Pixelmator launched this week. It is absolutely everything Adobe Photohop Elements should be and more. And, it’s cheaper. Weighing in at a svelte $60, Pixelmator is everything most people will ever need from the full Photoshop and then some. As an added bonus, the thing launches in a blink and is generally faster that Photoshop for most operations. Contributing to the speed of Pixelmator is the fact that uses OS X’s built in graphics subsystems such as Core Image and Core Graphics, which save on memory usage and, even better, offload most of the real work to the GPU. There’s also an added side effect here that all operations are performed as floating point operations, which gives you much more accurate color blends, and smoother gradients.
Just to be clear, Pixelmator is nowhere near ready to replace Photoshop. It’s fast and intelligent, but it doesn’t have enough features to really compete on that level. The truth is that most people don’t need a Photoshop. Most people need what Photoshop Elements should have been. They need Pixelmator.
The big problem with Photoshop Elements is that it differentiates itself from it’s big brother by artificially limiting it’s feature set through addition. It’s not a spry, subset of Photoshop, where each menu has a few fewer options. It’s pretty much all of Photoshop, with a nasty, limiting UI slapped on top to make it difficult to use the present features in a meaningful way. Imagine if an auto company designed their economy cars by taking their biggest fuel hogs and disabling all of the good features, painting them yellow, and removing all the gauges from the dashboard.