Pixelmator

The most sincere kind of flattery is imitation, apparently. In which case Team Pixelmator must spend a lot of time dreaming about Photoshop, as at first glance Pixelmator is an almost carbon copy of Adobe’s bitmap editor. And why shouldn’t it be? After all, there’s plenty of room for a better and cheaper alternative. And Pixelmator is very nearly – but not quite – it.

Pixelmator is so obviously based on Photoshop that it’s almost indistinguishable. The menus are in the same places with more or less the same entries, and if the design is subtly different it’s not distinctive enough to look like a different package.

If you’re a regular Photoshop user, the Pixelmator pitch seems to be most of the features at a tenth of the price. Except not, because Pixelmator doesn’t go far enough. Some of the most useful Photoshop basics are absent – there are no adjustment layers, no Navigator, no History palette and a more limited selection of filters. And elsewhere Pixelmator’s slavish devotion to the real thing reproduces some of Photoshop’s more pointless interface traditions, such as not scaling images automatically when a window is resized.

So is it, or isn’t it? It’s near enough to be a useful alternative if you’re a casual user or a beginner, or if you want a lean Elements without ‘creative friends and family’ additions. But the full version of CS3? Not yet, no.