Pixelmator Pro Gains New Exporting Tools, Auto Color Adjustments and Touch Bar Support

Thursday May 31, 2018 4:00 AM PDT by Juli Clover
Pixelmator Pro, a graphics and image editing app from the Pixelmator team, received its first major update today to introduce new features that include MacBook Pro Touch Bar support, new tools for exporting images, auto color adjustment options, a Tutorials page, and more.

The app now includes full support for the Touch Bar on recent 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro models, providing quick access to tools for making color adjustments, choosing effect presets, selecting colors for brushes, and more. The Touch Bar has been designed to offer up the most useful options whenever you switch to a new tool.


New Export for Web features are designed to allow users to prepare and optimize images for the web with advanced compression techniques in just a few clicks. The Pixelmator team says these tools compress images to the smallest size possible without a loss of quality.

Quick Export offers up a web-friendly image optimized with your most-used settings, while a new Slice tool is meant to make it easier to create web designs by slicing images into smaller images with the option of optimizing each one separately.


There are new Auto White Balance, Auto Lightness, and Auto Hue & Saturation tools that are powered by machine learning. These tools are meant to let users make one-click adjustments to optimize photos. Pixelmator says its machine learning algorithm was trained on millions of images to identify the contents of a photo and select the best lighting, contrast, and colors.


Other new features in Pixelmator Pro include support for opening and exporting vector images using the SVG format, support for exporting HEIF images, live previews when formatting text or tweaking layer blend options, a Select Color Range tool for selecting similarly colored areas of an image, and a whole new Tutorials page designed to help new users learn the ins and outs of Pixelmator Pro.

Dozens of other tweaks and bug fixes have been added, with release notes available on the Pixelmator Pro website.

Pixelmator Pro, which requires macOS High Sierra and a Metal-compatible graphics card, can be downloaded from the Mac App Store for $59.99. [Direct Link]

Tag: Pixelmator
32 comments


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Toutou
8 months ago
Personally I prefer Affinity, but I'll cheer for anything that's not Adobe. Go Pixelmator, go Affinity!
Rating: 9 Votes
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GoAndrius
8 months ago

This version fixed the Photos app access issue that I had been having within Pixelmator Pro itself. It used to get stuck trying to load the library and no albums/thumbnails would ever appear in the pop-up window. Now it works instantly, similar to the iOS version of Pixelmator.


Yay, we completely rewrote the Photo Browser to make it work much faster, so I'm glad to hear this is working!
Rating: 5 Votes
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GoAndrius
8 months ago

And still no text on a path? That’s a deal breaker for me.


That's fair — text on a path is on the roadmap along with additional text improvements, but it may take a little while longer for it to happen.

Still waiting for the iPad version - hopefully on the horizon.


We should have some news about this fairly soon. ;)
Rating: 3 Votes
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wwchris
8 months ago

So....you were totally okay with Pixelmator deciding to make a version of their existing product that they slapped the word "pro" onto, didn't have everything their existing one had so as to provide updates promising to add those things back in and more (like Apple) and charge $60 for it?

Okay....


Yes, I am totally ok with it. If you bought Pixelmator on sale at any one of the times they had it on sale you probably got it for $29. Hell, Adobe charges $10 per month. That version of Pixelmator has been out for, I dunno, at least 4-5 years as I recall, so yes, them releasing a 2.0/Pro version with tons of new features and a rewrite seems fine. Yes. I would like them to stay in business :-) Also, the old version still works.
Rating: 2 Votes
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Seuck
8 months ago
Unfortunately there is no upgrade discount coming from Pixelmator. If it's a limitation of App Store, sorry but that's not my problem as a customer.
Meanwhile Pixelmator becomes older and older and unsupported (and starts to crash often). I'm not happy.
Rating: 2 Votes
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Brammy
8 months ago

I'm over Pixelmator. The excitement is with Affinity now.


I do prefer Affinity, but is also complicated to use. That said, I hope having two, great, Photoshop alternatives keeps each app fresh and often updated.
Rating: 1 Votes
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GoAndrius
8 months ago

Unfortunately there is no upgrade discount coming from Pixelmator. If it's a limitation of App Store, sorry but that's not my problem as a customer.
Meanwhile Pixelmator becomes older and older and unsupported (and starts to crash often). I'm not happy.


That definitely shouldn't be happening and we're actually working on an update to the original Pixelmator at the moment — if you're having any trouble, it'd be great if you could fire over an email to support@pixelmator.com. We can share a beta version with you and make sure any issues you're having are fixed in the update.

How about supporting external filters like Topaz Adjust?


There aren't any plans for this at the moment, to be honest.

High Sierra requirement is a deal breaker for me. What happened to backwards compatibility?

Is there a comparison matrix of Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro?


Some of the new technologies we're using required High Sierra, so there wasn't a simple way to bring those features to previous OSes. With time, we'll of course add support for new versions of macOS, while keeping support for older ones.

There isn't a comparison matrix, but you can always check out the Pixelmator Pro trial ('http://www.pixelmator.com/pro/free-trial/') (if you decide to update your macOS) and see what we've added for yourself.
Rating: 1 Votes
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gnipgnop
8 months ago
This version fixed the Photos app access issue that I had been having within Pixelmator Pro itself. It used to get stuck trying to load the library and no albums/thumbnails would ever appear in the pop-up window. Now it works instantly, similar to the iOS version of Pixelmator.
Rating: 1 Votes
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GoAndrius
8 months ago

I’m trying hard to replace Photoshop with Pixelmator Pro but it just keeps letting me down.

Why can’t text be free transformed? This is such an obvious one. You have to try out different font sizes to try to get the size just right.

Why no distortion handles? You can’t change the perspective of an object to match the layer you’re adding it to.

So many basic features are missing and you realize it as you use Pixelmator Pro.

Hopefully it’ll get there soon. Meanwhile, I have to keep Photoshop around.


Text can now be transformed in layer groups — select a text layer, Command-G, then resize.

For perspective transform, you can use Insert > Effects > Perspective Transform. We also have plans for more comprehensive distortion/warping tools as well.
Rating: 1 Votes
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MacSince1985
8 months ago
High Sierra requirement is a deal breaker for me. What happened to backwards compatibility?

Is there a comparison matrix of Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro?
Rating: 1 Votes
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