Adjust colors with a collection of nondestructive, machine learning-powered color adjustments.Easily move, resize, and arrange objects to create stunning compositions.Edit nondestructively, adjusting individual changes whenever you like.Enhance your existing images and create new ones using every image editing tool you could ever need.
And thanks to its intuitive and accessible design, Pixelmator Pro is delightfully easy to use - whether you’re just starting out with image editing or you’re a seasoned pro. With a wide range of professional-grade, nondestructive image editing tools, Pixelmator Pro lets you bring out the best in your photos, create gorgeous compositions and designs, draw, paint, apply stunning effects, design beautiful text, and edit images in just about any way you can imagine. Pixelmator Photo costs $4.99/£4.99 and you can get it from the Apple App Store.What does Pixelmator Pro do? Pixelmator Pro is an incredibly powerful, beautiful, and easy-to-use image editor designed exclusively for Mac. Pixelmator Photo is a snip at just $4.99/£4.99 but it’s best for people who just want quick fixes and all the benefits of machine-learning artificial intelligence rather than in-depth adjustments. And the regular Pixelmator is a more powerful all-in-one photo-editing, drawing, painting and illustration tool at the same price. Google Snapseed offers a far wider range of effects and adjustments, including local adjustments, and it’s free. The editing tools are great as far as they go, especially the film presets and perspective corrections, but with no local adjustments or layers tools (you need the ‘other’ Pixelmator for that), Pixelmator Photo feels quick, cheap and useful, but also a bit limited. You can’t launch Pixelmator Photo direct from the Apple Photos app, so that means you have to start from the app and import from Photos – it sounds a small thing, but it is annoying. The repairs aren't always invisible, but people who haven't seen the original photo probably won't suspect a thing. You might not use half of them, relying on the film emulation presets and key Lightness and White Balance settings instead, but they’re there if you want to experiment with more advanced image effects – and you can save your own custom presets.
The manual adjustments are straightforward and responsive too. Pixelmator Photo automatically crops the image as you make adjustments so you don’t get any messy perspective correction ‘wedges’ at the side of the picture. The ML Crop tool is a nice idea that you can find yourself using more and more as you learn to trust the app to get your composition right, and the perspective correction sliders are smooth and responsive. The ML Enhance button can take a couple of seconds to do its work, as can the Repair too, but it feels quick compared to desktop software. Pixelmator comes with a wide range of film emulation presets, which work intelligently with any ML (machine learning) adjustments you've already made. If you want direct file compatibility between Pixelmator images on your iPad and the desktop software, you need the Pixelmator iOS app, not Pixelmator Photo. It doesn’t appear to use the same file format as the regular desktop Pixelmator Pro app, unfortunately, so editing Pixelmator Pro files on your desktop doesn’t look like it’s possible right now. Pixelmator Photo will also open raw files directly, from over 500 camera models. What this means is that you can use Pixelmator Photo to edit any image stored in these locations, so it’s like having a handy iPad editor for images available everywhere, including your desktop computer or laptop. You can store Pixelmator Photo files separately on your iPad or in Cloud locations like iCloud Drive or Dropbox (though it wouldn’t import a new file with the Dropbox option selected – Pixelmator is aware of this). On the upside, Pixelmator Photo is not tied to Apple Photos. Pixelmator Photo works independently of the Apple Photos app, so it makes importing and editing images more long-winded but gives you more choice in where you keep your images.