Plaidophile

So, Pixelmator 2.0 is finally out, and I've done what I can to put it through its paces to see if it can replace my old copy of Photoshop yet. The quick verdict: No, it can't, but it's really close now.

On the plus side, they finally fixed the biggest issue I had, with there being only a single global brush for all tools. Now, each tool tracks its own brush state. How they waited until version 2 to add this I have no idea (since it's pretty much fundamental that you're going to be switching tools a lot) but at least they finally fixed it, and that's what really matters.

There's still a few of the old questionable weirdnesses, like the fact that the background layer has an alpha channel, but is filled with opaque white by default. The end result is that if you draw on a new canvas and then erase those lines, you no longer have the same canvas, because now there's a hole in it. But that's a minor thing.

The new text tool is a bit frustrating. I'm glad they finally added the wrapping controls that are in Photoshop, but they did it in a pretty bad way, and to make things worse, it requires a lot of extra clicks to start writing your text (annoying), and you can't move the text layer around while you're editing it (maddening).

It still has the really annoying custom widgets, which aren't bad in and of themselves, except that there's no way to edit the numeric values from the keyboard, and it requires pixel-precise movements. There is a big difference between a 9-pixel line and a 10-pixel line, and having to nudge a custom control by EXACTLY ONE PIXEL is not exactly an easy task. Fortunately, most of my brushes I can do as presets so I only have to bother with that once.

The single biggest issue, though, is a minor bug with show-stopping consequences: is that there are flaws in how it handles tablet pressure. From what I can tell, it sees a pressure value of 0 to mean "pressure not supported," even when it's in the middle of drawing a line which has in fact had pressure the whole way. So every line I draw ends up with a full-thickness tail on it. Sometimes it seems to glitch out and do a full-thickness segment in the middle of a line too. This is absolutely unacceptable, as it is a constant deterrent to actual drawing, since you have to keep on stopping to go back and fix a mistake that was made by the computer, not by the artist. It's like trying to write with a leaky pen, or with a mechanical pencil where the lead keeps breaking (and when it breaks it leaves a giant mark on the paper).

Even without that last bug, though, all the previous issues add up to something that is not a very good experience, and for now I will continue to use Photoshop CS4.

Maybe next version.