If you are tired of long time Photoshop takes in loading your images and is looking for an alternative, Pixelmator will be the best choice. It is a pixel based image editor made for Mac OS and goes hand-in-hand with Photoshop. The most crucial factor here is that we can have the complete features you want from a US$999 Adobe Photoshop in much simpler and fast US$59 software, Pixelmator.

Pixelmator uses Apple’s Core Image feature and is world’s  first GPU powered image editing software. The key factor here is that it has an open-source core. It’s developed on ImageMagick which is a cross-platform library of image manipulation tools. It supports almost any image formats that are available in the market. It even has the ability to open PSD files. Unlike Photoshop, Pixelmator is made specially for Mac platform. This makes it have many features that a Mac user always lookup for. Some of them are integration with iLife Media Browser, iSight Camera and more. A built-in photo browser is integrated to this software that can look through the pictures in iPhoto. Another key feature in this is Automator Integration. With this you can perform many tasks with your pictures effectively. Although Photoshop has most of these Automator actions it does not perform it in such accurately and quickly as Pixelmator.

Pixelmator like most of other image-editing software supports layer-based editing. That is, stacking up of multiple items on top of one another and adjusting the transparency of various items separately. Another key feature in Pixelmator is the use of Mac’s iSight to immediately add a new layer to image from iSight.  Pixelmator allows capturing still-frames from built-in Mac camera. Another exciting feature is that it offers onscreen notification for each task performed and offers real-time reflection for changes informed in advance.

Pixelmator lack some key features too. One key factor here is the lack of those much familiar keyboard short cuts we use in Photoshop. Pixelmator lacks it completely which make editing rather difficult. For eg, we cannot use the “shift” button to restrain proportion but need to manually click the restrain key to perform the task. Everything need to be clicked at the interface which makes it rather slow.  Also Pixelmator does not offer any real power over managing text in interface. This make it difficult to perform text manipulation in this software which was much easier in Photoshop by selecting the layer and changing the setting needed.

Though Pixelmator may never replace a much efficient software like Photoshop but when you need to quickly edit a photo Pixelmator outcasts any other bigger software.