Pixelmator For Photographers?

24 Apr Leave a Comment Filed Under: Macintosh, Opinion, Photography

Pixelmator ScreenPixelmator is a won­derful little $60 pixel editor for Macintosh. I men­tioned Pixelmator briefly some time ago when it was in ver­sion 1.2 and I thought I should spend a little more time dis­cussing it now (its at ver­sion 1.6, today). In par­tic­ular I wanted to attempt to answer a question—is Pixelmator ready to be your photo editor? Many pho­tog­ra­phers are using Aperture or Lightroom (I use Aperture) and have access to many image adjust­ment tools, but for those times that a pixel editor is nec­es­sary, could it be Pixelmator? Or do we need to stay with the tried and true, and expen­sive, Photoshop?

The Case For “Yes”

Pixelmator's ToolsI can cer­tainly be a dis­cus­sion point as to just what tools are nec­es­sary for a pixel editor to be used as an adjunct to a photo work­flow appli­ca­tion such as Aperture. From my per­spec­tive, Pixelmator has a great many of what I con­sider to be necessary.

Let’s make a laundry list of the pri­mary pho­to­graphic tools in Pixelmator:

  • The basics: expo­sure, levels, curves, hue. sat­u­ra­tion, bright­ness, contrast
  • Brushes with lots of options
  • Full 64-bit archetecture
  • Layers with blending modes, opacity, masks and layer groups
  • Plenty of fil­ters such as Gaussian Blur, Unsharp Mask and Halftone Screens
  • Powerful selec­tion tools including the Magic Wand
  • Selection mod­i­fi­ca­tion tools such as feather, expand and contract
  • Support for pres­sure sen­si­tive graphics tablets
  • Open and saves over 100 image formats
  • There’s even a Quick Mask mode!

As a bonus, Pixelmator has a modern Macintosh inter­face that lever­ages many of the Mac OS’s core tools such that it blends right in and looks and works like a first class Macintosh cit­izen. That may be a bit sub­jec­tive, but the “feel” of one’s tools is impor­tant, too.

The Case For “No”

But make no mis­take, Pixelmator is not Photoshop. And in a few areas, its not even Photoshop Elements, its prime com­pe­ti­tion for pho­tog­ra­phers looking for some­thing less expen­sive and less inti­mating than Photoshop.

Pixelmator's Layer PalleteThere are a few key things missing for photographers:

  • High pass filter
  • Healing brush or patch tool
  • Adjustment layers
  • 16-bit image processing
  • There is only rudi­men­tary local­ized sharpening
  • Huge sup­port com­mu­nity and resources
Enough?

At $60 dol­lars Pixelmator needs to make a very strong case against the $78 Photoshop Elements. After all, Photoshop Elements is the scaled down ver­sion of Photoshop and is Adobe’s pitch to pho­tog­ra­phers not ready for the expense and com­plexity of Photoshop. Photoshop Elements does not handle 16-bit image pro­cessing, but it covers the other missing tools in Pixelmator.

My ver­dict? Pixelmator is not yet ready; as smooth and Mac-like as it is. Photoshop Elements makes a better buy for its fea­tures, even at a few dol­lars more. Pixelmator is still in active devel­op­ment and new ver­sions are released with some reg­u­larity, so its a little hard to guess what ver­sion 1.7 Geneva or even 2.0 (both now in process) will be bringing for pho­tog­ra­phers. If it could pick up the missing items I high­lighted, it will make a great pixel editor for photographers.

Wide Gamut Displays

25 Oct Leave a Comment Filed Under: Macintosh, Opinion

I started doing a little research for a poten­tial future pur­chase of a wide gamut mon­itor to replace my 23” Apple Cinema Display. Its pretty well known that most mon­i­tors on the market today do not dis­play a very wide range of colors and cer­tainly not any­thing approaching the range of the near stan­dard Adobe RGB color space. So if I wanted the ability to better pre­view my images, which of the more spe­cial­ized mon­i­tors avail­able from man­u­fac­tures such as NEC, LaCie and Eizo would be “best?”

Having done that work, I fig­ured I’d share what I’ve learned here so that others may have a head start on their research and those more knowl­edge­able than I could add to this work via attached comments.

So what is “wide gamut?” Of course that can be some­what sub­jec­tive, but the idea is that a wide gamut mon­itor is capable of dis­playing a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion, if not all, of the Adobe RGB color space. In my opinion, this is the pri­mary spec­i­fi­ca­tion the extra money for these pro­fes­sional mon­i­tors brings. The ones I was studying were 95% or better.

Two other impor­tant capa­bil­i­ties are the bit depth of the color look up tables (LUT), which are part of the monitor’s hard­ware rather than han­dled by the video card, and the bit depth of the dis­play panel itself. Together these allow for the min­imum banding in fine color gra­di­ents. I found these to range from 10 to 14 bit for the LUTs and 8 or 10 bit for the panels.

Needless to say, price is no small part of any deci­sion and these mon­i­tors are not cheap. If you con­sider that some 24” mon­i­tors at a retailer such as Best Buy can be had for a couple hun­dred dol­lars, these pro­fes­sional dis­plays might shock you! The lowest price I found for a wide gamut dis­play was $940.

Here’s my sum­mary of the fea­tures impor­tant to me for the dis­plays I found interesting:

Backup, Backup, Backup

2 Oct Leave a Comment Filed Under: Macintosh

Everyone pretty much knows that its impor­tant to back up their valu­able files. But not everyone does it, and not everyone covers all the bases when they do back up. Peter Krogh, the widely respected guru of DAM (the Digital Asset Management kind, not the water holding kind) has what he calls his 3−2−1 Rule for back up. Click the link for the details, but the short ver­sion is that you need 3 copies of all your impor­tant files, you should use 2 dif­ferent types of storage media, and 1 copy must be off site.

I think he has a good plan and so I follow it. And go a little extra. Here’s the way I have chosen to imple­ment back ups for my files.

All my data files are in four dif­ferent places. The first place is on my pri­mary storage — an SSD RAID 0 (striped for speed, not mir­rored for redun­dancy) for my boot disk (system files, appli­ca­tions and home direc­tory) and a hard drive RAID 0 for my data files. My data files are also stored on an external FireWire 800 hard drive RAID 0 that Time Machine uses (second copy). Every week I back them all up (or at least all the changed and added ones) to a LaCie Rugged portable hard drive that I keep in the glove box of my car (which is off site a lot and makes the third copy). And the fourth place for those files is on the cloud back up ser­vice Backblaze (which is always off site).

I think its good to have a ready-to-boot back up system drive as well as a back up of data files. So every week I clone my boot drive with Carbon Copy Cloner to another LaCie Rugges portable hard drive which I also keep in the glove box of my car. And Carbon Copy Cloner makes it very easy; I have cre­ated back up tasks that auto­mat­i­cally run when­ever I con­nect the portable hard drives.

With that system, if worst came to worst, I could grab the two LaCie portable hard drives, plug them in to any Mac, and be able to work as if it were my own system. The boot drive would have all my system con­fig­u­ra­tions as well as my appli­ca­tions ready to go. All my data would be on the other.

Backblaze, for those not familiar, is a won­derful auto­matic off site backup system the costs just $50 per year for as much data as you have to back up. It works in the back­ground and uploads any changes to your data files (it doesn’t back up system or appli­ca­tion files) when­ever you’re not using your com­puter. Needless to say, this would be a bad choice for dial-up Internet con­nec­tions, but moWith that system, if worst came to worst, I could grab the two LaCie portable hard drives, plug them in to any Mac, and be able to work as if it was my own system. The boot drive would have all my system con­fig­u­ra­tions as well as all my appli­ca­tions ready to go. All my data would be on the other​.re and more folks have fast, con­tin­uous Internet ser­vice now.

Peter Krogh makes the point that just backing up is not good enough. If you don’t have a copy of your impor­tant files off site, you would be vul­ner­able to a fire or a rob­bery. Having dif­ferent media used (hard drives and cloud storage, in my case, but many people use DVDs or even CDs) keeps you from being depen­dent on a given tech­nology (optical storage media does degrade over time) — I think that’s a little overkill, but then again, if you depend on your data for you liveli­hood, why not be extra sure?

So that’s my system. What’s yours?