I am not a graphic artist nor do I have the intention of becoming one. But as I have learned it is best to be a jack of all trades when it comes to digital communications as no one might understand your prerogatives as well as yourself (they would not necessarily share their priority either). You might end up having to change a background picture in the middle of the night for a presentation or a web site. Adding to the Swiss knife skills of a typical Office user, here is Pixelmator.

Pixelmator reminds me of Adobe’s Photoshop in its infancy which is not bad considering the $59 price. There are still a few bugs in this fairly recent software but it looks promising. Save often as they say (text layers have a tendency to evaporate). The interface is nice and simple to understand. Most basic features are there, at your fingertips. The filters are impressive and since this is brand new software it does not have to rest on legacy coding and is fast and light in terms of resources needed to operate. It is lacking a recorder for repetitive tasks, batch processing, automatic layer naming and a boatload of Photoshop masking features. But that’s not the point. It will suffice for most touch ups, filtering and photo montage. Be careful, when you close a file, the text layers get rasterized… I think it is a definite must have for those of us who know a bit to survive in artwork but who do not want to pay $1,000 for using 1% of a software’s features.