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January 7, 2011

My current Pixelmator wishlist (, )

by fluffy at 9:19 AM

I'm trying Pixelmator yet again. It's made a lot of positive progress since the last time I wrote about it in detail (especially regarding its pressure-sensitive brush engine, which is now just as good as Photoshop's), but there's still a bunch of stuff that could be better, and which still keep me from switching:

  • Selection refinement (still) isn't particularly useful. There needs to be a way of growing/shrinking by a specific number of pixels (rather than percentage), and keyboard access to those values (right now only "smooth" ever gets keyboard focus, for some reason)
  • There (still) needs to be a brush set on a per-tool basis, rather than globally. Having to constantly switch between a small brush (for sketching and inking) and a large brush (for erasing) sucks. (This is the main thing that stops me from switching.)
  • It would be nice if there were automatic non-destructive layer styles like in Photoshop; in particular, I use Stroke a lot, and not having that is really irritating.
  • Magic Wand and Paint Bucket (still) need a way of restricting their area based on the full image, not just on the current layer.

Every version gets a lot more features that add gee-whiz factor, but none of them seem to address what I feel are basic workflow issues for producing art digitally. If the Pixelmator guys would at least acknowledge these requests on their forum I might feel more confident in my purchase (which I've made again thanks to the categorical App Store transition), but I'm starting to get a bit worried that they don't actually care.

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