PIXELMATOR Now Available for iPhone

We told you it was coming and now it is here. Pixelmator ($9.99, on sale for a limited time for $4.99) brings the power of its Mac and iPad photo editing software to your iPhone, which is about the best news an iPhoneographer could get.

The app has complete feature parity with the iPad version, and all the power is nicely fitted to the iPhone smaller screen. This is especially good news for photographers, as Adobe has killed Photoshop touch.

I think Pixelmator has all the tools a serious photo editor is going to want, including a stack of desktop class tools like multiple layer support, histogram adjustments, color sampling, text tools, excellent effects and filters. Layers are handled with a slide out drawer which you can get to with a swipe. Layers can then be adjusted, merged or deleted.

The distort tools use the Apple Metal graphics tech, and the rendering is quite fast.

Pixelmator supports multiple levels of undo and restore. As with the iPad version, there are more than 100 brushes, and the very well thought-out repair and retouching tools.

For output, you can send to iCloud for syncing, and you can use Apple’s Handoff to open your image in other compatible apps.

Using Pixelmator on iPhone

Pixelmator for the iPhone is a pleasure to use. Yes, things are tighter on the smaller iPhone screen, but you can easily zoom in to work on only part of the image in detail. The app supports landscape and portrait mode on the iPhone. I found rendering very quick on my iPhone 6, and throughout all my testing I did not feel constrained by the smaller screen, In fact, I’d say Pixelmator performs similarly to Pixelmator on my desktop Mac.

Pixelmator is just not a photo editing tool. It is also useful for creating graphic art and paintings. Brushes can do realistic and stylized art, and brush sizes and opacity are adjustable. There are smudge tools, and you can emulate watercolors and chalk. For graphic design, there is a large catalog of shapes, and the ability to combine photos with graphics. Section tools allow you to work on any area of an image.

Of course Pixelmator supports cropping and rotation, and the output matches your input resolution, unless you decide to modify it.

As with the Mac and iPad versions, you can open Photoshop images with layers, and you can save in PSD, JPEG, PNG and PDF formats. Your images can be saved to your Photo Roll or to your iCloud Drive, and you can, of course, publish to Flickr, Twitter or Facebook.

I have quite a few shared albums on the cloud, I did not see any way to directly open an image from there, so I had to download those cloud images to my camera roll, then edit.

You can get a detailed overview of Pixelmator’s specs at this link.

The Bottom Line

Pixelmator for iPhone is a very exciting development for iPhoneorgraphers. It requires iOS 8.3 or later, and is optimized for the iPhone 5, iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The app is still on sale for half off at $4.99 but if you have the iPad version, it’s a free download for your iPhone. Highly recommended.

Download Pixelmator for iPhone and iPad:

App Store link: Pixelmator – Pixelmator Team

– Mel Martin