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Pixelmator

Friday, 13 March 2009

In the bright pre-recession days of 2008 I, and a bunch of my co-workers, bought into MacHeist: get a bunch of Mac OS X apps for about $30. One of those apps was Pixelmator.

Pixelmator icon

Pixelmator is basically a lite Photoshop-clone for Mac OS X. Some thoughts on it:


  • It's sexy. Popup-notices when undoing actions. Cute tool pallete (especially like the eye-dropper).

    Pixelmator eyedropper tool

  • It works. It is fullfilling my needs for recent work (cutting up screenshots, the odd tweak for images in Komodo. I'm not a graphics guy but I've played enough with Photoshop to suspect that the "lite" I mention above is a good thing for me. 1

  • If it helps others, here is my hyperlink_color.pxm Pixelmator file for the "Komodo color hyperlinks" screenshot in my previous blog post. This set of free arrow images is a great resource for slapping arrows into your screenshots.

The version that was current when I bought it was a little crashy, but at some point between then and now them seemed to have fixed whatever crashes I was hitting. This is the best $30 I've spent on the web.


  1. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has real experience with Photoshop and Pixelmator if it actually is "lite Photoshop". Poking around the menus there doesn't seem to be a whole lot less in Pixelmator. Perhaps the big part of Photoshop is the set of 3rd party extensions and integration with other tools like Illustrator? 

Tagged: macosx