Pixelmator for Mac gains Photos app support, Force Touch drawing, enhanced Repair tool, more

Pixelmator 3.3.2 for Mac improved Repair tool

Pixelmator for Mac received a sweet update last evening, adding a trio of noteworthy features and a plethora of bug fixes. A free update to existing users of the app, Pixelmator 3.3.2 brought out an even more remarkable — and way faster — Repair tool.

It also added support for pressure-sensitive drawing on Macs with the new Force Touch trackpad and importing photos from the Photos app on OS X Yosemite 10.10.3. In addition to these perks, the app contains other tweaks and bug fixes.

The enhanced Repair tool, shown above, is the result of two years of refinements. Not only does it sport improved edge detection, content patching and color matching, but is now five times faster whilst producing significantly better results in removing unwanted objects than before.

Here it is in action.

“We even used the new Mac Pro (because it’s extremely fast and powerful) to automatically improve our Repair technology algorithms,” said the firm.

Next, you can now access your Photos library right from the Photo Browser in Pixelmator. Here’s browsing images from the Photos app in Pixelmator.

Pixelmator 3.3.2 for Mac Photos app support

Moreover, it’s now possible to take advantage of pressure-sensitive drawing on the Force Touch trackpad found on Apple’s new twelve-inch MacBook and the updated thirteen-inch MacBook Pro.

The force sensors detect how much pressure you’re applying, and Pixelmator changes the size of your brush. “It feels just like painting with a stylus,” said developers, though this feature is hardly a replacement for dedicated drawing tablets that graphics professionals use.

Pixelmator 3.3.2 changelog:

New features and enhancements:

  • This update includes support for the new Photos app and the new Force Touch trackpad. It redefines the performance of Pixelmator’s awesome Repair tool, and contains other improvements and bug fixes.
  • Now you can quickly access your Photos library right from the Photo Browser in Pixelmator.
  • Paint with pressure sensitivity using the Force Touch trackpad on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro.
  • Wipe away unwanted elements from your photos up to five times faster with the enhanced Repair tool.

Other improvements and bug fixes:

  • You can now repair images non-destructively on a transparent layer placed in front with the “Sample All Layers” option selected.
  • The app would previously stop responding on certain Macs when using the Repair tool with the document name popover visible. We fixed this.
  • Performance used to get a little slow when working extensively with colors and styles of text and shape layers. Not anymore.
  • The “New Layer from FaceTime” feature now works perfectly on all Macs.
  • The Layers palette no longer dims after changing the image size.
  • After using crop and undo actions one after the other, the thumbnails of grouped layers used to show inaccurate previews of the enclosed images. Now they’re displayed beautifully.
  • Sometimes, after dragging an image from a Web browser when the app was hidden or closed, the palettes failed to open. No more surprises.
  • Now you can open 16-bit Photoshop images exported from Aperture.
  • Previously, opening Photoshop images containing outer glow adjustments could cause the app to stop responding. That won’t happen again.
  • Small images used to jump to full zoom when zooming out with the pinch gesture. We fixed that, too.
  • The scroll bar of the Gradients, Styles and Shapes palettes used to hide part of their thumbnails when the “Show Scroll Bars” feature was set to “Always” in System Preferences. Fixed.
  • The app used to stop responding when grouping shape layers into many subgroups. Fixed.
  • Sometimes, when connecting a MacBook Pro with discrete graphics and OS X Yosemite to an external display, weird graphical glitches would occur. We fixed that, too.
  • Once in a while, the alert “The file doesn’t exist” would pop up when trying to export a file in a different file format. It won’t happen again (fingers crossed).
  • Now you can Send Backward as many layers as you wish.
  • The thumbnails of newly created gradients wouldn’t show up properly in some localizations. Now, they are displayed just as they should be.

Our own Jeff Benjamin made a little video explaining how Pixelmator’s Repair extension can be used to easily remove unwanted objects from images in other apps like Mail, TextEdit and more, here it is.

The 42.9-megabyte app requires a Mac with a 64-bit Intel processor and OS X 10.9.5 and later.

Pixelmator is $29.99 in the Mac App Store.

The iPad edition is $9.99 in the App Store.