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.
And that’s the amazing Pixelmator Pro 3.2 Lumière! For a full list of all the smaller (yet still very cool) features included in this update, be sure to check out our What’s New page. Pixelmator Pro 3.2 is available from Mac App Store as a free update to existing users, starting today.
Hey folks! Pixelmator Pro has just received an awesome new update and we’re buzzing to tell you all about it. Pixelmator Pro 3.1 is now fully compatible with the powerful new macOS Ventura, brings blazingly-fast document opening experience, adds initial support for AVIF images, introduces corner radius improvements, including an all-new, smooth corner style together with options for adjusting the radius of individual corners.
Support for macOS 13
Pixelmator Pro looks and works better than ever on macOS Ventura, and we’re sure you’re going to enjoy the incredible new features that come with the new version of macOS. Take your daily multitasking to a whole new level by seamlessly switching between Pixelmator Pro windows or other apps using Stage Manager, easily bring up Quick Look previews of Pixelmator Pro documents in Spotlight, and more. If you haven’t updated yet, now is a good time to do it!
Quick Document Opening
We’ve completely overhauled document opening in Pixelmator Pro 3.1 with state-of-the-art performance improvements that now let you preview and open Pixelmator Pro documents faster than ever before. Quick Look previews of Pixelmator Pro documents now open ultra-fast in Spotlight and Finder, and even the largest and most complex of designs, such as templates or mockups, are ready to edit in an instant.
AVIF Support
macOS Ventura adds support for AVIF files in Safari and from now on, you can open and edit AVIF images in Pixelmator Pro, too. AVIF (or AV1 Image File Format) is a next-generation image format, designed to produce lightweight, high-quality images for the web. AVIFs can be up to 30% lighter compared to other web-facing formats such as WebP, meaning they support higher levels of compression without a discernible drop in quality.
Corner Radius Improvements
We’ve improved rounded rectangle editing, making it possible to adjust the radius of individual shape corners and also added an all-new, smoother corner style, which lets you create squircles.
A squircle is a kind of rounded rectangle with especially smooth corners, and it’s used extensively in Apple’s design language, including app icons and hardware. So, if you create designs for iOS, macOS, or often use the rounded rectangle shape in your daily workflows, you’re going to love this update.
Pixelmator Pro 3.1 is available today as a free update to all existing users. New users can get Pixelmator Pro for $39.99 exclusively on Mac App Store.
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.
Pixelmator Pro 2.4 is now available, bringing color adjustments and effects layers, a completely redesigned Layers sidebar, over 200 beautiful new vector shapes, support for M1 Ultra, and more.
Color Adjustments and Effects Layers
Color adjustments and effects layers let you nondestructively change the look of entire layered compositions more quickly and easily than ever before. These new layer types also make it possible to more easily make selective edits to photos, designs, and illustrations, completely transforming many common workflows.
If you’d like to learn more about these layer types, we’ve got you covered – check out our video on this topic below.
Redesigned Layers Sidebar
The Layers sidebar has been redesigned with a fresh new look and a range of usability improvements – different layer types are now much more easily recognizable, layers feature informative subtitles, it’s now possible to customize layer thumbnail sizes, and more.
Over 200 New Vector Shapes
Pixelmator Pro 2.4 adds over 200 new artist-designed vector shapes in categories like science, activities, and symbols. Vector shapes are resolution-independent so can be used freely in any design or illustration. And they’ve been meticulously crafted to be pixel-perfect in pixel designs, so you won’t see any unwanted blurring at their edges when using them as icons or other elements in your designs.
M1 Ultra Support
Pixelmator Pro is a Universal app that runs natively on M1-powered Mac devices, taking full advantage of all the power of the new M1 Ultra chip and its unified memory architecture. Thanks to machine learning model optimizations, ML-powered tasks, like automatic background removal, super resolution, and photo enhancement are up to 1.7 times faster on M1 Ultra compared to M1 Max.
Other Improvements
Pixelmator Pro 2.4 also adds a new Scrubby Zoom mode, adding an all-new way to zoom images, brings the ability to unlink layer masks, includes new keyboard shortcuts for adding layers, and more.
The update is totally free for all existing Pixelmator Pro users and $39.99 for those of you who don’t yet have a copy. Head on down to the Mac App Store to make sure you’re all up to date and enjoy all the shiny new features!
We’ve been spoiling you with updates recently – and we love doing it – so we’re very excited to say that, today, we’ve got a cherry on top of the 2021 cake for Pixelmator Pro. Today’s update brings the ability to export files to Apple’s motion graphics tool, the aptly-named Motion. Now, if you don’t use Motion, that might not sound like such a big deal to you, but hiding behind the headline is another equally big improvement for all Pixelmator Pro users: completely reengineered support for SVG files. Intrigued? Read on for all the details.
Motion file format support
First of all, Motion. This year, we’ve made a point of improving support for Apple pro apps, starting with Final Cut Pro and support for LUTs as well as the ability to export PSDs specifically optimized for FCP. We’re good, nay, great Apple citizens so this seemed like a pretty natural step as we keep building Pixelmator Pro to be the best app it can be.
So, starting today, you can now export Motion files from Pixelmator Pro, making it easier than ever to create motion graphics. Not just that, because Pixelmator Pro has support for SVGs, you can even open SVGs and export those in Motion format. This is great if you, for example, want to create some animations or Final Cut Pro templates but don’t feel like creating all the illustrations yourself. If you’d like to learn more about using Pixelmator Pro and Motion, check out this in-depth video guide from Ripple Training.
All-new SVG engine
Another big project this year has been improvements to the file reading and writing foundations of Pixelmator Pro, starting with massively improved support for PSD files. Now, it’s time for SVGs. And the improvements here are maybe even bigger.
The SVG format is pretty fascinatingly huge and isn’t limited to just simple vector layers. It can contain images, text, path text, layers with different blending modes, letter spacing, filters and effects, masks, clipping paths, opacity. And how much of this is supported can be measured in numeric terms because there are certain compliance tests you can run and we have created our own test suite.
The file format specification really is huge and most raster and vector apps would pass a small number of these tests. The latest version of Pixelmator Pro now passes four times more of our test suite the the previous version did. We’ve also added support for some features that are only available in SVG 2, the newest specification of this format.
4ximproved support for SVGs
Below, you can see a visual example of how some SVG files used to be opened in Pixelmator Pro and what the situation’s like in today’s version. Big improvements!
Previous Version
Latest Version
We also don’t plan to stop there and will continue improving support for PSDs, SVGs, and will probably add some more useful formats next year and in the future. Pixelmator Pro itself will need more features to be able to keep up, so that’s also in the works.
The update is free for all existing users and available now. Also, Pixelmator Pro is still on sale for another week or so, so you have time to grab a copy at the current ridiculously low price. To do that, you can open up the App Store using the link below.
Phew. It’s been a busy and very fun 2021 here at the Pixelmator Team. Thank you to all of you who use our apps to create cool stuff, give us compliments, feedback, and the occasional bits of criticism. We really do appreciate you all. And we’ve got even bigger plans for next year – stay tuned!
Not even a full month since our last major update, we’re bringing you another huge update with some truly amazing new features. Pixelmator Pro 2.3 – codenamed Abracadabra (because it’s totally magical) – brings a new automatic background removal feature, automatic subject selection, a new Select and Mask tool, and more. Not just that, starting today, Pixelmator Pro is also going on sale for 50% off!
Magic Background Eraser
With today’s update, you can now magically remove the background from any image with just a click. We’ve trained a convolutional neural network to find the subject in pretty much any image and automatically remove its background. In fact – we’ve created three separate machine learning models to each do its little bit of magic. If you’d like to learn more about where to find this feature, we’ve got a super quick tutorial on it that you might enjoy.
Built-In Quick Action
In addition to being available in Pixelmator Pro itself, the Remove Background feature is also available in the Finder app as a Quick Action!
Decontaminate Colors
When you remove the background from an image, the object left behind can often have traces of the previous background around its edges. The (AI-powered) Decontaminate Colors feature automatically removes these traces so objects blend seamlessly with any new background. Although this is usually done automatically when it makes sense, you can also apply it yourself to any layer – even ones that have been cut out in other apps.
Select Subject
Another totally magical new feature is automatic subject selection – with just a click, you can make a selection of the subject of any image. And if you’d like to refine that selection down to the tiniest detail, we’ve also got a…
Select and Mask Tool
To make it possible to make incredibly accurate selections of any object, we’ve created a new Select and Mask tool. This is designed to make it easy to select the most difficult areas of all – hair, fur, and similar objects with very complex edges. Here, you’ll find a completely redesigned Smart Refine feature and other tools that make it a breeze to select even the most challenging areas of an image. To help you get the most out of this tool, we’ve got a great tutorial on it – check it out on our YouTube channel.
Smart Refine
If you have a rough – or even quite accurate selection – you can refine it automatically using the totally redesigned Smart Refine feature. Again, with just a single click, you can go from a rough outline to a perfect selection.
Refine Edge Brush
For anyone who wants absolutely pixel-perfect selections of every single area in an image, we’ve added a Refine Edge Brush. This brush is designed to be used specifically on tricky edge areas – create accurate selections of those areas by simply brushing over them.
How the magic happens
All this is powered by a set of machine learning algorithms that we’ve spent the last 12 months developing. Because Pixelmator Pro does much more than just simple background removal, we decided to create three algorithms – one for detecting the subjects of images, one for refining selection edges, and one for decontaminating the colors at the edges of objects. If you’d like a closer look at how this all works – read on!
Step 1: Find the subject of the image
First, we need to find the subject of the image. In the comparison below, the image on the left is the original and the one on the right shows the mask created by the subject detection feature. In this case, the mask is already pretty accurate but the edges aren’t fully refined.
Original image
Mask created by subject selection algorithm
Step 2: Refine the edges of the selection
The next step involves refining the edges of the selection. The image on the left shows what the mask looks like after the subject selection algorithm has done its magic and the one on the right shows what the selection looks like after it’s been processed by the edge refinement algorithm. Much better!
Selection after subject selection
Selection after subject selection and selection refinement
Step 3: Decontaminate the colors at the object’s edges
The last thing we need to do is decontaminate the colors at the edges of the object. This is actually a massively important step – without it, the object wouldn’t blend naturally with backgrounds of different colors. In this comparison, we’ve changed the background so you can see what the image would look like both with and without color decontamination.
Without color decontamination
With color decontamination
These new features are going to completely transform pretty much every image editing and photography workflow in Pixelmator Pro, so we’re incredibly excited to be able to share them with you. The update is totally free for existing Pixelmator Pro users and on sale for 50% off for anyone who doesn’t yet have a copy. Visit the Mac App Store to make sure you’re all up to date and enjoy all the additions!
The update includes some other little things, like the ability to specify custom export sizes and scales in the Export dialog. For all the details, check out our Updates page. And lastly, although 2021 is drawing to a close and we’ve shipped some really fantastic updates this year, we’ve got a few more surprises under our belt. Stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks!
Hey everyone, Pixelmator Pro has just received an awesome major update and we’d love to tell you all about it! Pixelmator Pro 2.2 brings support for macOS Monterey and the new M1 Pro and M1 Max-powered MacBook Pro devices, adds 28 actions to the new Shortcuts app, includes a Split Comparison view for easily comparing edits, and a whole lot more.
macOS Monterey
Thanks to full compatibility support for macOS Monterey, Pixelmator Pro works perfectly with the latest and greatest version of macOS. Go for it – get the upgrade!
M1 Pro and M1 Max
As a Universal app, Pixelmator Pro is fully equipped to harness all the power of the latest MacBook Pro devices featuring the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. This means that you can expect features like ML Super Resolution to be up to 15 times faster compared to the most recent Intel-powered Mac devices!
Shortcuts
Shortcuts makes its grand entrance to the Mac and boy do we love it! So much so that we’ve added 28 dedicated Pixelmator Pro actions, including all our ML-based tools (Super Resolution, Enhance, Denoise, Match Colors, and Crop). We’ve also got some new, Shortcuts-exclusive features, like automatic background removal for photos of people! And to learn more about using our actions, make sure to watch our tutorial on Shortcuts and Pixelmator Pro.
Split Comparison
Pixelmator Pro now includes a split-screen comparison view, so you can see all your edits more closely than ever. You can turn on the split comparison view by Option-clicking the Show Original button or force clicking the canvas when using the Color Adjustments and Effects tools. You can also press the Control + C keyboard shortcut or add the new compare button to the Pixelmator Pro toolbar by clicking View > Customize Toolbar.
Other Additions
As for additional new features, there’s also an all-new Bokeh blur effect, you can now open Pixelmator Photo files in Pixelmator Pro, maximum brush spacing has been increased from 100% to 1000%, and there’s a few other things you can find in the full release notes.
The update is totally free for all existing Pixelmator Pro users and $39.99 for those of you who don’t yet have a copy. Head on down to the Mac App Store to make sure you’re all up to date and enjoy all the great new features!
After a short summer break, the entire Pixelmator Team is back at work, continuing our quest to create the world’s best image editor! And boy do we have some great stuff in store for you over the coming months. Today, we’re releasing Pixelmator Pro 2.1.3, which includes a huge update to our support for Adobe Photoshop files – in fact, we’ve rewritten the entire engine that handles this from the ground up.
All-new PSD engine
First of all, what’s the PSD engine? It’s what we call the part of the app that handles reading, opening, and writing PSD files – in a nutshell, everything to do with PSDs. And we’ve completely rewritten it to be faster, safer (crash-free!), and much more advanced.
This was a really big project and took us almost a year to complete. A cool note is that for the reading and writing part of this project, we used the Rust programming language. Also, we dived really deep into the PSD format itself and have a much better understanding of it, with some fantastic internal documentation and a great foundation for even more improvements in the future.
Support for PSD shapes
There are so many things that have been improved with regard to PSD support, but one of the most important ones is support for shapes in PSDs. Previously, PSD shape layers would be opened as image layers in Pixelmator Pro. Now, they’ll be opened as vector shapes, which is a really big deal. They’ll also be exported as shapes from Pixelmator Pro, bringing much improved compatibility!
Layered TIFFs, PSBs, improved effects, and more
In addition to this, there’s a whole lot more that we’ve added. This includes support for PSB files (very large PSDs), layered TIFF files (which actually include embedded PSDs), way better support for effects, and even support for some adjustment layers (such as Hue/Saturation, Exposure, Invert, and Channel Mixer). Support for text layers has also been improved a great deal – there’s now support for advanced features like SF Symbols sizing and improved handling of line height, spacing, and indents.
Optimize for Apple pro apps
A really nice extra detail is that you can now optimize exported PSDs for Apple pro apps like Final Cut Pro and Motion. This was needed because Pixelmator Pro now supports some much more advanced features in PSDs that these apps don’t.
A quick example
Below, we’ve got a quick visual example of how certain PSD files with some advanced PSD features (smart filters with masks and certain layer styles) would be opened in the previous version of Pixelmator Pro. This was inspired by a real-world case – the template files you can find on the Apple Design Resources page. The differences are pretty huge! And the new PSD engine is an ongoing project, so we’re certainly not done – we’ll be making more improvements as we continue to develop Pixelmator Pro.
Pixelmator Pro 2.1.2
Pixelmator Pro 2.1.3
Today’s update is free for all existing Pixelmator Pro users and is available from the Mac App Store right now.
Good day, Pixelmator fans! Today is truly a fantastic day because we’re releasing Pixelmator Pro 2.1 Coral, our latest and greatest major update, which is packed full of awesome new features and improvements.
Machine learning-powered intelligent cropping
The first new feature (at least in the What’s New window) is ML Crop, which provides suggestions for eye-catching ways to crop your photos. Simply click the new ML Crop button in the Crop tool and see what happens!
This tool isn’t designed to take the creative side out of cropping your photos, but getting a good composition can be tricky for beginners and getting a new perspective on this common task should be useful – especially when there’s machine learning magic involved. By the way, in the Crop tool, you’ll find that we’ve actually redesigned quite a lot of the tool itself, adding perspective correction, crop overlays, and more.
Quickly fill areas using drag and drop
The new Quick Fill feature lets you drag and drop colors from colors wells onto layers to quickly fill them with colors. It’s incredibly fun and so convenient when you want to quickly change the color of a shape, some text, or even an image layer.
You’ll find there’s also a brand new color well in the Pixelmator Pro toolbar that displays your foreground and background colors and lets you quickly switch between them. That’s a feature for which we’ve had quite a few requests and we’re excited to be able to add it.
Paint perfect brush strokes along paths, shapes, and selections
In the Paint tool, you’ll find a brand new Stroke with Brush button that lets you automatically paint brush strokes along paths, shapes, and even selections! We’ve even got a new tutorial about the feature – it’s very easy to use, so the tutorial is a quick one. You can find it here.
An improved Type tool
The Type tool has got itself a makeover, making it even more powerful and easy to use. It’s got a handy new text size slider (this sounds small, but you’ll find yourself using it all the time, trust us), a way to adjust paragraph spacing and indents, and more.
These are just the features that we could fit into the What’s New window, but there’s way more than that. To get you up to speed with all the changes, we’ve also created an overview video about the update, which you can find on our YouTube channel. And for those of you that want to see a line-by-line list of the changes, you’ll find them on our Updates page.
The update is now available (and is free for existing users), so open up the Mac App Store to make sure you’ve received it, and maybe leave us a nice word there too. If you feel like it, of course.
As for us, once an update like this is ready to ship, we’re usually already working on a whole bunch of things to surprise you with in the future – and boy do we have some goodies in store for you later this year. Speak soon!
Now that WWDC has finished (much love, again, to the new virtual format!), we just wanted to share one very quick update with you: Pixelmator Pro will absolutely be getting Shortcuts support. And we’ll be doing our best to make sure that support is first-class – second to none.
That’s it. That’s the blog post.
Until next time!
P.S. If you have any ideas for cool workflows that you’d like us to support, we’re always listening.
Twitter
Facebook
