Pixelmator: Low Cost Image Editor

Like a lot of people, I take a lot of digital photos. But, I'm not a serious photographer. At least, I'm not serious enough to justify spending US$649 on Adobe PhotoShop (though I am often tempted), Adobe LightRoom ($299), or Apple Apeture ($299). I've been very satisfied with Corel PaintShop Pro ($89.99) and the freeware Paint.net when I'm on a Microsoft Windows PC. Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4 ran reasonably well on my old G4-based Mac mini. But, its non-universal binary (Rosetta) ran really slow on my 1st generation MacBook 2GHz Core Duo. How slow? Given a 7 megapixel 4 megabyte JPEG photograph, PaintShop Elements 4 takes 1 minute 7 seconds before it is ready for use. This includes starting itself up and loading the image. Since I often just work with just one or two images for a web site or some other simple task. This statistic is important to me (time to start up). I turned to the Open Source SeaShore image editor as an alternative. It is much faster. It takes less than 5 seconds to load the photo and be ready for work. I know that load time is not the best indicator. But, PhotoShop Elements 4 is slow in everything it does on my MacBook. So, SeaShore seemed like a reasonable alternative until Adobe releases PhotoShop Elements 6 which is currently set to ship at the end of March. Unfortunately, SeaShore is at version 0.1.9. As you might guess, it is buggy and tends to crash on me.

SeaShore crashed on me while editing an image I was planning to post on my personal blog. At that point, I remembered there was some kind of image editor in the MacHeist bundle I had just bought a few days earlier. Pixelmator 1.1.2 normally costs $59 (version 1.1.1 was the current release when I picked it up and is what I used). Quite honestly, I had not heard of it until I noticed it in the MacHeist bundle list. But, having tried it now, I am glad I paid for the MacHeist bundle to test out apps I might not have normally considered purchasing.

The first thing that impressed me about Pixelmator is that it started up fast enough not annoy me (like PhotoShop Elements 4). It took a reasonable 8.6 seconds to start up, load the test image, and be ready for work. Yes, it is a bit slower than SeaShore. But, it is much much faster than PhotoShop Elements. Since I usually just want to edit one or two images for a web posting or a recent family type photo, that is important to me.

Second, although I had not even heard of Pixelmator before last week, I found the interface easy to understand and use. I didn't feel that feeling that I needed to click a lot of menus to figure out how to do something. The choices made sense even though they were a bit different from other images editors I have been using.

Third, I appreciate being able to read the Pixelmator developers' blog. That transparency between the firm and the customer (me) gives me a feeling that I have some understanding of what is going on with the project. After getting my Intel-based Macbook, I felt uncomfortable not knowing if I would be able to upgrade to a Universal version that would run fast enough to feel comfortable on my then new Mac (nearly two years ago now). And, I still have to wait two more months to buy the upgrade.

Finally, it hasn't crashed on me so far :-) Taking these points together, I feel like I've found a good alternative to PhotoShop Elements features and SeaShore's speed. I'll probably still buy the PhotoShop Elements 6 upgrade. But, I won't be as anxious as I might have been for the next two months had I not tried Pixelmator.

Note: The PixleMator 1.1.2 upgrade was released on Jan. 22. You can find out what's new or fixed in its update notes.