Pixelmator 1.4

See how this Mac-based image editor stacks up against your regular tool

This is the software publisher's description.

Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.

Someone who is editing images must be able to select the right shapes, portions or objects in images. With Pixelmator’s powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools you can quickly and easily select any part of your images. That means you can edit and apply special effects to portions of your pictures, remove unwanted objects or even cut out objects from one picture to put on another. Thanks to the masks palette in Pixelmator, you can even save your selections for later. Now, that’s handy.

Thanks to Pixelmator’s graphics drawing tablet support, you can now freely hand-draw or paint with the Pencil, Brush, and Clone Stamp tools, or erase with the tablet’s eraser. What’s more, you can take advantage of the tablet’s pressure sensitivity to play with incredibly fast Blur and Sharpen tools.

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. And if you have a high-performance card with increased video memory (VRAM), you’ll find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations. Pixelmator is blistering-fast on the latest PowerPC and all Intel-based Mac’s.

What if you just love having fun with filters, but think that Pixelmator doesn’t have enough of them? Well, think again—Pixelmator significantly outshines other applications with its powerful plug-in architecture that takes advantage not only of Core Image units, but also of Quartz Composer compositions. This means you can simply download or create your own Core Image unit or even Quartz Composer composition and play with it right away in Pixelmator.