March 28, 2023

File cataloging app Peakto now supports Pixelmator Pro documents

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.

March 21, 2023

Pixelmator Pro gets a gorgeous new Book Club template collection

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!

Open in App Store

March 14, 2023

Pixelmator Pro gets new, pixel-perfect device mockups

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.

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February 28, 2023

Pixelmator Pro 3.3 brings a powerful new Remove Color adjustment

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.

Open in App Store

December 21, 2022

Pixelmator Pro gets a magical, AI‑powered Deband feature

This year has been packed full of fantastic Pixelmator Pro updates and we’re wrapping it up with a bang. Today, we’re releasing Pixelmator Pro 3.2.3 with a groundbreaking new feature called Deband, which lets you remove posterization and compression artifacts from images with just a click. And, to top it all off, we’re getting festive with a collection of gorgeous, holiday-themed templates for social media, print, and more.

Split comparison of an image processed with Deband feature with the original image on the left and edited image on the right.

Deband

Color banding (or posterization) is a common type of image artifact especially noticeable in low-quality photos featuring gradients or large areas of solid color. Instead of smoothly blending together, colors jump abruptly from one shade to the next, forming distinct bands of color. While posterization isn’t particularly difficult to get rid of — you can blur it out or add noise to hide it — it is very much a labor-intensive task. Or, it was. With the magic of machine learning, we’ve been able to turn color debanding into an effortless, one-click process. And the results are simply incredible!

Before

After

We’ve trained the Deband algorithm to intelligently analyze colors, gradients, and textures in images, determine where the affected areas are, and seamlessly smooth them out without touching finer details in other parts of the image. Notice how all the tiny stars in the desert photo above remain crisp after color banding is removed. What’s more, Deband also tackles different compression artifacts (in heavily compressed JPEGs, for instance) so you can enjoy all-around better-looking images.

Holiday Templates

It’s the giving season and as a small gift from the Pixelmator Team, we’ve created a collection of new, holiday-themed templates you can easily customize and share with your friends and family. In this update, you’ll find 18 stunning, artist-designed templates for creating social media posts, stories, posters, and greeting cards which are fully optimized for sharing online and printing.

Six colorful Pixelmator Pro holiday templates are shown.

Today’s update is free to all existing users and is available from Mac App Store.

And that’s all for the updates this year — it’s truly been a great one for Pixelmator Pro. Let’s make 2023 even better!

Open in App Store

December 15, 2022

Pixelmator Photo gets a major update – and goes on sale

Pixelmator Photo 2.2 introduces all-new Clarity and Texture adjustments that let you improve the sharpness and clarity of fine details in photos using a powerful, texture-aware algorithm, adds the incredible Selective Clarity adjustment for even more precise detail enhancement, brings major improvements to Highlights and Shadows, and more.

Clarity and Texture adjustments are shown in Pixelmator Photo on iPad Pro and iPhone.

Clarity and Texture

The powerful new Clarity and Texture adjustments let you magically enhance fine details and structure in your photos. These two adjustments make changes to small and large objects in a photo independently – this makes it a more intelligent and advanced way to increase sharpness and detail that provides incredibly striking results. In addition to enhancing textures, the Clarity adjustment subtly adjusts the brightness and colors of your photos, making them look sharper and clearer overall. Traditionally, this type of adjustment can produce over or undersaturated results, but that doesn’t happen in Pixelmator Photo – regardless of how much you increase or decrease Clarity, the colors in your photos will be preserved using advanced image processing techniques.

Before

After

Download Image

Selective Clarity

While the Clarity and Texture sliders affect the entire photo, the new Selective Clarity adjustment lets you adjust textures in the highlights, midtones, and shadows separately. You can even use the Selective Clarity adjustment by simply dragging areas of your photo (just like the on-image Curves adjustment), which is an incredibly natural and intuitive way to edit photos. One more thing: make sure to also try the Selective Clarity adjustment for smoothing out parts of photos, for example, the skin. Check out the example below – we only lowered the texture in highlights. Yes, it’s that simple!

Before

After

Download Image

Highlight and Shadow Recovery

We’ve been gradually introducing updates to the Highlights and Shadows adjustments in Pixelmator Photo, and today we’re proud to unveil the biggest one yet – in today’s update, these two adjustments have been completely rebuilt from the ground up. The newest version lets you recover incredible amounts of detail in the highlights and shadows of photos and enjoy true-to-life colors and textures. Because this is such a significant change, your previously edited photos will continue using the old implementation to make sure that they don’t look different when opened in the updated version of the app. However, if you want to use the new implementation with previously edited shots, open the photo and make changes to it using any one of the Clarity, Texture, or Selective Clarity adjustments or simply reset all its adjustments, then re-edit it.

The new features and improvements work great with all image formats, but you’ll get the most out of them if you shoot and edit RAW photos. This format contains much more detail than regular images, making it the perfect choice for recovering more highlight and shadow detail or enhancing the texture and structure of your photos.

Before

After

Download Image

Improved Performance

Pixelmator Photo now runs faster and smoother than ever before. Thanks to color adjustment performance improvements, Pixelmator Photo is now up to 2 times faster.

If you think we’ve been spoiling you, we’ve got some more great news – Pixelmator Photo is now on sale! You can get 50% off the first year of an annual Pixelmator Photo subscription. Make sure to redeem this limited-time offer by clicking the Redeem Offer button, as the offer is only available using this special link.

Redeem Offer

December 6, 2022

Pixelmator Pro 3.2 with video support is available today

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.

Open in App Store

November 21, 2022

Pixelmator Pro 50% off sale and sneak peek at video editing support

Yes, you heard right – video editing support is coming to Pixelmator Pro and we’re incredibly excited to share a sneak peek with you. The next major update to Pixelmator Pro will let you edit videos using your favorite image editing tools and create stunning moving designs using video layers. With this update, Pixelmator Pro will become more powerful than ever before, and we can’t wait for you to try it out. Check out how videos look in Pixelmator Pro below!

We have even more good news – Pixelmator Pro is on sale for 50% off. We’re super excited for everyone to try out the upcoming update, so make sure you have a copy of the app before the update is available. Spread the word!

Open in App Store

November 2, 2022

Pixelmator Pro 3.1 adds support for macOS 13, AVIF images, introduces smooth corner style, and more

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.

An annotated comparison of smooth and rounded corner styles is shown.

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.

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October 24, 2022

Major updates bring support for iPadOS 16.1 and the new iPad Pro

Pixelmator Photo 2.1 has just been released, adding full support for iPadOS 16.1 and the incredible new iPad Pro. Today’s update makes the most of the next-level Apple Pencil hover features, adds LUT support for a supercharged color grading experience, EDR Mode for improved RAW editing, and more. In addition, the Pixelmator 2.8 major update brings automatic, machine learning-powered subject selection to iPhone and iPad.

Color Adjustments in Pixelmator Photo 2.1

What’s new in Pixelmator Photo?

iPadOS 16.1

Pixelmator Photo 2.1 is now fully compatible with iPadOS 16.1. Thanks to iPadOS 16 and virtual memory swap on newer iPad models, apps can use free storage as extra memory for demanding workloads. So, from now on, even the most demanding photo editing workflows will run flawlessly on your iPad. Also, the update brings the ability to undo and redo individual adjustments right in the Pixelmator Photo toolbar.

The new iPad Pro

Pixelmator Photo 2.1 adds support for the incredible new iPad Pro and makes the most of the next-level Apple Pencil hover experience. From now on, you can hover Apple Pencil over the color adjustment presets and instantly see a live preview. When using the Crop tool, you can also hover Apple Pencil over the canvas to temporarily see the original image, or move it away to see the cropped result. In addition, you can now double-tap the tip of your Apple Pencil and the Comparison Slider or the Repair tool size slider will appear right on the canvas to make it even easier to compare edits and retouch photos.

LUT support

Thanks to support for LUTs, you can now instantly change the colors of photos with universal color presets used in many creative image and video editing apps. You can import and apply LUTs in Pixelmator Photo, or export color adjustments as LUTs to use in other apps. And, using machine learning, LUTs can also be converted into individual color adjustments.

Free photographer-designed LUTs

To try out LUTs, check out the blog post below. There, you’ll find photographer-designed color adjustment presets that we’ve also made available as LUTs. Feel free to try them out in Pixelmator Photo or Pixelmator Pro.

Learn more

EDR Mode

EDR stands for extended dynamic range and is a technology that lets us render high dynamic range (HDR) images in a more vivid and true-to-life way. iPad and iPhone devices with XDR displays deliver much higher levels of peak brightness than typical displays and EDR Mode makes the most of it. It works with the brightest parts of RAW photos: the highlights. Clipped highlights in RAW photos contain additional invisible detail and, using EDR Mode, those invisible details can be revealed by utilizing the higher peak brightness of XDR displays as parts of the display can become up to 8 times brighter.


Turn on EDR

The image above shows how EDR Mode works. Keep in mind that it only imitates the mode – to try out the real thing, open a RAW image and turn on EDR Mode in the updated version of Pixelmator Photo.

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What’s new in Pixelmator?

Pixelmator 2.8 is fully compatible with iPadOS 16.1 as well as with the incredible new iPad Pro. Pixelmator makes the most of the new Apple Pencil hover features, allowing you to easily preview the Clone tool source area and the selection area of the Quick Selection tool by simply hovering your Apple Pencil over the canvas. The update also introduces the machine learning-powered Select Subject feature to make automatic subject selections right on your iPad or iPhone.

Pixelmator Photo showing a woman selected automatically with Select Subject on iPhone and iPad.

As Pixelmator is becoming more powerful and full-featured, we’re also changing its price from $4.99 to $9.99. Of course, today’s update is absolutely free for existing users. Check the App Store to make sure that you’re all up to date and enjoy the newest features!

Open in App Store