Pixelmator vs. Elements

I'm using Pixelmator since its release and I think it is a good application: it provides pretty sophisticated features for a reasonable price.

I'm sorry but I can't provide any feedback about Elements.

I'm also curious to know if anyone's got further reviews on these products. I'm inclined to go Photoshop Elements 8, but Pixelmator is $34 at macmall.com. PSE 8 is $65, so not that much more.

If you don't want to read the whole blah blah, go down to the .

Hi there,
I own both programs, that is Pixelmator 1.5 and PSE 8 (and PSE 6), and I have to admit that I like Pixelmator much more. It seems just easier and more straight forward besides being snappier. In PSE I often feel like taken by the hand and as a consequence ending up with losing some of the control.
Some people rant over Pixelmator but I could never find their point. Most is just hot air of some "designers" being frustated of life. An often recitet critic: the Pixelmator GUI. Personally I don't think that the black HUDs in Pixelmator are harder to read than the tiny semitransparent smart tags in PSE. Both programs come in dark grey anyway and the tool bars are on both readable to me.
Still there are 2 things that bug me in Pixelmator 1.5 under Snow Leopard: First and most obvious since version 1.5 the integration into iPhoto as an external editor is somewhat broken as I can't simply press "save" and it saves back (worked in 1.4 and the developers are working on a fix, which will be available as a free update). I have to "export to iPhoto" or save to desktop and reimport into iPhoto. I don't know about Aperture though. Second the automator actions are cool, but only 32 bit, so I would have to restart Automator in 32 bit mode to use them (not a big deal, I don't use that very often).
Of PSE 6 and 8 I consider the problems more serious. First of all, it is very uncertain, what the plans of Adobe for OS X support are given the fact, that they dropped PSE 7 and silently dropped stuff from version 8 that is available in version 8 for windows and version 6 for mac. The support for coming OS X versions in existing Adobe products is about zero. They expect you to buy their newest product to have support. That's just greedy. Updates don't work on PSE 6 for me. They just cancel with an error. And last their activation process can make you pull your hair out. Just google for it.

To summarize I would buy Pixelmator again but not PSE.

On a side note I would also consider the following 3 programs as competitors. I don't know them in depth though:
Photoline
Pixel
Gimp

Best regards

Coffee-Drinker

I use Pixelmator and it has a neat interface, as well as lots of various options for pic editing. One thing I miss in Pixelmator though, is the ability to fix barrel distortion in pics - you apparently just can't.

Other than that, it would also be a good idea if they made it 64-bit so that you could use it with Automator, rather than having to launch the latter in 32-bit mode in order to be able to utilize Pixelmator with it.

I found some decent article on the internet comparing photoshop alternatives.
Hope, it helps.

http://loewald.com/blog/?p=733

Coffee-Drinker said:

I found some decent article on the internet comparing photoshop alternatives.
Hope, it helps.

http://loewald.com/blog/?p=733

Click to expand...

An interesting review with updates too:

http://loewald.com/blog/?p=1651
http://loewald.com/blog/?p=1783

It makes me wonder why Adobe charge £600 for the basic version of Photoshop when apps like Photoline do a lot of the same things for a fraction of the price. Maybe one day there really will be a 'Photoshop-killer' at a fraction of the price - God knows we need one!

Nick G said:

It makes me wonder why Adobe charge £600 for the basic version of Photoshop when apps like Photoline do a lot of the same things for a fraction of the price.

Click to expand...

I always wonder how Adobe can charge so much money and why is everybody paying the price. Regarding a killer app: It looks like Photoline would be something like a killer app. Sure, it doesn't look the same and behaves the same but if these are the criteria for a killer app then we will never have one, as Adobe would sue the programmer of it into nirvana.

Anyway I will give Photoline a fair try. Its price is absolutely reasonable for what it can do. And besides it was originally an Atari ST program, so it MUST be good.

I just bought Pixelmator and I'm super happy, does what I need it to do and has a nice GUI. I used Gimp upon today and Gimp is nice but since it's a port for OS X it doesn't feel like an OS X application imho.

I always felt Photoshop to be to expensive, I've used in in school and so and it's a nice app no doubt.

Coffee-Drinker said:

... it is very uncertain, what the plans of Adobe for OS X support are given the fact, that they dropped PSE 7 and silently dropped stuff from version 8 that is available in version 8 for windows and version 6 for mac.

Click to expand...

Hi Coffee-Drinker,

I've been considering an update from PSE6 to PSE8. Could you please advise what features were dropped from v6 to v8?

Thank you.