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However, Photoshop Elements, while much leaner than its professional namesake Photoshop CS, is still a ponderous beast that takes seemingly forever to start up, at least on my getting-a-bit-long-in-the-tooth G4 PowerBooks, and it is overkill for a great deal of the image editing tasks that I do, which keeps me coming back to good old Color it!, now at OS X native version 4.5, most of the time. Color it! starts up almost instantly and is delightfully responsive. I like the way its tools are configured, and the program just has a nice feel to it - an impression perhaps accentuated by comfortable familiarity; I've been using Color It! since the early '90s when it debuted as a Mac OS Classic application. Indeed, the Classic Color it! 4.0 on my wife's WallStreet PowerBook running OS 9.2.2 looks nearly identical and works almost exactly the same as version 4.5 for OS X.
Color it! is even quite powerful, with good, basic to semi-advanced image correction tools and filters. For quick an convenient editing or creation of images and product illustrations it's tough to beat. However, Color It! does have some shortcomings. For one thing, it doesn't support layers. I don't find this much of a handicap for most of the stuff I do, but if you need layers support, you have to look elsewhere, Photoshop Elements being a logical candidate. Color It! Also does not support PDF files, which can be seriously frustrating these days now that the PDF format has become more of a standard, for instance the default screen capture format in OS X Tiger. The workaround it is to use Preview or a third-party application like the wonderful little freeware ToyViewer (which also has some pretty impressive image correction tools in its own right) as an intermediary.
Photoshop Elements 4.0, on the other hand, has no such limitations, and aside from its sluggishness, at least on middle-aged or older hardware like mine, it's a delightful application. I am especially smitten with its Lighting and Contrast correction tools, the Clone Tool, and the Spot Healing tools, the excellent red-eye correction feature, and its aplomb in handling higher resolution images (which Color It! sometimes seems to choke on a bit). Indeed, other than when doing very minor and straightforward image tweaking, I find it frustrating to use anything else. With the combination of Color It! 4.5 and Photoshop Elements together costing only 150 dollars, and ToyViewer for free they make a capable suite of bitmap graphics tools that keep most of the bases covered for relatively modest outlay.
So, is there room for other players in the mid-range OS X bitmap image. editor category? Late last month, two new applications debuted competing in essentially the same market range as Color It! and Photoshop Elements, challenging them both on price. Can Pixelmator and Acorn challenge these established applications in functionality and features as well? I decided to find out.
This time, we'll check out Pixelmator 1.0, a new Core Image-Based image editing program for OS X which is being promoted as an 'image editor for the rest of us,' and even more ambitiously as a potential "Photoshop-killer." Written by U.K.-based developers Saulius and Aidas Dailide, the application is touted as having " everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images," and unlike Color It!, Pixelmator supports layers.
Pixelmator is sold as $59.95 shareware (making it the same price as Color It! 4.5 and $30 cheaper than Photoshop Elements 4.0) and is a moderately big download at 24.4 MB, or about 3 1/2 hours over my slow dial-up connection. It expands to 68.5 MB when decompressed, which compares to 158 MB for the Photoshop Elements 4.0 application folder.
The first thing that impressed me about Pixelmator 1.0, codenamed "Firestarter" (subsequent 1.x updated will also have distinctive names) is that it starts up quickly; not quite as fast as Color It!'s remarkable four-second startup, but a very respectable 13 seconds on my 1.33 Ghz G4 PowerBook (Photoshop Elements - go make a coffee - well actually about 40 seconds).
The second thing that impressed me about Pixelmator is that its user interface is drop-dead gorgeous. Stunning, really. The document windows are bordered in black, with translucent black backgrounds for the various tool palettes. How well this will wear in practical terms is another matter. It's pretty, but more than a bit distracting, and I found myself squinting to distinguish some of the tool selections, whose rendering is more than a bit murky in some instances, and I found myself easily losing track of the cursor position, while other open stuff on your Desktop showing through gets old quickly as well. I don't want to disparage the look. It's interesting and distinctive, perhaps I'll get used to it, and the developers have hinted that there is a cool new feature coming that will be related to window trensparency.
I should note here that my main uses for bitmap graphics software are general resizing and file type changing, straightforward editing and retouching (for example removing unwanted elements like text blurbs, and most importantly - photo editing; correcting, enhancing and retouching of images taken with my digital camera or scanned from photograohic prints, negatives, and transparencies..
I happened to have a bunch of scans in a folder of snapshots taken by my daughter with her compact Vivitar 35mm point & shoot camera several years ago (it's since been replaced with a very nice 6 megapixel Olympus digital) that I had never got around to correcting, so I decided to do a comparison of what Pixelmator was capable of vs. Photoshop Elements' known-awesome capabilities.
For a test mule, I picked an early-morning shot of my daughter's old '67 Imperial Le Baron, a bit of a sow's ear to begin with (the photo, not the car), but I wanted something challenging. Here's the image out of the scanner:
In Pixelmator, I immediately missed Elements' superb and comprehensive photo correction toolset, most particularly the Auto Smart Fix command and the Adjust Lighting and Adjust Color submenu selections, as well as the Spot Healing Brush, none of which are available in Pixelmator. After about 20 minutes of applying every relevant tool and filter I could find in Pixelmator's arsenal, this is the best I was able to do with the shot:
Not very impressive. I expect that someone experienced with Pixelmator's filters and tools could have done more, but the point for me with this sort of image editing is speed and convenience. Also, Pixelmator proved sluggish in saving changes to the edited image, some tool responses were not exactly snappy either, and some (such as applying the Clone Stamp) involved a lot of beachball-watching. The latter would of course be less of an issue on a faster Mac, but my 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4 with 1.5 GB of RAM is not quite back-of-the-pack yet.
Over to Photoshop Elements, in just a couple of minutes, the photo was enhanced substantially, thanks to the tools mentioned above - especially the "Shadows/Highlights" filter. It's still no masterpiece, but Photoshop Elements is the clear winner of this photo-editing shootout by a wide margin. Red-eye correction was not an issue with this photo, but Pixelmator doesn't have that either.
Now, other users will have different priorities and foci of interest, such as creating images from scratch, art creation, special effects, and commercial graphics, and in those contexts Pixelmator may acquit itself more satisfactorily (there seems to be a strong orientation toward special effects in the program's feature set), but for straight photo editing it's definitely not there yet by a long shot.
Other things that are missing include CMYK and RAW support (both to be added in later versions reportedly), and there are no guides and rulers in the document window.
In the positive column, Pixelmator seems to be stable and not plagued with any serious early version bugs that I noticed. Update: However, there were some I didn't encounter. Pixelmator 1.0.1 was released on October 13 with the following fixes and enhancements:
• Fixed bugs in the Magick Wand tool
• Fixed a bug in the text tool that prevented opening saved PXM documents
• Added support for opening CMYK files
• Fixed crash with Auto Levels, Levels, and Auto Contrast
• Changed JPEG file extension to .jpg
• Resolution information is now properly stored
• Fixed some minor problems with Photo Browser
• Text Tool now properly supports undo/redo
• Fixed text layer duplication bug
• Fixed crash occurring with Eyedropper tool
• "Show Fonts" button in text tool now always updates
• Fixed image resizing bug that introduced black lines around images
• Popup button in Match to Profile window now properly displays long profile names
• Photo Browser now properly supports iPhoto 6.0.6
• Improved PSD files support
• Improved serial number field for easier entering of serial numbers
• Pixelmator now opens all RAW file formats supported by Mac OS X
• Minor stability and performance improvements
There is a masks palette that allows you to save your selections for later, and the View menu is nicely-conceived to allow you to quickly open or hide just the tools and effects palettes from among the 10 available that you need to work with at the time. Pixelmator also has "dozens" of modal color adjustment and filter palettes which appear only when you choose the corresponding command from the menu bar. Mouseover tool tips are supported.
Pixelmator's sophisticated layers support allows you to blend layers, change their opacity, create clipping masks or add layer masks to hide some portions of layer.
The Selection tool is quite sophisticated, allowing you to refine selections, to, say, soften edges or create borders. You can add text to your images in Pixelmator using type layers, which are editable and even support OS X's built-in spellchecker.I found the Pixelmator Brushes palette more convenient than Elements' pull-down menu.
There are distortion, blur, sharpen, color, stylize, halftone, tile, generator and transition filters, and you can and save in PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF (hooray!), EPS, as well as can open and save Photoshop files with layers supported.
A particularly nice touch is close integration with iPhoto. The Photo Browser palette provides quick access to your iPhoto Library - events, albums, Smart Albums and pictures in your Pictures folder via a handy pull-down menu, and your can drag-and-drop images using the thumbnails in the Browser as layers in Pixelmator compositions (slick!).
A Mac-only application, Pixelmator also integrates with Mac OS X Core Image, Open GL, Automator, ColorSync, and Spotlight, and you can use the Backup tab in the Preferences to back up your Pixelmator preferences, swatches, and brushes to .Mac.
Actually, Pixelmator is designed from the get-go to take advantage of OS X's Core Image technology that taps the processing power of your Mac's video card to speed image processing - an effect that will be especially noticable if you have a powerful GPU and lots of VRAM. Pixelmator also lets take pictures with an iSight camera on your Mac and add them as layers to your composition.
Pixelmator is an interesting application, and it's very early days yet. The basics are there, and users will have to make their own minds up about the appearance theme (Me - Looks 9.5; functionality -6). I will be really interested to see how it develops in future versions, and I hope that the photo editing and correction capabilities will be enhanced. In the meantime, if that's what you mainly need a bitmap editing program for, Photoshop Elements is still way out in front, and well worth the extra $30.00.
Pixelmator 1.0 System Requirements
• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later
• Core Image supported graphics card (recommended)
• Some features require iLife.
System support:
PPC/Intel
$59.00 demoware
For more information, visit:
http://www.pixelmator.com/
Charles W. Moore
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