It loads in a glimpse of an eye, it’s superbly designed and it uses Core Image (it uses your Mac’s Video Card for Image processing)!
Now, let’s take a closer look at this application (let’s meet after the jump)

A beautiful icon my dock is now proudly holding, superb clean and transparent interface, photo processing becomes a pleasure on PixelMator!

First thing we’ll do, clicking on this little button (familiar to QuickTime/iPhoto users) to make the application run in full screen (notice how beautiful and simple the tool bar is):

Now we’re in full screen mode.. (0.00000001 sec to load)

Not the photo you wanted to edit? It’s not a problem! PixelMator is fully compatible with iPhoto ‘08, all you need to do is to browse your photos via the browser and pick/search the one you wanted to open!

PixelMator has all the features you find in Photoshop: filters, brushes, all the image adjustment tools (levels, colors etc…). And…
The first thing I did when I had PixelMator is opening a .psd file with layers and… it’s as if it told me: “anything Photoshop can do, I can do it!”

It supports layers too! Indeed PixelMator is able to open more than 100 kind of files (from .psd to .tiff without forgetting the famous .pdf!).
This application is really “Made For Mac”, the integration to OS X makes me want to say it should come bundled with any Mac (like Comic Life used to)!

• iSight support, you can start composing from your iSight
• The Photo browser (iPhoto ‘08 compatible).
• Core Image support (the application don’t use as much CPU as it supposed to be):
  

  The World’s First GPU Powered Image Editor.“Pixelmator is based on Core Image technology that uses your Mac’s video card for image processing. Core Image utilizes the graphics card for image processing operations, freeing the CPU for other tasks.”

• Spotlight support right out of the box!
• Automator integration with some very useful actions

We started this review with a comparaison with Adobe’s Photoshop, so let’s end with 2 important points for almost everybody:

1. As soon as you launch the application, it is ready to use, no “Loading this and loading that” screens.
2. Adobe Photoshop CS 3 is about $629 and PixelMator is only $59

As a result of these 2 points: you save $570 and you save a lot of time (waiting for the loading start up screen)!

Purchase/Download a Trial Version of Pixelmator here.

Posted in 3rd Party Software