Pixelmator Pro vs. Photoshop CC
If you do heavy print work, you rely on other Creative Cloud apps, or if you’re plugged into a workflow reliant upon some of the connected features available in Creative Cloud, I can save you some time: forget it. Adobe offers a decent deal for subscribers: between online storage, fonts, and other workflow niceties; you won’t easily replicate that with a single application. However, if you simply need to work with photos and manipulate them for the Web—which is likely a big chunk of Photoshop users out there—then Pixelmator Pro offers some advantages for a lot less money.
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That said, Pixelmator Pro takes advantage of numerous macOS features, including Versions, which lets you move among previous saves with ease. In fact, as I alluded to earlier, the macOS features in Pixelmator Pro give it somewhat of an edge over Photoshop. By relying on macOS features like Metal 2, Wide Color, and CoreML (which powers its machine learning features), Pixelmator Pro moves like a speedboat to Photoshop’s battleship. I wound up launching Pixelmator Pro to do a lot of my photo work simply because (on a 2017 27-inch iMac, anyway) it launched instantly and ran like a cheetah.
I recently used Photoshop for the first time in many years and was surprised at how it feels less like a regular Mac app than I remember.
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@Michael
Yeah. I think the appeal to Photoshop is it works the same, more or less, on Windows and Mac. People with muscle memory built up around Photoshop workflows can fly through the app, once it finally launches of course. ;-)
Super native apps can be very appealing, but as a Linux guy these days, you quickly get acclimated to mismatched user interfaces. QT, GTK, etc. In this case, Photoshop just doesn't feel that strange on Windows, but I can see why Mac users might like Acorn or Pixelmater instead.
Pixelmator, Acorn and others are good but for me the Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher suite is the best thing that happened to Mac software in a long time. Even in it's current beta state I feel like Publisher is a solid Indesign replacement for my needs. (And, thank god, they have not gone subscription model in pricing.)
> the Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher suite is the best thing that happened to Mac software in a long time
Agree. Having these apps solves so many issues for me. And, best of all, unlike apps like Acorn or Pixelmator Pro, they're also available for Windows, and cheap enough that I have zero issues just buying them for both platforms.
