Rendering is very fast and the application UI is equally responsive. In my use, on a retina Macbook Pro, Pixelmator was incredibly fast and efficient. The team has combined all of OS X’s technology stack, such as Core Image and OpenCL, which results in a very performant application. I think the result was decent for something that only took about fifteen minutes of work.īelow the surface, for version 3.0, the developers have revamped the image engine. In my example, I attempted to de-emphasize the face structure and highlight the piercing eye without making it look artificial.Īn animated GIF of before and after my short experimentation with the Liquify tools.įinally, I used layer styles to add a thin black border to frame the shot. It’s tempting to go overboard, but small tweaks are where these Liquify tools have value. I took an image of my friend’s cat and used a mixture of the warp and pinch tools to touch it up.
I had a play with these tools to see if I could achieve similar results and determine if this feature was more than just a gimmick.
In the screenshot at the top of the article, the warp tool has turned a bland photo of a flower into a very stylized (but professional) image. Clearly, these are meant as more of a novelty attraction than serious editing features, but they can have productive uses. In the press release, the team describe the Liquify Tools as effects that “are incredibly fun to play with, whether you want to subtly improve your photos or artistically distort them”. Warp pushes pixels around the canvas, Bump gradually enlarges at the center of the brush, Pinch stretches and Twirl - well - twirls the image a la a Photo Booth.
A drop-down enables switching between Smudge and the new warping tools, namely: Warp, Bump, Pinch and Twirl.Įach effect is pretty self-explanatory once you increase the diameter size of the brush. The new tools now accompany Smudge in the tools palette. These are officially referred to as “Liquify Tools” in the app. Like shapes, layer styles can also be imported from external sources if desired.Īside from layer styles, Pixelmator 3.0 brings a brand new array of warping tools. As you would expect, this swatch can be added to, allowing you to store your own custom styles for future use. The presets have a good variety to them and will probably come in handy at some point. Pixelmator exposes a handful of preset layer styles at the bottom of the pane. The absence of more granularity here make it useless for most projects. Customization options such as distance or angle are not available and are sorely needed. The reflection setting is probably the only option that feels somewhat rushed because it isn’t flexible. Shadows (both the normal and inset type) are limited to solid colors only, but fills and strokes can be colors or gradients. Layer styles are a great way to spruce up text with visual adornments. It doesn’t feel like the view has been ‘tacked on’. If a layer has a style applied, a small ‘fx’ icon is shown next to the preview. Styling options are exposed through a new pane in the app, the Styles pane. The new pane is integrated really well with the rest of the app, with the same look and feel you find in other parts of Pixelmator. In fact, layer styles can even be copied to the clipboard and duplicated across layers. This means layer effects can be undone and manipulated without changing the underlying image data. More importantly, these changes are non-destructive - they affect the layer, not the canvas pixels themselves. Layer styles apply effects such as strokes, fills, shadows and reflections to the entire layer in very few clicks. The headline feature for Pixelmator 3.0 is the addition of layer styles.
#Pixelmator animated gif update#
9to5Mac has had access to a preview copy of the update for a few days … so read on for a full walkthrough of the changes. The update brings a slew of changes to the already popular image editor, especially considering version 2.2 was only released a few weeks ago.
#Pixelmator animated gif mac#
As before, the app is available on the Mac App Store for $29.99. Today, the team behind Pixelmator has released the latest version of their app, version 3.0 FX.
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