Selective Clarity
The Selective Clarity adjustment lets you adjust clarity and texture selectively, in the shadows, midtones, or highlights of an image. While clarity and texture are typically used to make details in images stand out more, you can also use these adjustments to create the opposite effect. Check out our tutorial on this neat little technique for smoothing out skin using Selective Clarity.
Shadow and Highlight Recovery
Thanks to the improvements to Shadows and Highlights, you can now recover much more detail from images that are too dark or too bright. The adjustments are now more precise, too. When adjusting shadows or highlights, only the darkest and brightest areas of the image will be affected, leaving the midtones untouched. You’ll find Shadows and Highlights in the new Basic adjustments group (previously called Lightness), along with the updated Exposure and Brightness adjustments, and the all-new Clarity and Texture.
Stroke Styles
Pixelmator Pro 3.3 adds a variety of new stroke styles and even more options for customizing strokes, letting you easily create beautiful outlines around videos, images, paths, and shapes. When adjusting strokes, you can now change stroke cap and corner styles, choose from a range of new endpoints, change stroke position, create dashed lines with custom spacing, and more. Also, you can get extra creative with your designs by filling strokes with your own patterns thanks to the new Pattern fill type, which is also available when using the Fill style. Once you’ve created a stroke design you like, you can save it as a preset to easily reuse it.
Sidecar Files
From now on, you can directly open and edit images — such as JPEG or PNG — in their original format and then save them back to the same file format while preserving all nondestructive edits and layers. This seamless workflow is made possible thanks to the new sidecar file feature. A sidecar file is a special kind of Pixelmator Pro document that is attached to the original image and stores all its edits elsewhere on your Mac or in iCloud.
Unlike regular Pixelmator Pro documents which can only be opened using Pixelmator Pro, images with sidecar edits look and behave just like regular images. For example, you can easily share such images online or open them in other apps without having to export them first. You can customize the document opening and saving options in the new Editing tab in Pixelmator Pro Settings.
That wraps up the biggest new features in Pixelmator Pro 3.3 but there are lots of smaller changes and improvements that are also included in this update. Be sure to check out our What’s New page for a complete list of features. The update is free to all existing users and is available from the Mac App Store starting today.
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