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Apple

Apple Acquires Photo Editing App Maker Pixelmator (macrumors.com) 21

Apple has reached an agreement to acquire Pixelmator, the maker of popular photo and image editing apps Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator. Financial terms of the deal wasn't disclosed.
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Apple Acquires Photo Editing App Maker Pixelmator

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  • Yet you don't even care about Krita and Gimp, you enjoy being enshittified and you know it.
    • Yet you don't even care about Krita and Gimp, you enjoy being enshittified and you know it.

      Well, I'm not familiar with Krita....but with GIMP, that's more of a PhotoShop open source "competitor"...and while it has improved over the years, I'd still take Affinity Photo over either of those as a pixel editor.

      I believe Pixelmator is a RAW photo workflow editor....much like Lightroom is for Adobe....or my favorite, Capture One....of working with RAW images, and being able to do FAR more detailed edited to col

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Pixelmator is a Photoshop competitor like Affinity Photo or Gimp. It popped up after Apple added libraries that made GPU-enabled photo editing straightforward.

        It can load most RAW formats, but so can Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Gimp.

        • Pixelmator is a Photoshop competitor like Affinity Photo or Gimp. It popped up after Apple added libraries that made GPU-enabled photo editing straightforward.

          It can load most RAW formats, but so can Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Gimp.

          Ah...I stand corrected.

          Thanks for the info...I might try it some day if price is right (not rental)....but for now, for pixel smushing....I'll stick with Affinity Photo....amazing tool.

          I've not touched anything Adobe in years and years, ever since they started renting out

          • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            I used the original Pixelmator when it came out, and it's quite nice. I also use the Affinity suite, and agree with you. Pixelmator doesn't seem to do the suite thing, but does offer Photomator, which is the RAW editor. Both have rental or actual purchase options. You also get the Mac, iPad and iPhone apps all together I think, similar to Affinity.

            I tried to like Gimp back in the day but just didn't. Now I'm trying to like DarkTable as an open source Aperture replacement. It's not bad, but the HTML GUI is l

    • I mean, good for a small group of indie devs who have managed to make just an amazing image editing app. I have used Pixelmator for a decade at least and love it. And yeah, I use Keita (and Rebel) to do all my digital artworks. At the same time, I hate that this amazing program is being swallowed by Apple and potentially as you say enshittified. Damn, this is one I hoped would never happen. FFS Apple, please let others innovate too?
    • Yet you don't even care about Krita and Gimp, you enjoy being enshittified and you know it.

      Gimp takes all the interesting and useful image processing features and presents them to the user as... numbers and named options.

      Taking the simplest action, paint (with the pen tool), you can set the numeric value of size, spacing, hardness, and force... among many other options such as fade length and smooth stroke. You can also set the "Incremental" and "dynamics" flags.

      I noticed the complete opaqueness of all of this while viewing a YouTube video tutorial about another graphics program on a tablet, wher

      • You get what you don't pay for. As a programmer, I like to get paid for the work I do. I see the point of free software. I tried using Linux for making electronic music and it's just not worth the hassle. Maybe there's a distro out there that works, but I don't have time to try them all and find out.
        Someone could rewrite Gimp, but they'd be better off starting from nothing and developing something that works, and then having that get bought by Apple so they can go start working on something else that could

    • Krita is crashy and Gimp has a terrible interface.

      I use Gimp occasionally but it is ten times easier to get the same results in Photoshop.

  • I hope Apple isn't intending to kill it for some reason. But I don't believe they actually have their own in-house competitor; so that's a good sign.

    However they could still "Siri" it, starting with a good app and gradually rendering it useless...

    • They did and they killed it: Aperture, which was a very good and reasonably priced competitor to Adobe’s Lightroom which is now only available in Adobes stupid subscription model, and not single license form.
      • I loved Aperture. I still keep some stuff in it (fortunately I still have an Intel Mac available - don't know if Rosetta could handle it).

    • by Roogna ( 9643 )

      I expect the same treatment Dark Sky got when it got turned into Weather. Apple has a tendency to pick up very good Mac/iOS first apps, and then let their internal UX attack it and remove every feature that people actually use because they're "simplifying". Which results in it being simplified into nothingness.
      Which is unfortunate, Pixelmator is a top notch set of tools.

      I'd be much more impressed if they were specifically saying they'd be like Claris, owned by Apple but left independent as a company to co

    • I'm still pissed off about all the functionality SoundJam MP lost when Apple bought it and turned it into iTunes.

    • Iâ(TM)d bet heavily that this is a case of wanting to add an official picture editing workflow to the photos app, thatâ(TM)s more than colour adjustments and cropping.

  • Adobe's only good competition is going away now.
    • Adobe's only good competition is going away now.

      Err...depending if you are wanting RAW workflow or pixel editor, I'd argue there are still VERY valid (if not better 'pro') options....things like Capture One and On1 RAW editors....or Affinity Photo for more pixel editing (like PS).

  • I don't think this is probably the case, but my hope would be acquiring this means Apple plans to bring back Aperture, the photo management and editing tool. There still is not anything quite like it.

    • It appears they are indeed getting back int the raw photo editing game. They can’t just revive since that staff is long gone now probably at Adobe. It was dumb of them to kill Aperture, even more so now with how powerful their in-house M series chips are.
      • They canâ(TM)t just revive since that staff is long gone now probably at Adobe.

        I totally agree with not being able to bring back the original codebase, so was imagining an all new application, with Pixelmator taking up the editing part.

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