Friday, February 24, 2017

Is pixelmator a viable alternative for photoshop?


I've always been a photoshop user, i know the ins and outs and know my way around all the tools i need for my webdesign work. But now i'm faced with a dilemma, for my new job i haven't got the budget for a full photoshop license so i'm wondering, is pixelmator a good alternative?


I use Photoshop mainly to slice a design into separate images so enable/disable layers is a must, PSD compatibility too, ...


Anyone has experience with Pixelmator?



Answer



No.



Pixelmator is quite nice--especially for the price. And I've been using it for a while for my own personal side projects. 2.0 came out and added some nice features.


Alas, it has issues. The big ones:



  • it's buggy. I think it's a bit premature to call it '2.0' IMHO. Still feels a little beta.

  • doesn't support full range of PSD layer information. It can open PSD files, but since it can't bring over all the layer effects and styles, it's really not practical.

  • very limited export abilities. The big one is PNG files. If you let it compress them, you get big color shifts. If you export it as a non-web PNG, it's huge, and then you have to use 3rd party tools to further compress.


I think it has a lot of potential, and eventually will be a great runner-up, but it still won't be PhotoShop.


As for slicing, it does do that (aside from the PNG issues). (I'd suggest not using a 'slice n dice' workflow anymore, but that's a different discussion...)


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