Wow! Pixelmator Photo is an Apple Design Award winner. It’s been an incredible first day for us here at WWDC and we can’t believe our week in California has started out with such an amazing honor.
It’s no secret that, when it comes to fans of Apple, we’re about as big as they come. We take great pride in designing apps to be as native, powerful, intuitive, and beautiful as possible. And we take a lot of inspiration from all the amazing things Apple does. So to be recognized by the same people is the most special, amazing feeling possible. It’s almost impossible to put everything into words. Just… wow!
And our week at WWDC is only beginning — we’ve got a long day ahead today with all kinds of awesome sessions to attend and we’ve already started working on adding support for the fantastic new features announced yesterday morning. We hope you’ll love what we have in store for you over the coming months. And make sure to check out the story about us and other Apple Design Award Winners on the App Store!
The big day is here. The incredible, AI-powered Pixelmator Photo is now available to download from the App Store!
All those of you who pre-ordered the app have already received it — we hope you’re loving it! The rest of you, head on down to the App Store, download Pixelmator Photo, and let us know what you think. We really do love hearing your feedback.
And know that this is only the beginning of the Pixelmator Photo journey. We’re already working on improvements, new features, and thinking about where to take the app in the future. It’s going to be a fun ride!
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Note:
We know some of you aren’t able to download the app on iPad Air 3 and iPad mini 5 devices, even though you were able to pre-order and can also run the TestFlight builds just fine. Strangely, we’ve also had reports from a few different people that they were able to download the app on those devices without any trouble. For those affected, please email us at [email protected] and we’ll get you a copy of the app via TestFlight for now — apologies for the inconvenience, we’re doing our best to get to the bottom of this!
It’s been just under a month since the last Pixelmator Pro update and, in that time, we’ve baked you all another delicious update in the Pixelmator oven. The headline feature in this point update is support for Portrait Masks. Any photo taken using Portrait mode in iOS 12 will now be opened with a handy layer mask. Below, you’ll find a video tutorial showcasing just one very cool thing that absolutely anyone can do with a portrait mask — change the background of an image.
Along with Portrait Masks, we’ve made tabbed editing the default experience in Pixelmator Pro. Because of that, your window size and position will also be remembered for all new documents you open, which, you may or may not be surprised to learn, was a very common feature request. Three cheers for making people happy! Oh, and we’ve also added a few new keyboard shortcuts for selecting layers in the layer list, as well as locking, hiding, and duplicating layers in various ways. Check out our keyboard shortcuts page if you need a refresher.
Over this past month we’ve actually been working on a whole lot more than this — seriously, so much more — and I’d love to tell you all about it. But that would ruin the surprise, so I won’t. Though you can always sign up for our public beta to get an early look at some of those new features as soon as we’re ready to test them.
This is a free update for all existing users, so head on down to the Mac App Store, make sure you have the latest and greatest version of Pixelmator Pro, and tell us what you think!
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Pixelmator Pro 1.3 Prism has just been released, bringing a range of handy new features that make creating advanced illustrations and designs easier than ever — layer color tags, filtering and search, clipping masks, quick opacity and blending controls, and more.
This is the third major update since Pixelmator Pro was released just over a year ago. In fact, Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon came out on May 31st, so this is actually the third major update in just 7 and a half months! And yes, it might sound a little cliche, but it’s pretty crazy to see how far Pixelmator Pro has come in such a short time.
In this update, we focused on improving the Layers sidebar to make it easier to work in documents with lots of different layers. We also added clipping masks — an often-requested, incredibly useful feature for designers of all kinds. Let’s break down the major additions one by one.
Layer tagging, filtering, and search
In Pixelmator Pro 1.3 Prism, you can now apply colored layer tags to layers, search the layer list, and filter it out according to layer type and layer tag. These new features make it much easier to get around the layer list in compositions with lots of objects and they look pretty darn great to boot. We’ve created a few quick tips to help you get started with using them, so be sure to check them out!
Clipping masks
Clipping masks let you create perfect masks from existing layers in your Pixelmator Pro documents with just a click. This is a really handy feature for anyone working on all kinds of designs and illustrations. It might seem a little surprising but this feature actually took by far the longest to develop and test. And there aren’t all that many image editing apps out there (other than Photoshop) that have proper clipping masks — the reason why is precisely because it’s nowhere near as simple as it looks. But we’re really happy with the job we’ve done and, in Pixelmator Pro, you can effortlessly create clipping masks from any layer in your image. That includes group layers and nested shapes! Plus, you can also use any of the nondestructive effects on both the mask layer and the fill layer, so everything is super flexible.
Quick opacity and blending controls
If you’ve spent even a little bit of time browsing Pixelmator Pro reviews on the App Store, you’ll probably have seen at least a couple 1-star reviews saying there’s no way to adjust layer opacity or blending mode in Pixelmator Pro. There is. It’s been there since day 1. But, clearly, finding those controls was tricky so we’ve added them to the Layers sidebar. And, naturally, the live blending mode preview works there as well!
More!
In terms of other changes in the update, one of the more significant ones is that adjustments, effects, and layer styles will no longer be flattened when you paint, erase, retouch, reshape, or change the pixel content of a layer in any way. It’s the kind of change new users might not even notice, but we know some of you guys really wanted this feature, as did we, so we’re really happy it’s here. We’ve also got a few interface improvements related to this change that are in the works. We’re also really looking forward to shipping those.
Naturally, this update is free for all of you who have already purchased Pixelmator Pro, so head on down to the Mac App Store, get updating, and let us know what you think!
In our previous blog post, we said Christmas is coming early because we’re planning to ship another major update to Pixelmator Pro. Well, today, we just got an early Christmas gift of our very own as Pixelmator Pro was named the 2018 Mac App of the Year by the fabulous folks at Apple!
What’s more, we’re working on some great new features right now and we have plans for Pixelmator Pro updates for almost all of 2019 that we also can’t wait to get started on — so this App of the Year is only going to get better and better.
And what better way to celebrate than a quick sale — until this Friday, you can get Pixelmator Pro for 25% off!
Pixelmator Pro is Mac app of the year because it makes a huge range of pro-level image-editing tools accessible to all.
Among photographers, illustrators and graphic designers, Pixelmator has been a longtime favorite thanks to its powerful features and affordable price. Pixelmator Pro takes the suite to the next level. This upgraded app packs even more power without compromising ease of use and introduces impressive machine-learning intelligence.
Fine-tune your photos manually, or use the ML Enhance option, which makes automatic adjustments based on machine-learning powered algorithms.
The app is flexible enough to handle photo editing, painting and illustration. For illustrators, it offers a rich canvas with an array of customizable brushes and support for external drawing tablets. Graphic designers will appreciate the vector tools. And Pixelmator Pro’s advanced colour adjustment helps photographers make their images pop (without leaving artifacts).
Create vector graphics easily and efficiently.
Coolest of all, machine-learning features bring cutting-edge intelligence to your workflow. By leveraging the Core ML framework on macOS Mojave, Pixelmator Pro recognises specific elements in your projects with startling accuracy. This lets you easily remove objects from photos or select complicated forms with just a few clicks. Auto Color Adjustments improve your photos’ lightness, saturation and more with ML-powered algorithms that were trained using millions of images. The app can even automatically name all the layers in your project based on what appears in them.
Pixelmator Pro puts an incredibly broad range of tools at your fingertips. And its sleek Dark Mode is the perfect backdrop for your editing.
Pixelmator Pro includes one of the best collections of color adjustment tools in any app on any device. And we want to make them even better. In Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon, we added some super cool Auto buttons next to three color adjustments: White Balance, Lightness, and Hue & Saturation. Although those buttons may be small, there’s a lot of machine learning power behind them and we wanted to talk a little bit about one in particular — Auto White Balance.
Fixing white balance
When editing photos, fixing the white balance is almost always the first thing photographers do before moving on to any other edits. It’s important to get it right because all your later edits depend on it. And if you’re not used to doing it, it’s not all that easy — there are two different sliders that are influenced by each other and it’s not that obvious what they do. I mean, adding yellow cancels out a blue tint, how does that work?
So, in Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon, we’ve added the machine learning-powered Auto White Balance to make fixing the white balance in any photo as simple as clicking one little button. Behind that button, there’s a 200-layer-deep neural network trained on millions of image pairs and integrated via the awesome Core ML.
Magic machines
Did you know that neural networks are practically magic and no one knows how they really work? Basically, getting machine learning models to do what you want them to requires you to test them on really huge datasets. The models then make complicated, seemingly random connections based on your tests and their quality depends on how good your tests and datasets are.
In this case, we needed millions of images with bad white balance and good white balance. It probably goes without saying that there’s no giant repository of badly white balanced images to just download. Even if there was, we’d still need to get someone to fix each one and that’s not exactly efficient either. For that reason, we had to find a different approach. We decided to take millions of good images and create a separate algorithm to ‘break’ them in as natural a way as possible to mimic real-world white balance issues.
Neural network training
Once we had our image pairs, we could start training. Except there was another little problem. Most neural networks work with small, fixed-resolution images, which usually have to be square. That meant we needed to turn every photo into a uniform small square image. But if the photo is portrait or landscape, potentially important details at the edges of the image would be lost if we cropped them. If we simply stretched them, then they wouldn’t look like actual photos people edit.
To get around this, we took each image and applied content-aware scaling. This separate algorithm identified features in the original images (for example, a sky, some trees, or people) and scaled them according to their importance to the photo. The content-aware scaling makes for some pretty strange-looking images — people look a little like weird aliens — but the neural network likes them a little better. Now we could start training and getting our model to learn. And once that was done, we could start testing how accurate our approach was.
Quality and accuracy
Most image editing apps have some sort of non-machine learning automatic white balance correction tools and we compared our approach with the results you get in those apps. We measured quality using the industry standard CIEDE2000 metric and found our Auto White Balance tool to be at least 50% more accurate, and usually between 2 to 10 times better than those standard tools. And we think our approach passes the eye test even better. Just looking at the results, the Auto White Balance adjustment seems to be much more natural and visually pleasing.
RAW friendly
One awesome feature of Auto White Balance is support for RAW images and any extended data within them. Our trained neural network uses extended-range information to correct white balance issues in RAW images with improved accuracy. Sweet!
Here are the Auto Color Adjustments getting a mention during the Platforms State of the Union at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose.
Better than humans
To round things off, here’s a fun fact. The new Auto White Balance correctly fixes the white balance in the infamous “dress” photo, which became an internet phenomenon in 2015. And that photo isn’t even in the training dataset! This is an especially good example of white balance and lighting issues which are tricky even for humans to solve. And Pixelmator Pro now makes it effortless with the help of breakthrough machine learning.
If you want to try out these awesome machine learning features on the dress or any of your own photos, you can download Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon — it’s available now from the Mac App Store and it’s a free update for everyone who has already bought Pixelmator Pro.
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The Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon, a massive update to the world’s most innovative image editing app for Mac. The update adds a modern way to easily prepare images for the web, brings machine learning-powered Auto Color Adjustments, support for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, a new Slice tool, SVG support, a new Tutorials page to help with learning Pixelmator Pro, and much more.
“Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon is an absolutely massive update with tons of great new features,” said Saulius Dailide, one of the founders of the Pixelmator Team. “With the innovative new Export for Web features, it’s now easier than ever to prepare and optimize images for the web. And Pixelmator Pro continues to push the boundaries of image editing with the new Auto Color Adjustments, which take advantage of the latest advances in machine learning and computer vision to automatically improve photos.”
Pixelmator Pro now gives you everything you need to prepare and optimize your images for the web. You can use advanced compression techniques to compress images to the smallest size possible without losing quality. Export presets let you quickly optimize images with your favorite settings. As you adjust any export settings, Pixelmator Pro displays a live preview of the optimized image right in the Pixelmator Pro window. Quick Export lets you instantly export a web-friendly image optimized with your most-used settings at any time. And the new Slice tool makes it much easier to prepare web designs by letting you divide entire designs into smaller images, optimizing each one separately.
With the new machine learning-powered Auto White Balance, Auto Lightness, and Auto Hue & Saturation adjustments, you can automatically perfect the colors of a photo with just a click. The machine learning algorithm was trained on millions of images to identify the contents of a photo, finding the best colors, lighting, and contrast to make every image stand out. Integrated via Core ML and powered by Metal, the Auto Color Adjustments deliver lightning fast performance and stunning quality.
Full support for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar gives you quick access to all your favorite tools and all kinds of useful options. You can apply color adjustment or effect presets, select colors for your brushes, and even share your image, all right from the Touch Bar. And whenever you switch tools, the Touch Bar automatically changes to put the most useful options at your fingertips, which makes using Pixelmator Pro simpler and easier than ever.
Pixelmator Pro 1.1 Monsoon includes many more incredible new features, including support for opening and exporting vector images in the SVG format, live previews when formatting text and adjusting layer blending options, a Select Color Range tool that lets you make selections of similarly colored areas in an image, support for exporting HEIF images, a new Tutorials page to help with learning Pixelmator Pro, and much more.
The Pixelmator Team today released Pixelmator Pro, a brand new Mac app that redefines image editing on the Mac, providing professional-grade editing tools in an incredibly intuitive and accessible design. Pixelmator Pro 1.0, codenamed Whirlwind, includes a modern single-window interface, nondestructive, GPU-powered image editing tools, machine learning-enhanced editing features, and more.
“We’re incredibly excited to finally release Pixelmator Pro on the Mac App Store,” said Saulius Dailide, one of the founders of the Pixelmator Team. “Its innovative, user-centered design makes editing images on a Mac simpler than ever. And with its GPU-powered and machine learning-enhanced editing tools, Pixelmator Pro is built for the future.”
The modern, dark single-window interface of Pixelmator Pro has been created exclusively for working with images. A streamlined, macOS-inspired design provides a completely native Mac app experience and is fully consistent with the look and feel of macOS. And a reimagined, user-centered workflow design makes the professional editing tools in Pixelmator Pro especially accessible, even to first-time users.
Completely nondestructive color adjustments, effects, styles, and layouting tools in Pixelmator Pro give users the freedom and flexibility to go back and modify or delete individual changes at any point in the editing workflow. Thanks to the new presets feature, you can create endless combinations of multiple adjustments, effects, or styles, save them to your favorites and reuse them in any of your images. Drag-and-drop sharing also makes it a breeze to share presets with others.
Pixelmator Pro pushes the boundaries of image editing, using breakthrough machine learning to deliver more intelligent editing tools and features. Integrated via the new, blazing fast Core ML framework, machine learning lets Pixelmator Pro detect and understand various features within images, bringing a number of groundbreaking advancements, such as jaw-droppingly accurate automatic layer naming, automatic horizon detection, stunningly realistic object removal, and intelligent quick selections.
Designed exclusively for the Mac, Pixelmator Pro uses the Mac graphics processor in tandem with the latest Mac graphics technologies, such as Metal 2, Core Image, and OpenGL, to deliver blistering fast, GPU-powered image editing. Built with Swift 4, Pixelmator Pro is a next-generation app that takes full advantage of the latest technological innovations in hardware and software.
The Pixelmator Team has packed a wide range of features and innovations into Pixelmator Pro, such as full RAW support, including support for multiple RAW layers; HEIF file format compatibility; superior support for Adobe Photoshop images; complete macOS integration via full support for iCloud, Versions, Tabs, Full Screen, Split View, Sharing, Wide Color, and others; Metal 2-powered painting tools and dual texture brushes; powerful retouching, reshaping, selecting, type, shape and vector tools; and a lot more. In addition, a number of free updates adding major new features to Pixelmator Pro are already lined up for the very near future.
Pixelmator Pro 1.0 Whirlwind is available exclusively from the Mac App Store for $59.99.
Pixelmator Pro requires macOS High Sierra and a Metal-compatible graphics card. Full system requirements and more information on Pixelmator Pro can be found at www.pixelmator.com/pro/
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