Give it a try and you just might find that Pixelmator Pro is the perfect Photoshop replacement.
Final Cut Pro X users are not used to subscriptions for creative software. For fcp.co, Oliver Peters takes a look at the new $40 Pixelmator Pro and sizes it up as a Photoshop replacement.
If you are an experienced Photoshop user, then switching to Pixelmator Pro might take a bit of relearning; but if anything, the app is faster, more fluid, and more logically designed. Not to mention a steady stream of updates through the App Store mechanism since its introduction. As a Mac-only application, Pixelmator Pro is cleanly-written with optimized code – designed to take full advantage of Metal and Core Image.
I’ve been using Pixelmator Pro more these days instead of the knee-jerk reaction to head to Photoshop first. Each time I open it I discover more things that I really like about it. While you can’t do some of Photoshop’s more exotic functions, like video animations, Pixelmator Pro covers the bulk of what an editor needs from a graphics tool. Even advanced workflows, like batch actions, can be automated through Apple’s Automator app. Furthermore, if you use Apple Photos, Pixelmator Pro is also supported as an extension and through Photos’ “edit with” function.
MacDailyNews Take: Pixelmator Pro now has an end-to-end Metal pipeline for rendering and editing and a new asynchronous zoom engine, which brings some big performance improvements. Zooming and scrolling is now at least 10x faster and always responsive, effects are up to 2.7x faster, and painting is up to 2.4x faster!
We’ve been using Pixelmator, Pixelmator for iOS, and now Pixelmator Pro for many years now, replacing Photoshop, and we highly recommend Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro, and Pixelmator for iOS.