Pixelmator may be nipping at Photoshop's heels

For any creative pro out there, Photoshop is about your only option for photo manipulation and composits, things like that. Pixelmator, from the Pixelmator Team, is pretty quickly becoming a respectable alternative, though in its very early stages. Certainly the Photoshop juggernaut offers a tremendous amount more flexibility and has a laundry list of features that don't appear in Pixelmator, but bullet points don't always equal a superior product. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the creative community can drop PS for Pixelmator as the new standard anytime soon, but I've found I'm using it more and more for my projects whenever I can, when it doesn't involve a need for using smart objects. In the last week, Pixelmator 1.4 dropped with a new paint engine that now allows all PS brushes to be used and it really showcases how PS has become new features piled up on the same old, rigid framework of the original versions, if not the first version.

Some PS tools work marvelously and some make you wonder why you're still using the same archaic dialog windows from long ago, such as all the filters from earlier days. For example, the radial / zoom blur dialog in PS gives you a blank white square and a crosshair and you have to guess where you want the effect to originate from. Get it wrong the first time? Undo and try again. And yes, if your canvas is oblong, you still get a square to place the crosshair in. Pixelmator, on the other hand, gives you a white circle on your document itself and allows you to move that around and see in real time how the effect is going to look. The circle is tethered to a dialog where you adjust the intensity of the effect.

The new paint engine is marvelous, too. I was able to bring in all of my PS brushes without any issue, and it was yet another reminder of how Photoshop needs a complete rewrite. If you load brushes in PS, you're given an icon representing the brush to help you choose the one you want. The problem with that is, if your brush is also an oblong shape, the icon is stretched to fit a square area. Not particularly helpful, I have had a great number of times where I'll think "this brush should work well," only to find the actual brush looks a great deal different when not stretched. Pixelmator now also shows you what the brush looks like over the document before stamping it, which is a very welcome addition. Before, you were given a crosshair—not at all helpful.

The Pixelmator interface is also very nice, based off of the Mac OS X 'bezel' appearance. Photoshop, however, is still trying to shoehorn their old interface and display style into the new 'panel' layout, which is suffering from terrible UI bugs. For more information on that (and much more amusing, though quite NSFW), you can visit adobegripes.tumblr.com. Personally, I think it would be quite rad if the Pixelmator Team partnered with some vector app like DrawIt or Line Form, and perhaps some other company start a pro page layout software, that way there could be the option for really tight integration like Adobe now offers that, quite honestly, is really what keeps me from kicking it to the curb. And on the page layout topic, anyone who suggests Quark I will scoff at. Quark is dead to me and should be dead to everyone else. And dead in general.