Pixelmator: A Great Photoshop Alternative for OS X — Two Free Licenses!

We’re giving away two free copies of Pixelmator. Submit a tip and win! More details at the bottom of this post.

Pixelmator is an extremely quick image editing application for Leopard. It’s similar to Photoshop and GIMP in many aspects, but also has some very unique features that justify the $60 price tag.

For starters, Pixelmator is laid out a lot like Photoshop and GIMP. This makes getting started easy if you’ve used either of these programs before.

Sexy Interface

Pixelmator looks amazing. It’s absolutely beautiful. While it doesn’t use the traditional Leopard user interface it still fits into the operating system quite nicely.

Most filters have this cord running from the tool to the picture. The physics for this are dead on as you move the window around your screen.

While this seemed like unnecessary eye candy at first, I later realized it was pretty useful for not loosing track of the dot.

You’ll also notice some of the filters are similar to those in Photo Booth. This is because Pixelmator and Photo Booth rely on Core Image for many of their effects.

Pixelmator isn’t limited to Core Image filters, however. It does offer quite a few that I haven’t seen before.

Fast Fast Fast!

The best part of Pixelmator is it’s extremely fast. The reason for this is much of its processing is done through your graphics card, freeing your CPU for other tasks.

From the Pixelmator site:

Pixelmator is based on Core Image technology that uses your Mac’s video card for image processing. Core Image utilizes the graphics card for image processing operations, freeing the CPU for other tasks. And if you have a high-performance card with increased video memory (VRAM), you’ll find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations. Pixelmator is blistering-fast on the latest PowerPC and all Intel-based Mac’s.

This translates into zero lag while applying filters, as shown in the video below.

(E-mail and RSS Readers will have to click through to view the video)

Other Interesting Features

Pixelmator claims to integrate well with tablets. Unfortunately I don’t have one, so I wasn’t able to test this–but the feature sounds promising:

Thanks to Pixelmator’s graphics drawing tablet support, you can now freely hand-draw or paint with the Pencil, Brush, and Clone Stamp tools, or erase with the tablet’s eraser. What’s more, you can take advantage of the tablet’s pressure sensitivity to play with incredibly fast Blur and Sharpen tools.

This sounds a lot like TableDraw in terms of detecting pressure sensitivity.

Pixelmator also supports iSight, PSD files, Spotlight, iPhoto, Quartz Composer compositions, Automator and much more. It’s clear it was built specifically for OS X and not as an after thought.

Pixelmator is a great choice if you can’t afford Photoshop and want something a little more user friendly than GIMP.

If you’re looking for a powerful image editor for your Mac, Pixelmator is definitely worth a look.

Two Free Licenses

With the huge success of our ScreenFlow giveaway, I was determined to find another great app to give away to MacTips users.

I contacted the makers of Pixelmator, and they’re allowing me to giveaway two licenses.

There were so many entries in the last giveaway, I wanted to find a better way of giving away applications. I’m still experimenting with ideas, but I think this will be a better solution (Thanks Discerptor)

To win a free license of Pixelmator, Submit A Tip. On Sunday April 13th at 9pm CST the MacTips staff will vote for our favorite tips. The two best tips will receive a free license.

There are a couple points to consider before submitting a tip:

1. The tip can’t already be posted on MacTips
2. By submitting a tip you allow us to use it on MacTips. This includes rewriting it as we see fit. We will always credit submitted tips, however.
3. You can submit as many tips as you’d like, but you can only win once.
4. Any questions should be forward to brad at mactips dot org.

I look forward to seeing everyones submissions!

Update: The winners have been e-mailed, thanks for the submissions everyone!

 
 

Submitted on April 8, 2008 at 8:59 pm - Pixelmator: A Great Photoshop Alternative for OS X — Two Free Licenses! was written by Brad Jasper - There have been 17 comments - Categorized in Cool OS X Apps, Easy Tips, Free Giveaways, Video Tips

17 Responses to “Pixelmator: A Great Photoshop Alternative for OS X — Two Free Licenses!”

1. 
   Robin Whitman
   One of the best features of Pixelmator is its compatibility with (almost) everything: it supports more than 100 different file formats, including the major ones: PSD, TIFF, PNG, JPG, and PDF. And it works with your already-made Photoshop files: even Photoshop files with layers can be opened and then edited.
   Pixelmator looks great; but if you need a less-powerful freeware alternative, sign up for a Photobucket free account: now you can edit the images that you store there. April 9th, 2008 at 6:23 am
   
   
2. 
   Discerptor
   That's pretty nifty... since Adobe is going to completely rewrite Photoshop for CS5, I wonder if they'll consider taking advantage of Core Image as well. April 9th, 2008 at 8:31 am
   
   
3. 
   Gary Lee
   Just a warning . . pixelmator runs a little choppy on a macbook with 2.0GB of ram . . .once i switched to the new MBPro .it runs very smoothly April 9th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
   
   
4. 
   Discerptor
   Well, I assume that would have to do with the MacBook not having a dedicated video card. It uses an onboard Intel GMA chipset instead, if I'm not mistaken. Even so, it shouldn't go any slower than Photoshop, which doesn't rely on the video card very much anyway. April 9th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
   
   
5. 
   Norris
   Those with 4GB of RAM and 512MB of V-RAM shouldn't have a problem running ANY software. April 9th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
   
   
6. 
   Trackback
   Day 55: Test and ‘Stros at AskLG

   [...] of ranting, I’ll let other people do it for me. MacTips.org has a great preview of Pixelmator software. This image editing tool is nearly as powerful as [...]

   April 9th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
   
   
7. 
   Samm
   Where can I get the picture used on the first screenshot? April 13th, 2008 at 2:49 am
   
   
8. 
   Brad Jasper
   Samm, I couldn't find it on the NASA site again but I was able to locate it: http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~dbrown/AL/GPN-2003-00092.jpg
   
   I made some hue adjustments in that photo so it looks slightly different. April 13th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
   
   
9. 
   hamsammich
   ...I suppose NOT getting an email means my tip was crap. ;) April 14th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
   
   
10. 
    Brandon Hopkins
    @Norris, 4gb of RAM is overkill for most people. Unless you're running a lot of apps or CPU intense apps, 2gb should be plenty for 2008. April 14th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
    
    
11. 
    Brad Jasper
    hamsammich,
    
    I'm sorry I missed the deadline. We will decide these tonight and get the winners their licenses.
    
    Thanks,
    Brad April 14th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
    
    
12. 
    hamsammich
    No problem Brad, I was just being facetious about that. :D April 16th, 2008 at 6:44 am
    
    
13. 
    Concetta
    Hi, Brad,
    
    I was wondering about the top 2 tips ...
    
    The two free licenses were to be decided the evening of Monday the 14th, is that right?
    
    The winning tips were to be published after that (not sure how long after that).
    
    Were the winning tips in the five posted on the 15th or 16th? If so, could you tell us which ones they were? Maybe you did, and I missed it. That DOES happen!! ;-)
    
    Thanks bunches! LOVE the tips!!! April 18th, 2008 at 10:59 am
    
    
14. 
    Brad Jasper
    Concetta,
    
    I've already sent out notices to the winners, so if you didn't receive an e-mail unfortunately you didn't win.
    
    We will be posting the winning tips this weekend.
    
    Thanks,
    Brad April 18th, 2008 at 11:49 am
    
    
15. 
    Concetta
    Thanks, Brad!
    I'm looking forward to reading them!! April 18th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
    
    
16. 
    Chet
    Thank youuuuu!!! April 18th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
    
    
17. 
    concettaz
    Are the two winning tips posted in a special area of MacTips?
    I checked the last week of posts, and unless I've missed something, they are all from MacTips writers. April 24th, 2008 at 4:42 am
    
    

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