Forums >Gears and Wears>Pixelmator
Good Bad & The Monkey
Anybody use this? Thoughts?
I'm running somewhere tomorrow. It's going to be beautiful. I can't wait.
Poor baby
I prefer my tomators to be real. And large. But not too large.
Dave
I've owned it and used it for a few years.
Good value for the money, especially if you don't want to spring for Photoshop. It has some limitations but it does most things pretty well.
Alternatively you can use "The Gimp" which is open source and free. Learning curve on the Gimp is a little more difficult and the app isn't as attractive.
It doesn't come close to some of the new editing tools in Photoshop CS5(?) but it also costs 1/10th as much.
I ran a mile and I liked it, liked it, liked it. dgb2n@yahoo.com
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I've got some!
Runners run
Learning curve on the Gimp is a little more difficult
Yes, I found this to be the case. In fact, yours is an understatement.
I believe that any of these powerful photo manipulation tools have a fairly challenging learning curve.
If you make them powerful enough, they get hard to use. If you make them easy to use, they tend to not be terribly capable or flexible.
Pick your poison.
Pixelmator is a pretty good middle ground.
Another reasonable open source and free option for windows is Paint.Net. It does not have all the power of The Gimp, but it's user interface is more like a "normal" windows program.
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325th place or bust!
How is Pixelmator compared to something like IrfanView (a Windows tool)? IrfanView is probably the one tool that has kept me from going completely to the mac. It's fast and very good at picture editing, including a batch mode where you can shrink a whole folder of images. It's free, too!
PR: 5K 22:41, 10K 51:05, HM 1:59, Sprint Tri: done!
True dat. However, GIMP documentation is either way too basic or way to advanced.
At first glance, I'd say they address different needs. Irfanview looks like a very batch capable image editor/converter. Not a whole lot of advanced filters, layers, etc. Does some files other than just images.
Pixelmator is pretty much a mouse only app. Increasingly capable photo editor. Includes layers, filters, all the basic editing stuff. Can resize and save in different formats. Images only. Beautiful interface. Really leverages the standard apple "Quartz" libraries to make stuff process fast.
With all these tools, I find that some of the online tutorial videos (some on Youtube) provide the best documentation of all. Every time I watch one, I realize what a noob I am with the tool and how little of it's real capability I can leverage.
That and I'm not gifted in creative stuff. I realize that too.
Lazy idiot
Rolf is a great resource for GIMP.
Tick tock
Nice link, Drew.
I like this, but am too lazy to search the site. May be a dumb question, but here it goes. Is there a way to change the focus of a picture? For example, I have one pic where I got a really good bird shot, but the branches seem to be the focus (it was a quick snap, no time to adjust camera for it). Is there a way to make the bird stand out? The bird isn't distinctly different in colour from the branches, except a little yellow on his front.
MTA: increasing contrast makes it worse.
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Personally, between GIMP and Inkscape I can do most of the stuff I need but I tend not to work with photographs all that often. Inkscape is my favourite as it can handle Encapsulated PS (which I have to use regularly for posters and reports) without converting, and thereby losing the important scalable quality of .eps, it like a lot of other programmes tend to.