Earlier this morning, Pixelmator Pro’s 1.1 “Monsoon” update was pushed to customers on Mac App Store, bringing a plethora of enhancements and new capabilities to this award-winning image editor and a viable Photoshop replacement.
The latest version of this awesome non-destructive image editor brings Auto Color Adjustments, support for the Touch Bar feature on 2017 or newer MacBook Pro models and a brand-new Slice tool for web designers. Saulius Dailide, one of the founders of the Pixelmator Team, called it “an absolutely massive update with tons of great new features.”
Export for web
The new Export for Web features make it really simple to optimize your images for the web and compress them to the smallest size possible without any discernible quality loss. Thanks to export presets, you can optimize images with your favorite settings with just a few clicks.
If you’re optimizing images for the web, a Quick Export feature instantly exports a web-friendly image optimized with your most-used settings at any time. As you adjust any export settings, Pixelmator Pro displays a live preview of the optimized image.
And with the newly announced Slice tool, designers can easily prepare their web mockups and layouts by dividing entire designs into smaller images, optimizing each one separately.
Smart color adjustments
With machine learning and computer vision-powered automatic color adjustments, Pixelmator Pro can automatically improve your photos. You may see suggestions for improving white balance, lightness, hue and saturation, for example.
Per developers, the machine learning algorithm was trained on “millions of images” to identify the contents of a photo, finding the best colors, lighting and contrast to make every image stand out. They’re using Apple’s CoreML and Metal frameworks for smart adjustments.
Other perks
Pixelmator Pro 1.1 can now export images in iOS 11’s new space-saving HEIF file format.
You now get live previews when formatting text and adjusting layer blending options. With a Select Color Range tool, you can make easy selections of similarly-colored areas in an image. With Touch Bar support, MacBook Pro owners can use their TouchBar for things like applying color adjustment or effect presets, selecting colors for their brushes and sharing images.
“Whenever you switch tools, Touch Bar automatically changes to put the most useful options at your fingertips, which makes using Pixelmator Pro simpler and easier than ever,” developers said. Last but not least, the app can now open vector images encoded in the SVG file format and includes a new Tutorials page to help with learning Pixelmator Pro.
Pixelmator Pro 1.1 changelog
Here’s everything new, enhanced and improved in Pixlemator Pro 1.1:
New
- The new Export for Web feature gives you a modern way to easily prepare your images for the web.
- Automatically perfect the colors of your photos with three machine learning-powered Auto Color Adjustments.
- Get quick access to all your Pixelmator Pro tools with support for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar.
- Advanced Compression lets you shrink image sizes to the maximum without affecting quality.
- The new Slice tool lets you divide designs into individual images and optimize each one separately.
- Use Quick Export to quickly export images optimized with your most used settings.
- Export Presets let you save your favorite export settings to speed up exporting images.
- See handy live previews when formatting text and adjusting layer blending.
- Use Select Color Range to select precise colors or entire color ranges.
- Thanks to SVG support, you can now open, edit, and export resolution-independent vector images.
- Export images in the modern High Efficiency Image File Format.
- Learn all about using Pixelmator Pro with easy to follow video and text tutorials on the new Tutorials page.
Improved & fixed
- The Pixelmator Pro Help menu has been improved and now shows search results from the online user guide.
- You can now Control-click a ruler to change its unit.
- When moving guides, their position will now be shown in the current ruler units rather than pixels.
- You can now show or hide each of the buttons in the Pixelmator Pro toolbar.
- When using the Arrange tool, choosing the Reset preset will now reset the rotation of text, shape, and group layers as well as image layers.
- The Gradient Fill layer style now has an angle option.
- You can now change layer opacity using the number keys when using the Style tool.
- When you select a layer in the canvas, the Layers sidebar will scroll to reveal it.
- Pressing and holding the Command key will now let you move layers while using the Free Selection tool.
- When editing individual paths within a shape, the position of any gradient fills will no longer change.
- Moving a selected image area within a group would move the group instead of the selected area. Fixed.
- It was not possible to change a layer’s rotation to below 0 degrees using the arrow buttons in the Arrange tool. Fixed.
- The Pen tool now draws much more precisely, especially when using a Magic Mouse.
- The accuracy of the Quick Selection tool’s live overlay has been improved by 1 to 2 pixels.
- The Reshape tools would not work on images over 4K with MacBook Pro models from 2016 and later.
- Using the Command key to move a layer while using the Paint tool would cause graphical glitches. Fixed.
- Using the Paint tool with the Luminosity blending mode would produce random black pixels. Fixed.
- It was not possible to change the color of single text characters using the Type tool color picker. Fixed.
- Undoing an image size change would not restore layers to their previous positions. Fixed.
- The Auto Contrast and Auto Color options of the Curves and Levels tool now work faster.
- On rare occasions, ungrouping a layer group and undoing would cause Pixelmator Pro to quit unexpectedly. Fixed.
- Refining a selection on a RAW layer would sometimes cause Pixelmator Pro to quit unexpectedly. Fixed.
- Simultaneously zooming and undoing would sometimes cause Pixelmator Pro to quit unexpectedly. Fixed.
- Switching to the Paint tool while painting a Gradient Fill would sometimes cause Pixelmator Pro to quit unexpectedly. Fixed.
- Added a few more fixes to improve the overall stability of Pixelmator Pro.
- A whole bunch of other fixes that make Pixelmator Pro even better.
You can read the full release notes at pixelmator.com/pro/updates.
This update is provided free of charge to existing users of the app.