Feedback and Suggestions for Pixelmator Photo

Discuss Photomator and photo editing.
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2022-08-26 21:00:33

Hi! Pixelmator Photo is the best app I have found, to this point, that matches my workflow and preferences. I like to use Apple Photos as my photo library, which eliminates most other photo editing apps. I think it’s brilliant that Pixelmator Photo is able to edit my photos nondestructively, supports RAW, and acts as a peripheral value-add to my existing photo library instead of trying to get me to migrate all my photos into some other service whose reliability, privacy, integration into apps like mail and messages, etc are not already things I am comfortable with. I also love the Pixelmator UI. It’s so well designed. It’s so seamless that, at times, I forget whether I’m in the native Apple Photos app or in Pixelmator. Well done.

Sometimes I have images shot in very adverse conditions, like nearly-black RAW files that I need to do extensive processing, sharpening, and noise reduction to get good images from. I often have no choice about this: I’m shooting action photos of birds taking flight in near-dark, for example, at long distance. Other times I just grab a lifestyle camera and capture vacation memories. It’s all across the spectrum. I would describe myself as a very advanced photography enthusiast. I’m not a pro, shooting weddings or something like that. But I am also significantly more advanced than, say, someone who wants to one-click filter a selfie and post it to Instagram. I have flagship pro-quality cameras and lenses, and I shoot everything from astrophotography, family, pets, landscape, portraits, events, and a lot of wildlife including very demanding birding, insect, and macro photography — for pleasure and for research. And all of this goes into Apple Photos, which I have found to be reliable, well-integrated, secure, and “just works” across iPad, iPhone, and Mac. Sometimes I’m importing 10,000 files from a card captured in burst mode and using Photo Mechanic to cull, other times I’m on a family trip and I’m just pulling the card out of my pocket camera and importing them into Photos on an iThing.

All that said, I really appreciate the balance of simplicity and power in Pixelmator Photo. By the way, I heard that you’re bringing it to Mac, and that makes me very happy.

I use a lot of different software to get the most out of my images. Sometimes, like a recent macro spider shoot in the early morning hours in the dark, I’m shooting RAW and using DxO PureRaw to denoise and sharpen on the Mac desktop before I ever import. Other times I just import and then rely on either a) apps that integrate natively with Apple Photos, or b) apps that can be invoked as external editors from Apple Photos on the Mac. The latter includes Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and the Topaz AI suite in particular. I also have used RAW Power, which does have a lot of raw power, but very little UI polish.

Here are some suggestions for Pixelmator Photo that would make me able to rely more on it and less on other apps that I sometimes currently use.

1. Let me select RAW/JPG when there’s a pair. As far as I can tell, Pixelmator Photo currently uses the RAW if there’s a pair. If I’ve already extensively pre-processed in something like DxO PureRaw and turned a RAW into a RAW+JPG pair, I want to use the JPG from then on. But sometimes I shoot with the camera configured to save both, and I then realize the JPG isn’t good enough and want to use the RAW, and I’d like Pixelmator to let me choose the version I want to edit from.
2. Pixelmator’s denoising isn’t nearly as effective as other denoise apps I use, from my experience, so I rarely/never use it.
3. A few tools that I genuinely need a lot, which are in other apps: Dehaze, Clarity, and Structure. I can often get by with Pixelmator + Apple, by doing most of the editing in Pixelmator, and then using Apple Photos’ editing tools (Clarity=Brilliance, Structure=Definition). But not always. I often finalize a photo except for Dehaze, and then switch to Mac for those photos and edit the photo further by selecting Affinity Dehaze, which is a Photos plugin that Affinity Photo installs on Mac. It saves the resulting dehazed file back into Photos. This is workable but not ideal.
4. I’d like a little more precise control over some of the tools. Being able to type values into sliders with the keyboard, for example. Another example is the histogram: it’s contained in a styled box with rounded corners, which covers the extreme ends of the histogram and prevents me from seeing when I’ve adjusted things juuuuuuuuust enough to make the histogram stretch to cover the dynamic range fully and start clipping.

These are the things that come to mind right now. If I think of something else I’ll try to add it here. There’s not much missing, for my purposes, that I can’t do well with other apps. The UI does have a surprising amount of capability elegantly hidden just out of view, like the eyedropper to choose a white point for white balance, which isn’t obvious right away, but once I discovered it, I appreciate that it’s there and doesn’t clutter the UI. So all in all I don’t have a lot of requests! Thanks for a great app that really complements a minimalist workflow quite well.
User avatar

2022-09-09 13:45:17

Hi there! Thanks for the kind words and taking the time to write some detailed feedback.
1. Let me select RAW/JPG when there’s a pair. As far as I can tell, Pixelmator Photo currently uses the RAW if there’s a pair. If I’ve already extensively pre-processed in something like DxO PureRaw and turned a RAW into a RAW+JPG pair, I want to use the JPG from then on. But sometimes I shoot with the camera configured to save both, and I then realize the JPG isn’t good enough and want to use the RAW, and I’d like Pixelmator to let me choose the version I want to edit from.
This is actually already in Pixelmator Photo - if you long-tap a RAW+JPEG photo in the browser, you'll see an "Edit JPEG" option.
2. Pixelmator’s denoising isn’t nearly as effective as other denoise apps I use, from my experience, so I rarely/never use it.
If you don't mind, could you send some sample images where you find that Pixelmator Photo's Denoise falls short compared to your other apps over to us at support@pixelmator.com?
3. A few tools that I genuinely need a lot, which are in other apps: Dehaze, Clarity, and Structure. I can often get by with Pixelmator + Apple, by doing most of the editing in Pixelmator, and then using Apple Photos’ editing tools (Clarity=Brilliance, Structure=Definition). But not always. I often finalize a photo except for Dehaze, and then switch to Mac for those photos and edit the photo further by selecting Affinity Dehaze, which is a Photos plugin that Affinity Photo installs on Mac. It saves the resulting dehazed file back into Photos. This is workable but not ideal.
We're working on it!
4. I’d like a little more precise control over some of the tools. Being able to type values into sliders with the keyboard, for example. Another example is the histogram: it’s contained in a styled box with rounded corners, which covers the extreme ends of the histogram and prevents me from seeing when I’ve adjusted things juuuuuuuuust enough to make the histogram stretch to cover the dynamic range fully and start clipping.
Fair points, we'll take them into consideration for the future!