Photomator for Mac
pixelmator.com
pixelmator.com
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 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 realized I just wanted clean / simple but not too close to a company where it started to feel "off".
- 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.Otherwise it's really slick. Frustrating.
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.
It looks like Pixelmator Pro is roughly analogous to Photoshop, while Photomator is roughly analogous to Lightroom.
„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.”
App supports RAW from some cameras unknown to Apple system: https://support.gentlemencoders.com/the-future-of-raw-camera...
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.
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.
I still have no idea if Photomator is something I should consider, having already purchased Pixelmator Pro.
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.
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.
They are STILL missing a means to quickly adjust the softness and/or size of all of their tools using the scroll wheel.
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.
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.
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.
Lifetime could be 6 months, could be 6 years. The latter is probably impossible and a rebrand could nullify it.
Be honest about what 'lifetime' actually means, write it into a binding contract (yeah, 'binding' is difficult) and I might consider it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Expecting lifetime updates with your lifetime license seems weird to me. That‘s not a realistic expectation.
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.
It's the subscription model that is poison.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Photomator might be an acknowledgment that pixel and photo editing are fundamentally different processes (... and never the twain shall meet).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-inch_MacBook
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.
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.
They announced it a couple of years ago but it seems to have been abandoned.
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.
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.
Insaw this page but am confused. https://www.pixelmator.com/compare/
The copy on their website does not address my confusion.
Is photomator a completely new tool? Or an evolution?
I see it does not have layers? What does this mean for my process? Do I now need both?!
> 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.
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 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.
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.
Affinity can edit in EDR, but there's no export format supported natively by Apple.
After getting an XDR capable screen, I've lost the desire to edit my photos.