Adobe v Pixelmator? – No Contest

Hi All,

Thought it was about time I hit the keyboard again  :0)

Spurred on by Bart’s adventures with Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac (over at www.bartb.ie) and his comparisons on Allison Sheridan’s Nosillacast Podcast, I thought I’d take a look at Pixelmator.

It seemed to be the other main player in the ‘Photoshop lite’ category, and I heard Bart mention the Magic Words ‘Layer Mask’ – my Geek Radar Pinged!

Now, I don’t do a whole lot of photography tweaking, but in the ‘Day Job’ of building web sites, the ability to blend 2 or 3 pictures or images comes in very handy indeed. I had found a work around for PSE 6.0 for Mac – my current App for picture editing – but it has been a little clunky & not as smooth as I remember it of Photoshop 6 for PC (yes, that’s the last time I used it!)

So off to the Pixelmator site I went & downloaded the trial – about 10 minutes later I was converted!

Pixelmator handles Layer Masks as smoothly as Photoshop in my opinion, and although it’s not a complete replacement for Adobes Big PS – for my application it fits the bill perfectly.

Of course, it handles the other Picture Altering duties with ease too – cropping, resizing, colour & exposure adjustments etc, and granted, it doesn’t have the new features to be found on PSE 8, like the ability to remove people from the background of shots, stretch or squeeze pictures without distorting the main elements and auto-merge several images to get the best of each – but to be honest, that’s no where near as important to me as being able to use Layer Masks – so you  pay your money & you take your choice!

And then there’s the price – one of my Major Whinges with Adobe is their insistance on Gouging users outside the US for as much as they can, well Adobe, I’m afraid it’s going to lead to people abandoning you in droves. Yes, you’ll keep the big corporate players who can afford £2,500 on software without blanching, but you’re doing a great job of alienating the smaller ’semi-pro’ users – way to go!

So, Pixelmator will be replacing PSE 6.0 for Mac (and 8 too!) on my machines, and if you’re in the market for an alternative to the Behemoth that is Photoshop, you could do a lot worse than Pixelmator.

Wiz  :0)