Category: Mac
Pixelmator is a reasonably priced, very capable image manipulation program for Mac OS X. I’ve been an Adobe Fireworks fan for quite a while, but (since I am spending my own money) Fireworks is out of my price range ($300 USD).
If you are looking for the super cheap alternative, the Gimp is free, but it’s really clunky on the Mac. It works wonderfully on Linux, just not so well on the Mac. It is so clunky that I find it often works against me, and causes more headaches than I am willing to put up with. As a simple example, I have to click a window to focus, then click the tool I want – there are many things like that.
Pixelmator on the other hand uses Mac OS X specific hooks which make it really nice to use. It has an iPhoto browser, and it takes advantage of Core animation (meaning it uses your video card to its full potential (a GPU-Powered Image Editor)). It has some great built in effects, and it’s nice eye candy to boot. It is very snappy on my G4, and it starts up way faster than any other image editor I’ve tried.
Here is a quick movie showing off some of the good and bad day to day things about Pixelmator. This leaves off a great deal of nice features, and just focuses on things you might need to get work done.
You can download a trial version on the Pixelmator web site. The full version is $60 USD