The crew behind Pixelmator, a powerful and well-integrated Mac OS X photo editor, gave us a chance to play with what they consider the largest update since they tore off 1.0's beta badge. It features a solid batch of new tools and major updates to old ones, so we're inclined to agree that this is a major update.
Click-and-drag is the new drag-and-drop
At the top of the new features list is a "Magic Eraser" tool that brings the "Instant Alpha" feature Apple uses in Keynote and other apps to photo editing. Pixelmator's Magic Eraser employs a click-and-drag UI that allows it to target specific areas of a photo. In our testing, it appears that Magic Eraser is using a mixture of color similarity and edge detection technology to target things like backgrounds or objects for removal from an image or layer.
Speaking of removing pixels from a scene, click-and-drag has also arrived for the Magic Wand tool. The Magic Eraser is nice for quick edits, but the Magic Wand tool offers more power and flexibility for creating a selection (instead of just erasing portions of an image), and then applying less destructive edits and filters, or using color correction and other tools. A click and drag UI is a useful addition to the Magic Wand, though like the Magic Eraser, it doesn't offer much control over how sensitive Pixelmator's selection algorithm is. Still, I find these smart selection tools to be surprisingly accurate when, for example, knocking the sky out of this background or selecting the entire St. Louis arch.
Last in the realm of tool updates in Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo is the Paint Bucket, which also gained click-and-drag support. Again, the tool works well, and the ability to click and drag across specific areas to include them in the tool's swath is a useful addition to Pixelmator's workflow and UI options.
Pretty new color tools
Pixelmator's color controls also received a lot of attention in 1.3, which introduce a new color wheel UI that is really quite interesting. When adjusting color in the Hue and Saturation tool, for example, clicking a color anchor and dragging around the wheel provides a visual representation of which color is taking over in the image.
New colored swatches at the top of this panel allow for better targeting of specific hues, and this new UI is generally a pleasure to use. It takes some getting used to, but it's nice to see color UI ideas like this in third-party design software.
Pixelmator's Colorize and Replace Color tools have been given this new UI, and Replace Color has gained a few more features, including a Radius slider for a live B&W proof of exactly what range of color the tool will use. The emphasis on live feedback with this tool and others, such as the live gradients in a recent update, brings a pleasant fluidity to Pixelmator workflows.
Everything else
We spoke with Saulius Dailide, one of the two brothers at the core of Pixelmator's development team, about the new release. Dailide told us that his team decided to rewrite various components of Pixelmator's core to enable these features and prepare for new features coming in the next couple of upgrades, although I can't talk about those quite yet. Version 1.3 will bring a lot of other enhancements to the table, though, such as a Smart Palette Hide option that automatically hides other tools and palettes when using adjustment and filter palettes. This attention to a flowing experience, where portions of Pixelmator's tool set disappear when not needed, makes the app feel like a smart, natural fit for the Mac OS X environment.
Pixelmator 1.3 Tempo should be released to beta testers soon, and it will be a free upgrade for registered users once released to the public.
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