Pixelmator 2 sneak preview

Pixelmator is the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editing app for Mac OS X that has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.

With tons of new features and improvements, the next generation of Pixelmator — codenamed Chameleon — is clearly the best Pixelmator ever built.

The Pixelmator team has posted a sneak preview of Pixelmator 2, which features:

• Look and Feel: Handcrafted to the very last detail specifically for working with images, the new user interface of the app is as beautiful to look at as it is easy-to-use.

• Drawing Tools: Enjoy perfectly precise, full-featured drawing tools that allow you to easily create and edit any vector shapes, whether simple or advanced.

• Shapes: Use the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Star, Line or Custom Shape tools to quickly add shape layers to your compositions.

• Healing Tool: Paint with the new Healing Tool on objects or any other details in an image to magically remove them, as if they never existed. Watch the video here.

• Content-Aware Fill: Take advantage of a breakthrough technology that helps magically get rid of unwanted elements in images.

• Smudge Tool: Use the new Smudge Tool to smear paint, or to rub out blemishes or any other details in your images, as realistically as if you were using your fingers.

• Sponge Tool: Paint using any brush tip either to add more color to or to take color away from objects, details or any other areas of an image.

• Burn Tool: Use the Burn Tool to naturally darken specific areas of an image—whether in the highlights, midtones or shadows range for a given area.

• Dodge Tool: Use the Dodge Tool to naturally lighten specific areas of an image—whether in the highlights, midtones or shadows range for a given area.

• Red Eye Tool: Use the Red Eye Tool to easily—either automatically or manually—get rid of the red-eye effect in your images.

• Pixel Tool: Enjoy editing images at the pixel level by taking advantage of the hard-edged, pixel-precise, pixel art-type Pixel Tool.

• New Eyedropper Tool: Use the new magnifying Eyedropper Tool to efficiently snap colors from an image to use as needed.

• Info Bar: The new Info Bar provides you with the most useful information required at a specific moment, depending on the tool in use.

• Tools Customization: Make the app truly personal by adding, removing, arranging, even grouping tools in the fully customizable Tools palette.

• Tool Options Bar: Enjoy the new contextual Tool Options bar, which shows the exact set of tool settings needed at the moment, depending on the tool in use.

• New Type Tool: In addition to easily placing and formatting text on your images, now also enjoy advanced typography features.

…and much more

Pixelmator 2 will be available later this summer via the Mac App Store as a free upgrade for everyone who purchased any version of Pixelmator via the Mac App Store.

For now, anyone who doesn’t have the app can purchase the currently available version of Pixelmator on the Mac App Store for $29 and receive a free upgrade of Pixelmator 2.0 once it is released.

22 Comments

    1. I have been using an RGB workflow for my print work for about 8 years now. The only time I use CMYK in PhotoShop is to match a CMYK colour I used somewhere else or if I am using extra plates CMYK+Metallic or spot. In that case I am using multi-channel and PhotoShop still rocks for that.

  1. I purchased Pixelmator just a few months before it became available on the Mac App Store…

    Can’t feel too bad about that, though, because it is such a great Mac application. I especially like the dynamic magic wand tool that lets you click to establish the set point and drag to expand or reduce the threshold.

  2. For me, to be a serious contender to Photoshop, Pixelmator would have to offer a white balance option, and ideally RAW file conversion. To the best of my knowledge the curent version does not support this. As a result I still need either Bridge from Photoshop, or the RAW converter from Canaon from my EOS 1Ds MkIII to set color balance, save the result as a TIFF or PSD, or DNG format, and then pull that into Pixelmator. That really does not save me any work, and once I have Bridge open, just going ahead and using Photoshop is there.

    I like the Pixelmator concept and approach to using native Mac capabilities, but as of now it just seems to be missing some critical capability for anyone that shoots exclusively RAW format.

    I can see how for someone shooting JPEGs only and relying upon teh camera to set white balance where Pixelmator could be a very viable and useful alternative to Photoshop.

  3. I used to say that Pixelmator covered 85-90% of what Photoshop can do and in a much more user-friendly manner. Now, it sounds like they bumped it up to 95% or so. Version 3 should close the gap except for the most esoteric Photoshop features. Looking forward to it!

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