Pixelmator's continued commitment to making their products and brand as "Apple-y" as possible is pretty impressive. Even their marketing pages and blog are nearly identical to Apple's — they certainly feel identical even if they aren't a pixel-for-pixel copy.
It must be great for sales, because it feels like you're buying the "missing" Pro application in the Final Cut/Logic/? triumvirate (I guess Photomator is sort of a spiritual successor to Aperture's editing features). But I do wish their UI had more labeling, especially in the right-hand menu, which is just a giant column of icons.
I wonder if part of the rationale is to set themselves up for a tuck-in acquisition by Apple.
> I wonder if part of the rationale is to set themselves up for a tuck-in acquisition by Apple.
I doubt it. I think it's just that Mac fans like the Apple aesthetic, so they're copying it for the appeal, no larger strategic explanation needed.
But then again, I've never quite understood why Apple doesn't spin off Final Cut Pro, except for inertia. Or maybe they keep it around to make sure there's at least one internal high-performance app team to make sure the macOS team doesn't do something dumb performance-wise?
I'm pretty sure no one using Windows is making any money doing photo touch-ups or any other kind of design work (except maybe pre-press). OTOH neither is anyone using this junk unless their main gig is fixing their own selfies for some profitable influencer account.
In my opinion, their website design has surpassed the boundaries of imitation, giving it an uncanny resemblance to Apple's official site. This extreme similarity raises suspicion, making it appear like a phishing site to me..
I don’t think this is what you’re saying, but just to be super clear for anyone else coming through - Pixelmator is extremely _not_ a scam. Their products really are top notch.
I really like Apple’s web design, then I reworked my personal site to follow that style and … I reached the same conclusion, it was too close and felt scammy / weird. I didn't use it.
I realized I just wanted clean / simple but not too close to a company where it started to feel "off".
This is one I'd consider paying the $99 lifetime price for:
- Pixelmator cost me peanuts and I'm still using it ~15 years after buying it. I even purchased PM Pro because I felt guilty I'd gotten so much benefit of the original for so little.
- I gave up Lightroom because... adobe.
- Capture One:
= is barely anything but rental software at this point. "Lifetime" price is ridiculous.
= I'm tired of having to relearn a seemingly completely rebuilt UI every time I upgrade.
= Catalog system makes it practically impossible organize your photos outside of the app. (all my raws up till I switched to C1 are in year/month/day folders, afterwards it's single folder blobs dated roughly at the time I ran out of diskspace and had to purge it to offline storage). The whole paradigm of how it manages photos sucks imo.
As long as it can read my Sony A1 raws and has reasonable shadow recovery I'm in.
I managed to get a Capture One 22 license for half price (when I was quitting Adobe), I did the trial and the let it expire - I actually was just going to buy it but forgot. Then I just got an email like "Hey, would half price be enough incentive?" and I was like, "Sure".
It looks like things have changed somewhat with the perpetual licensing since then, but the version I have does what I want for the cameras I use and supports Apple Silicon, so I hope to keep using this version for the next four or five years so without paying any more...
But good to have alternatives, I'll definitely look at this software in a few years if something happens like incompatibility with a future version of macOS or something.
Well it's importing images from a card into the apple photos catalogue, and randomly scattering them thru the folders in it's database. That's kinda useless for anyone wanting to manage literally terabytes of images.
Have a look at RAW Power by Gentlemen Coders (https://www.gentlemencoders.com/). The team consists of former Aperture engineers, so it's similar. Costs a reasonable $40. You can use either Photos libraries or manage the files yourself. Overall, I've been really pleased with it.
I didn't immediately understand the positioning of Photomator versus Pixelmator Pro, but they have a somewhat helpful page here: https://www.pixelmator.com/compare/
It looks like Pixelmator Pro is roughly analogous to Photoshop, while Photomator is roughly analogous to Lightroom.
It'd be _really_ cool if it's the Aperture replacement we've all wanted since that was shut down. Lightroom never really did it for me (for RAW photo processing and organization), and Photos is a pale echo of what Aperture used to be (missing such simple tools as multi-photo comparison views, the Loupe...).
„Gentlemen Coders was founded in 2016 by Nik Bhatt, an 18 year veteran of Apple. His roles in the Photo Apps group included Senior Director of Engineering and Chief Technical Officer. He also led the RAW Camera and Core Image teams, as well as the imaging team for the Mac version of Photos.”
How have I missed this all this time? RAW Power looks like exactly what I was looking for a few years back when I realized there was no non-subscription upgrade path from Lightroom 6, and I trialed just about the entire market, settling on the generally-fine Capture One.
Capture One continues to be generally-fine and it does at least still have an (expensive) upgrade path to the latest non-subscription version, but I will definitely have to look into RAW Power.
Photoshop is general image manipulation, layers brushes, all the power.
Lightoom is more for photography. Ingest workflow, applying small changes like colour adjustments and applying them on batches. Non-destructive edits, working with raw images without the need to "render" them into bitmaps.
After Lightoom 6 they moved to Creative Cloud, to a fairly expensive subscription. Furthermore, they did a revamp to become more inline with their mobile offerings, and started feeling even more sanded down.
Lightroom is optimized in a workflow sense for photographers, and is tightly integrated with its own digital asset management system (the photo “library”).
I have no use for this as I've never needed a Lightroom-like product but the Pixelmator Pro app always is a joy to use. I just need to do minor edits (add text, resize, layering stuff) and it scratches the itch that something like Photoshop used to for me. It's lightning quick, no BS update manager running in the background, and a 1-time $50 purchase. I've gotten a ton of value out of it and it's a very Apple-y app. I can't say enough nice things about it.
If you were driven away from Photoshop due to subscription pricing for something you use 1-2 times a week at most then take a look at Pixelmator Pro.
I would highly agree with this. I always wanted something slightly better than Preview, but not Photoshop (and all that encumbrance). Pixelmator is pretty amazing for quick edits and adjustments.
Literally exactly the same place I was. I needed more that just resizing and minor/basic edits in Preview but I couldn't stomach $21+/mo for something I used 1-2 times a week at most and sometimes go months without using.
It's really confusing because the names are so similar, but I believe Pixelmator is still a one-time purchase, it's just Photomator that is a subscription. Completely agree on these subscriptions prices being way too high for very infrequent usage.
This marketing-driven distinction is disappointing to me. I switched to Pixelmator Pro not because it has layers but because it was an affordable image editor. I highly doubt anyone would use Pixelmator Pro if it didn't have single image editing, which is now apparently the defining distinction between Pixelmator Pro and Photomator.
Pixelmator Pro was introducing great AI-driven single image editing tools for years (e.g. background removal and upscaling), so re-positioning it in relation to Photomator is bs.
These are meant to be analogues to Photoshop and Lightroom, which also have a ton of overlap in features. In terms of photo editing, there's not a lot that Lightroom can do that can't be done in Photoshop (at least in my experience). But the point of Lightroom, relative to Photoshop, is that it makes it a lot easier to work with large groups of photos.
So yeah, single image editing vs batch image editing is a seemingly small but extremely important distinction.
Sure, batch editing is cool - but that seems like a small feature to add to the existing app, rather than a massive feature that requires a new app.
Moving forward, what AI-driven features will be added to Photomator vs Pixelmator Pro? I bet that it's not going to be batch-specific. They are going to start adding new single image editing features to Photomator and _not_ to Pixelmator Pro.
Lightroom vs Photoshop is one way to think about apps. But not the only way.
>Lightroom vs Photoshop is one way to think about apps. But not the only way.
Perhaps. But those two products are successful for a reason, and I think there's an untapped market of people who like these two products but 1) don't want to pay $40/month or whatever the Creative Cloud license is, 2) might not like Adobe as a company, and 3) want a more modern, OS-specific solution that doesn't have decades of technical debt.
agree, I feel like they're diluting the core of their product which should be a solid competitor to Photoshop. I've used pixelmator pro for years but photomator feels like a distraction that will hamper their development efforts to continue to improve it.
They are STILL missing a means to quickly adjust the softness and/or size of all of their tools using the scroll wheel.
You're overthinking this. "Lifetime" is just a new word for: no monthly costs, buy once, use forever (= as long as your device and OS supports this software), just like it was for almost all software from 1990-2010.
But since everything is now a subscription, we need a new term that signals "one-off payment".
The confusing part is whether or not the devs must provide a lifetime of updates, which is unlikely, but also an unreasonable expectation.
Hence, lifetime means: buy once, use as long as you have a device that supports the software, get all updates for free, as long as the developers keep providing updates. Could stop tomorrow, could stop in 10 years, when they announce a new app. Depends on the developer.
I would love to see "lifetime" purchases be regulated out entirely, so that a lifetime purchase of software has very specific meaning and can't be weaselled out with a major version update, a rebrand, a new listing, etc.
Exactly what they did with the Pixelmator > Pixelmator Pro switcharoo trick.
I wouldn’t have minded as much if they hadn’t taken every single complaint about Pixelmator and made it a feature on the new product instead of a fix in the old one.
Makes me steer people to Affinity every chance I get.
You buy a hammer, they make a better hammer, you still have your old hammer, and that’s a “switcharoo trick”?
Lifetime licenses always mean the thing you’re buying, not all its future updates. Affinity just did the same thing, came out with a paid 2.0. I think it should be that way, all “free {x} for life” deals end with you getting the absolute minimum that’s arguably {x}.
Besides, Pro is actually a huge remake and expansion. I’d guess only 10% of its code came from the predecessor, compared to 90% for normal big updates like Affinity 2, and 99.99% for Photoshop.
I see no problem with making genuine new features something that is brought out in a versioned, paid update.
But turning a deaf ear to QoL requests because in secret you’ve decided to use them as a stick to force people onto your v2, and just see the complaints (= customers) as free research.. that just makes you a grubby little company.
Let’s say it’s 20 lost sales per enthusiast (10 directly, 10 from second order effects). 2500 enthusiasts that you have made your enemy. That’s 50 000 lost sales.
If you don’t have market capture, don’t be an asshole to your customers. It’s just bad business. I’ve done my part and sent at least 2 dozen people to Affinity over the years, if not more. Hopefully others did too.
Edit: your hammer example is absolutely terrible because you cannot patch everyone’s hammer remotely for cheap. If the surface of the hammer is so shiny it reflects the sun too harshly, you can’t just send a patch that lowers the reflectivity.
The point of the of course very different hammer example was that it’s the same contract and it’s a perfectly moral contract: give money, receive a thing, and that’s it. You seem to be arguing that they should keep doing things for you because they can and it benefits you, and I agree that they can and it benefits you, but it’s also at a cost to them, which I don’t think they have a moral obligation to pay unless that was part of the sale to you.
Maybe communication is a root issue here. I think both of us could agree that they should make sure people know before buying whether they’ll be getting updates, and for how long.
Affinity did exactly the same just now. They've released version 2.0 which is a paid upgrade so people who bought 1.x will not receive any new features anymore.
That's true in most cases, just wanted point out that Pixelmator is not alone in doing so, their direct competitor does the exact same thing. And I don't mind since I used the original Pixelmator a lot, and now I'm using the Pro version as well and I consider it was well worth my $49.
It's a different app. Anyone who bought Pixelmator still has it. It hasn't had an update for a couple of years, now, but updates overlapped with Pro for awhile.
I do remember some people being upset that Pro wasn't just a free feature enhancement to Pixelmator when Pro was announced, though.
I've been revisiting old games I wrote 35 year ago (rewriting them with modern API) and it is the lowly Pixelmator that I have been using near daily. (In fact was just using it this morning.)
Besides occasionally foregrounding its palette windows when it is in the background, I find it fully capable for pixel-editing.
They’ve been pretty darn good about keeping their other apps updated following a one-time purchase, and I’m just glad to see any new product launched with an option other than subscription pricing. Not sure what happened with Pixelmator/Pixelmator Pro, but whatever it was didn’t offend me too badly at the time.
I’ll probably pay $99 for this app in large part to reward a dev for giving users the option to pay upfront.
I don’t mind paying 3-5x the annual subscription cost to get a paid-up license, and the “pay once, pay again if you want new features released after your first year” seems pretty fair. But $50 a year, ever year, into perpetuity for, say, a weather, calendaring or Twitter app seems pretty stupid to me.
Yeah, it's kind of funny, at first I heard about the Pixelmator/Pro debacle and thought "Damn, weaseled again"
but really, that's how software all worked back in the 90s, and it was fine. I bought Corel 5 in the 90s for $200 or whatever, and it worked great. If I wanted new features or other substantial changes, I was willing to pay for a new version.
The way I see it, there are 2 options: either you buy software "as is" and can use it forever, but you don't get free access to updates (or get them up to certain point of time), or you pay for a subscription. People who bought old versions of Pixelmator or Photoshop or 1Password can still use them (I have 1Password 4 on one of my devices), as long as the system updates won't render it useless.
Hmm.. I just gave this a quick spin and I’m not sure how they can talk about editing workflows without a culling process. I get that it leans on the Photos app for organization but the photos app is also lacking in this department. I’m looking for basics like star ratings, pick/mark, and filtering on all of the above. Looks like I’m stuck paying Adobe for a little while longer :(
For me, the issue is that it relies on yet another cloud library. I would already happily use Darkroom if it didn’t require me to use iCloud Photo Library. Same issue here.
This is why I stick with Capture One and a session workflow. My images are just files. I can sync and back them up as I please.
Even after browsing the comparison page, the differences between Pixelmator Pro and Photomator are not entirely clear. Possibly this is because of where they are in their life cycle.
For casual image editing, including photos, I turn to Pixelmator Pro most of the time. I'm not sure at this time how I would use Photomator. If it eventually integrates metadata management and cataloguing, then I would happily jettison Lightroom Classic.
I too was looking for a replacement for Lightroom Classic. I was hoping this could be it. I downloaded it and quickly found that it is not it.
- Photomater's photo library is the Apple Photos library
- Files are copied into the Apple Photos library when importing, even when Photos.app has the preference set not to
- Edits are not saved to the dng. (There is a preference to save a sidecar file when editing, but I couldn't find the sidecar. Could be a bug.)
I think that if they had just not used the Apple Photos library for their library, and had their own library browser, I probably would have bought it. The app performed really well and the experience was nice for simple photo edits. Their B&W editor was nice, and seemed to maintain brightness while adjusting individual color channels.
I'm still holding onto my LR6 perpetual license as tight as I can, even with all of the broken features, waiting for something that isn't a subscription that can function as a photo library and editor.
I found the sidecar files by going to Photomator > Settings > Editing then clicking the "Manage Files..." button.
This revealed a potential showstopper for me. Each RAW file that I worked on created a 100 MB sidecar file. I think this is just an image preview though. I could delete the sidecar file and my edits were preserved.
Those are the reasons I love this and always hated Lightroom. I'm not a pro photographer, just a better than average amateur. I guess I'm probably much more the target market for Photomator.
Looks good, unfortunately can't test because only supports the latest Mac OS (13), which Apple doesn't provide for my MacBook that still works perfectly fine. I wish developers had a bit more tolerance with backwards compatibility as I don't feel like throwing away electronics and adding to the garbage problem because of software compatibility.
If my 2013 MacBook Pro 13's battery wasn't bloated to dangerous levels, and if battery replacements weren't prohibitively expensive compared to buying a new set when discounted, I might still have been using my old one instead of upgrading to a M2 MacBook Pro.
I was on Mojave for the longest time before my upgrade forced me onto Ventura, and it was rock stable except that plenty of software no longer offered updates while on it, since the newer versions would be compiled with newer Xcode versions.
The Kaby Lake m3 with 8 GB is the version I have. It is utterly and completely schooled by my 2013 MBP. The MacBook runs the latest version of macOS, unlike the MBP.
I also have some PowerMacs that “run just fine”, but it’s been a while since they’ve gotten a software update.
Drawing tools yeah, but the workflow is still very much focused on pixel editing with layers, a fixed canvas size, etc.
In this respect it's very much like Photoshop that does have some vector stuff but it's really a terrible tool for doing graphic design, UI design, etc.
How does Pixelmator compare to Affinity photo? I've been looking for an apple aperture replacement; I know adobe lightroom is the best option available, but I already have too many subscriptions.
I’ve got both, but prefer Pixelmator for most things. While I like the idea of Affinity, I find it quite clunky to use and often find myself looking up the manual.
Pixelmator probably isn’t as fully featured, but for making quick edits it’s excellent. It’s become my go-to image editor and use it multiple times a day.
Plus the AI tools are a bonus. Upscaling isn’t as good as Topaz Gigapixel or something like SwinIR, but it’s extremely handy to have it built in.
I only had the original Pixelmator, but while it was superfast and Mac-like, it felt amateur next to Affinity, which feels like the Adobe replacement it’s angling to be. But each is $70 flat and I know Affinity has sales that make it a steal, so buy both and you’re probably still ahead if you cancel your CC sub.
> What about Pixelmator Pro?
> Together with the launch of Photomator for Mac, we’ve also released an update to Pixelmator Pro with major improvements to Photomator document support. Using the Edit with Pixelmator Pro feature, you can quickly open an edited photo in Pixelmator Pro with all the nondestructive changes fully preserved and visible. This makes it super easy to round-trip between the apps – for example, you can edit a photo, then send it to Pixelmator Pro to add some text, shapes, paint on it, and more.
> If you’d like to check out the differences between Photomator and Pixelmator Pro, you can head over to our Compare page [0] to see a side-by-side comparison and find out whether you need one or the other (or both!) for your specific workflow.
I’ve just made the move from Lightroom to Apple photos + Photomator. I was sick of having a Lightroom library for my DSLR photos, and an Apple Photos library for my iPhone shots. So far I’m happy with the move overall. I did like the control over how my files are stored in Lightroom but having all my best shots on the devices I view photos the most (iPhone and iPad) is worth giving that up.
How well is it working with the Photos library integration? I would love to do this, but only if it means I can just edit photos and share from Photos / Photos on iOS, but also edit more deeply in Photomator... do edits translate back into the Photos library for RAW files?
I'm pretty new to photography. I understand a lot of the basics (ex-wife shot as a professional hobbyist for a few years) but never really paid much attention to her editing workflow. Adobe already gets me for $20/mo for Illustrator (because designers) and I looked at alternatives. I've been using darktable http://darktable.org since I got my camera about a month ago and it's nice enough for me.
> Photomator for Mac is built from the ground up for Mac and it makes the most of native macOS technologies, such as Apple Silicon, Swift UI, Core ML, Core Image, and Metal.
Psst, Pixelmator team: if you’re here, it’s “Apple silicon” and “SwiftUI”. I figured you’d be the ones to care about that stuff.
I always get redirected to the Apple Appstore when trying to buy Pixelmator or Photomator from their website. Business wise, why is that when Apple is taking a 20% toll? Couldn’t it just be a license purchase in pixelmator website? For subscription / in-app purchase model, I get it, but for life-time licences I don’t, and I’d really would like them to take that 20% extra…
It could just be that the 20% Apple Tax is worth it to them as a business.
I use a "merchant of record" for my own side project, despite the roughly 15% it takes from each sale purely because they take care of all VAT collection and remittance worldwide.
Apple will also be taking care of some other little things like getting app updates to users, CDN, etc. etc. that I would need to implement myself.
Or you could be cynical and think that at some point they'll move to a subscription or IAP model later down the line once they have a bigger audience.
Despite the hate they get, the App Store business model is actually pretty decent for most small developers. It’s the review process that sucks, and the payments usually become more of an issue when you start paying Apple millions a year.
No, that button is on their own site (landing page). If you want to prove that saying “download for free” and then demanding payment is not a trick - don't waste your time.
App Store has an “In-app purchases” option not for tricksters like this, but for applications that provide additional functionality or services for additional payment.
It must be great for sales, because it feels like you're buying the "missing" Pro application in the Final Cut/Logic/? triumvirate (I guess Photomator is sort of a spiritual successor to Aperture's editing features). But I do wish their UI had more labeling, especially in the right-hand menu, which is just a giant column of icons.
I wonder if part of the rationale is to set themselves up for a tuck-in acquisition by Apple.