Pixelmator Core Image-Based Image Editing Program For OS X Updated To Version 1.1.4
"Since Pixelmator launched last fall, we've been incredibly focused on harnessing the full power of Mac OS X," said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. "And now with Core Image units, Quartz Composer compositions support, and the Quick Look plug-in, Pixelmator proves once again that it is one of the most innovative real-Mac OS X applications."
Pixelmator significantly outshines other applications with its powerful Mac OS X standards-based plug-in architecture, which not only takes advantage of Core Image units, but is also the first product to bring Quartz Composer compositions to image editing. Every version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard comes with a free Quartz Composer application that can be used to create almost any possible filter for use with Pixelmator and any other application that supports Quartz Composer compositions.
Pixelmator's new built-in Quick Look plug-in makes it possible to view almost any of more than 100 image file formats supported by Pixelmator, without having to launch the application itself. The Pixelmator's Quick Look plug-in is a significant enhancement not only for Pixelmator, but also for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, because there are some exotic file formats supported by Pixelmator's Quick Look plug-in that were not previously supported by Mac OS X.
In addition to graphics tablet support, Pixelmator 1.1 Kitten also features over 80 new filters, improved Leopard compatibility, and bug fixes.
Built from the ground up on a combination of open source and Mac OS X technologies, Pixelmator features powerful selection, painting, retouching, navigation, and color correction tools, and layers-based image editing, GPU-powered image processing, color management, automation, and transparent HUD user interface for work with images.
Mac iSight users will enjoy Pixelmator's New Layer from iSight feature that allows taking a snapshot with Mac's built-in video camera and adding the snapshot as a layer in composition. The Photo Browser palette in Pixelmator offers quick access to iPhoto Library, events, albums, Smart Albums, and pictures in the user's Pictures folder. Best of all, the user can just drag-and-drop any of those images as layers in Pixelmator composition..
Pixelmator is based on Core Image and OpenGL technologies that use Mac's video card for image processing. Core Image and OpenGL utilize the graphics card for image processing operations, freeing the CPU for other tasks. And if a high-performance card with increased video memory (VRAM) is present, the user will find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations, including editing tools, color correction tools, and filters. Pixelmator is lightning-fast on the latest PowerPC and all Intel-based Macs.
Other notable features: Pixelmator supports more than 100 different file formats, including Photoshop images with layers, and it comes with more than 15 color correction tools and 50 Core Image-powered filters, transform tools, fill and stroke, Gradients, QuickMask mode, full-screen editing mode, Automator support, ColorSync support, Spotlight support, and much more.
Precise selection tools
Someone who is editing images must be able to select the right shapes, portions or objects in images. With Pixelmator's powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools you can quickly and easily select any part of your images. That means you can edit and apply special effects to portions of your pictures, remove unwanted objects or even cut out objects from one picture to put on another. Thanks to the masks palette in Pixelmator, you can even save your selections for later. Now, that's handy.
Full assortment of painting tools
Another bunch of tools in Pixelmator are painting tools. The real greatness of these tools is the ability to use different brush sizes, shapes, hardness, even blending modes when painting. You can paint with Pixelmator as you would traditionally, play with beautiful gradients or even fill colors with other ones. There has never been a more satisfying way to paint. What's more, Pixelmator's painting tools can be used not only for any style of painting, but also for improving your selections with masks or even retouching.
Retouching tools
It is a snap to perfect your aging or buggy photos with Pixelmator. With its advanced retouching tools you can easily blur hard edges or sharpen fuzzy areas of your image. Or paint with a sample of an image to remove wrinkles from faces or scratches in your photos. In fact, you can use any of the adjustment or painting tools to polish or to refine your images.
Every tool you need
The coolest image editor comes not only with handy and powerful selection, painting and retouching tools, but it also has everything you need for typing text on your pictures, analysing colors, cropping, transforming, moving anything in your pictures or navigating through your images.
With Pixelmator's easy-to-use but powerful tools you can do a lot more with your images than you ever could before.
Layers
Of course, Pixelmator is a layer-based image editor. You can quickly create layers from your photos, other pictures, from selections or even your iSight. Yes, Pixelmator can add a layer to your composition directly from your Mac's little camera. Not only can you link and arrange added layers, but Pixelmator allows you to blend layers, change their opacity, create clipping masks or even add layer masks to hide some portions of layer.
Powerful color correction tools
Pixelmator features a simple and elegant collection of intuitive color correction tools. Using these tools you can fine-tune hue, saturation, and luminance; adjust exposure, color levels, brightness and contrast; use automatic color corrections such as Auto Levels, Auto Color and Auto Contrast; even use Channel Mixer and much more.
Breathtaking filters and effects
Pixelmator is the real filter-machine. It has over 50 filters and special effects for your needs. Just choose any of nicely designed distortion, blur, sharpen, color, stylize, halftone, tile, generator and transition filters and boom -- you see the result in real-time. Filters in Pixelmator are very, very fast.
Compatible with everything
One more thing: Pixelmator supports over 100 different file formats. You can open and save in PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, EPS and scores of other image formats. Above all, Pixelmator can open and save Photoshop files with layers. You are never alone with Pixelmator.
System Requirements
• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or later
• Core Image supported graphics card (recommended)
• Some features require iLife.
Because the Pixelmator Team is so serious about improving Pixelmator, every 1.X update will be given an unusual software name. For example, the first version of Pixelmator, codenamed Firestarter, is called Pixelmator 1.0 Firestarter. Pixelmator's next version will be named Pixelmator 1.1 the code_name, and so on. What's more, the code_name gives a hint about features that are built into Pixelmator.
And, of course, Pixelmator 1.X updates are free for registered users.
From Your iSight to Your Composition
Ever thought about what else you could do with that little camera on your Mac's display? Sure, you could use it to videoconference with your friends or take photos of yourself with funny faces. But now you can also use iSight with Pixelmator. One click, and Pixelmator takes a picture of you via iSight and adds it as layer into your composition. When you've done that you can, for example, cut yourself out, put in another background and create postcard for your friends. It couldn't be easier!
Photo Browser
The Photo Browser palette in Pixelmator offers quick access to your iPhoto Library, events, albums, Smart Albums and pictures in your Pictures folder. Best of all, just drag-and-drop any of those images as layers to your Pixelmator composition.
Reign of Mac OS X Technologies
Pixelmator harnesses the full power of Mac OS X. It takes advantage not only of Core Image, Open GL or Automator, it also supports, ColorSync, Spotlight and many other technologies. Pixelmator was built exclusively for Mac OS X, and it shows.
Automator: Pixelmator's Best Friend
Your personal automation expert - Automator working hand in hand with your personal imagery expert - Pixelmator does those boring tasks for you. Using very powerful Pixelmator actions in Automator you can quickly enhance, resize, or transform your images, add any special effects or even export your images to over 100 different file formats. You can do that to as many images at one time as you wish.
The World's First GPU-Powered Image Editor
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.
Pixelmator Loves Open Source
Just like your beloved Mac OS X, Pixelmator is also built on open source. It uses a very sophisticated foundation to provide you with the most powerful image editing tools available. More than 15 years of development have gone into Pixelmator.
Tony Smith at The Register has this to say about Pixelmator with regard to the ideal production applications to use with Leopard:
Pixelmator at work
I've replaced Photoshop with Pixelmator, which is (almost) as capable - for me - as the app it has replaced. It's new, a little buggy, but I can get 95 per cent of the image manipulation work I need to do for Register Hardware done with it.
And at $59 it's literally a fraction of the price of Photoshop.
You can check it out at:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/21/eb_back_to_leopard/
New in version Pixelmator 1.1.4:
• Added new and more visible cursors for tools
• Added a feature that allows choosing exact pages via Cover Flow when opening PDF document (Leopard only)
• Contextual menu for Eyedropper is now available and includes the ability to choose Point Sample, 3 by 3 Average, 5 by 5 Average, 11 by 11 Average, and Copy Color as HEX
• When using Brush, Pencil, Paint Bucket, or Gradient tools with Option pressed, the selected tool will temporarily switch to Eyedropper
• Option shortcut added to Eyedropper to change background color instead of foreground color
• Eyedropper Tool Options palette is updated
• Eyedropper bug with different ColorSync profiles is fixed
• Major color management improvements have been added
• Any painting tool now paints a straight line if shift is pressed
• Bugs that caused color shifting in Levels, Colorize, Replace Color, Channel Mixer, Hue/Saturation, Exposure, Threshold, and Posterize are now fixed
• A bug that caused incorrect results when painting with brush with Color Burn blending mode has been fixed
• Bugs that caused color or position shifting in some filters have been fixed
• Blending Modes quality improved
• A bug that caused Fill to show incorrect preview when “preserve transparency” is enabled has been fixed
• A bug that caused Motion Blur to add an undesired line to image is fixed
• A console message that when using some color filters said "Exception raised during posting of notification. Ignored. exception: '*** -[CIColor initWithNSColor:]" has been fixed
• A console message ("Exception raised during posting of notification. Ignored. exception: '*** -blueComponent not defined") that appeared when matching color profiles has been fixed
• A bug that caused Auto select layer to turn on when switching applications has been fixed
• A bug that caused an inability to move selection after using the Magic Wand tool has been fixed
• A bug that caused mask content to disappear after moving selection has been fixed
• A bug that caused selection to change its position after using Quick Mask and Gaussian Blur has been fixed
• Default Crop tool mode is changed from hide to delete
• A bug that caused Crop tool to select incorrect size has been fixed
• Selection crop area now clips to canvas
• A bug that sometimes caused an active layer to be deleted after switching tools has been fixed
• A bug that caused Type layer not to submit any changes after leaving the type cursor active has been fixed
• A Quick Look console message that said "quicklookd[10856] Cannot find factory" has been fixed
• A bug that caused incorrect sizing when pasting from the clipboard has been fixed
• When Save dialog is active, Tab key will not hide palettes
• A bug that caused some temporary files to stay in the root directory has been fixed
• A bug that saved large temporary "Undo" files on the hard drive has been fixed
• A crash that occurred when deleting a layer from the Layers palette by highlighting it and pressing Delete on the keyboard has been fixed (Tiger issue only)
• A crash that occurred when opening PSD files with vector mask has been fixed
• A crash that occurred when backspace is pressed repeatedly has been fixed
• JPEG saving is improved
• The application will remember last export options, JPEG quality settings, and TIFF compression settings
• Export to PDF improved
• Minor PXM improvements
• PSD compatibility improved
• Minor TGA improvements
• Minor user interface improvements have been implemented
• Minor performance improvements have been made
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 or later, Core Image supported graphics card (recommended), some features require iLife.
System support:
PPC/Intel
$59.00 demoware
For Charles W. Moore's full review of Pixelmator (1.0.1) click here.
Pixelmator 1.1.4 is a free update to current Pixelmator customers. Full system requirements, more information, as well as the Pixelmator demo version is available as a free download at the Pixelmator website.
Pixelmator:
http://www.pixelmator.com
Direct Download Link:
http://www.pixelmator.com/download/
Purchase Link:
http://www.pixelmator.com/buy/
Charles W. Moore
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