May 20, 2008
I really like to use Pixelmator and these new features, especially the Polygonal Lasso Tool, it makes the process much easier. As I’ve been writing here, every time I use Pixelmator I get really impressed with how fast is it, using filters like Gaussian Blur and other blurs is much faster and pleasant than Photoshop.
Fábio Sasso, Abduzeedo
May 12, 2008
Version 1.2 Draftsman Delivers Rulers, Guides, Grid, Snap, Curves, Color Balance, Auto Enhance, and Polygonal Lasso Tools and Much More.
The Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator 1.2 Draftsman, a second significant update to the revolutionary GPU-powered image editing tool, furnishing users with everything they need to create, edit, and enhance still images. Available today as a free software update, Pixelmator 1.2 Draftsman features rulers, guides, grid, snap, color balance, auto enhance, curves, and polygonal lasso tools and much more.
“Pixelmator opened the door for all users to explore their imaginative side through image creation, editing, and enhancement,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “Now with powerful, but easy-to-use rulers, guides, curves, auto enhance, color balance, and polygonal lasso tools, Pixelmator provides users with an even wider range of creative opportunities.”
Pixelmator 1.2 introduces a powerful rulers tool, which is helpful for the exact positioning of images or elements. Additionally, users can adjust the rulers origin to measure from a specific point on an image and change the units of measurement to pixels, inches, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, or percent. Guides appear as nonprinting lines that float over the image, which users can add, move, remove, and lock. They can also utilize the grid to lay out elements symmetrically and the snap feature to position selection edges precisely.
Powerful, yet user-friendly new adjustment options in Pixelmator 1.2 include a sophisticated curves tool for adjusting the entire tonal range or making precise adjustments to individual color channels in an image and a new color balance tool essential for controlling the overall color mixture in an image for color correction work. Pixelmator 1.2 also furnishes users with a new auto enhance tool, which can dramatically improve less-than-perfect images with one click, and a new polygonal lasso tool, useful for drawing straight-edged segments of a selection border.
In addition to a free transform tool, Pixelmator 1.2 Draftsman features new and updated help documentation, enhanced Automator actions and transform tools, minor user interface and compatibility improvements, as well as bug fixes.
Pixelmator 1.2 is a free update to current Pixelmator customers.
May 11, 2008
Pixelmator is probably the most feature-packed image editor for Mac OS X this side of Adobe’s campus. Just in time for Apple’s design award deadline on Monday, a significant new Pixelmator release will continue the app’s march onto Photoshop’s turf with the addition of powerful new tools for controlling color, aligning objects, making selections, and manipulating layers.
David Chartier
April 30, 2008
Pixelmator 1.2 Draftsman coming soon…
April 30, 2008
Now that the Pixelmator Team crew (that includes me, too!) is putting final touches to the release of a grand Pixelmator 1.2 Draftsman, I couldn’t keep myself from scribbling an oh-so-traditional article about what’s going on with our favorite image editor.
And, boy, is there lots of stuff to tell!
First of all, I hope it won’t be considered bad manners if I say a good word about the whole Pixelmator Team crew (that includes me again!) for working hard, as they did all last year and at the beginning of this year. Though just four months have passed this year, the team has fixed many bugs and made many improvements to Pixelmator. And the improvement goes on….
More good news for Pixelmator—we don’t have any plans for a holiday this summer. We will be working seriously on Pixelmator improvements, bug fixes, and (attention!) performance issues.
Yup, this summer is the summer of performance for Pixelmator, which is probably why the next major update of Pixelmator is codenamed Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo.
Our task with Tempo is to stun every single user of Pixelmator by speed (think large images) of the app as much as we did with the UI and other never-before-seen things.
Tempo does not mean that we will leave other stuff behind, not at all—we will continue those huge maintenance updates we’ve been doing. And you can rest assured that every single feature and tool in Pixelmator will see major improvements with every Pixelmator release. You can get an idea of what I am talking about if you look at recently released updates where we worked on Move, Eyedropper, Selection and Navigation tools.
By the way, just for fun, I thought you might be interested to know that we use the Lighthouse application (as its developer says, and we agree, it is “beautifully simple issue tracking”) for Pixelmator issues management, and we have over 200 tickets open. Tickets include bugs, features, and improvements that you guys submit and we work on. About 30% of those are bug fixes that should be done ASAP and 50% minor improvements required for working faster and better. All the other tickets are features submitted by our users and considered by us. Of course, there would be a lot more features if we added all of them—but are you sure you want your image editor to play music from your iTunes Library?
To sum up everything I have babbled about: this summer is going to be the Summer of Pixelmator Speed and because not many bugs are left in Pixelmator, we hope to be completely bug-free by summer’s end.
For now, so that you won’t feel like you’re departing with empty hands, I leave you with the Pixelmator 1.2 Draftsman screenshot (see next post).
P.S. One of our new members in the Pixelmator Team (who was the major forums orator for a long time)— Sebastiaan van der Velden—is working on a very cool and informative Pixelmator tutorials for those of you who are completely new or even those who already know something about image editing. I hope Pixelmator Podcast will be available in a few weeks.
P.P.S. Also, you might want to know that not only is Pixelmator’s already-huge user base expanding exponentially, but also the Pixelmator Team is growing too! There are 6 people working here for you! I think everyone will feel the benefits of the bigger team soon.
March 28, 2008
So in this Pixelmator tutorial I will show you how to create a very fast retro design coming straight from that old Atari 2600 that we used to play Decathlon and get our hands full of blisters…
Fábio Sasso, Abduzeedo
March 26, 2008
We are very happy to let you know about the release of Pixelmator 1.1.4 since it features fixes for one of the most important functions of Pixelmator – color issues – some of which have been a big headache for us.
But not anymore. Working on version 1.1.4, our main task was to repair color shifting issues, improve the Eyedropper tool, and enhance the precision of adjustment tools in Pixelmator, and we accomplished our goals. Oh, and thanks to your feedback, we also replaced the cursors, making them much more visible but still in the Mac OS X style.
Just a few more notes about other improvements for the many people out there who are interested:
• When opening PDF documents, you will see the Cover Flow window, which will let you choose the exact pages. (If we get some requests for a feature to specify the resolution when opening a page,we will add it.)
• A contextual menu for Eyedropper is now available and includes Copy (color) as HEX.
• When using painting tools, you can temporarily switch to Eyedropper by pressing the Option key on your keyboard.
• And use your shift key to paint a straight line with any of the painting tools. (You just said, “Finally!” Right?)
All the other changes are bug fixes (over 40) focusing mainly on color improvements and stability.
Download version 1.1.4, and have fun immediately.
March 11, 2008
I’ve been following Pixelmator’s development since I first downloaded it last summer, and I’ve found it to be both the most visually arresting graphics program I’ve ever encountered in terms of user interface aesthetics and also very capable and likable in a functional sense. The developers say their target is to make Pixelmator a Photoshop challenger – and that isn’t just hype (if they’re talking Elements rather than CS).
Charles Moore, LowEndMac
February 20, 2008
Welcome to another wave of bug fixes and improvements to your favorite image editor. With v1.1.3, we mostly worked on Move, Zoom, Hand and Crop tools, performance, and (again) stability improvements. Check the release notes for more info.
January 28, 2008
What sets Pixelmator apart from all other apps in its class is a brilliant interface. Pants down, it is the most stunningly beautiful creative software I have ever used on any platform, and represents state of the art in Mac software design. The team behind this product are clearly at the head of the herd and raise a new bar for software developers to strive for. If there is any higher praise than that, tell me and I’ll bestow it.
Kent Pribbernow, elitist snob
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