Pixelmator Team Unveils Pixelmator 2.0 Chameleon

The Pixelmator Team has unveiled Pixelmator 2.0, a major upgrade of their Photoshop-alternative image editing tool for creating, editing, and enhancing still images. Pixelmator 2.0, codenamed Chameleon, appears to have addressed most of the shortcomings your editor noted with Pixelmator 1, featureing new drawing tools, Content-Aware technology-based Fill, a Healing Tool, new retouching tools, a Smudge Tool, a new Text tool supporting advanced typography features, and more.

Free and incremental rotate and support for keeping multiple adjustment palettes open simultaneously aren’t mentioned in the press release, but, the Pixelmator folks do say version 2 users will be able to make the app truly personal by adding, removing, arranging, and even grouping tools in the new, fully customizable Tools palette, and that there will also be a new contextual Tool Options bar, which shows the exact set of tool settings needed at the moment, depending on the tool in use, so here’s hoping.

“Pixelmator makes it incredibly fun and easy for anyone to create, edit and enhance images,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “Now, with tons of new features and improvements, the next generation of Pixelmator is clearly one of the most impressive and useful apps ever built for Mac OS X.”

The new drawing tools in Pixelmator will allow users to easily add, create and edit vector shapes. In addition to Pen, Freeform Pen, Convert and Path Selection tools, Pixelmator also includes pre-drawn shape tools for quickly adding triangles, lines, circles, rectangles, and even custom shapes from the new Shapes palette into compositions. Fill and stroke settings for created shapes, as well as shadows, can be easily adjusted in the new Shape Settings palette. The drawing tools are very useful for creating buttons, icons, web page elements, illustrations or any other items for use in image compositions.

A breakthrough new Content-Aware Fill technology in Pixelmator allows users to magically get rid of unwanted elements in images, as if they never existed. By using either the new Healing Tool or the selection tools, one can select wrinkles, blemishes, image damage or any other details in images, then let Pixelmator smartly and seamlessly fill the selected area with similar nearby image content.

The new retouching tools in Pixelmator include a Sponge Tool, for adding more color or taking color away from areas of an image by painting on them; Burn and Dodge tools, for naturally darkening or lightening areas of an image; and a Red Eye Tool for easily – either automatically or manually – fixing the red-eye effect in images.

The new Smudge Tool allows smearing paint, or rubbing out blemishes or any other details in images, simply by using any brush tip, as realistically as using one’s fingers.

Other new features of Pixelmator 2.0 Chameleon include a cleaner and easier-to-use interface, a new Eyedropper Tool, a new info bar, a convenient tool options bar, a fully customizable Tools palette, a new Type Tool, a Pixel Tool, and a number of minor improvements.

Pixelmator 2.0 will be available exclusively on the Mac App Store for $59.00 (USD) later this summer. For now, anyone can purchase the currently available version of Pixelmator on the Mac App Store for $29.00 (USD) and receive a free upgrade of Pixelmator 2.0 once it is released. Pixelmator 2.0 is a free upgrade via the Mac App Store for everyone who has purchased any version of Pixelmator via the Mac App Store.

Pixelmator:
http://www.pixelmator.com/sneak-preview/

Pixelmator 2:
http://www.pixelmator.com/sneak-preview/

Download:
http://www.pixelmator.com/download/

Purchase:
http://www.pixelmator.com/buy/