Pixelmator Photo 2019 for iPad | Full Guide and Review
Pixelmator Photo has just been released for iPad and I’ve spent some time editing some RAW and JPEG photos, and overall, I’m impressed. It’s priced at a relatively low $5 on the App Store which is a good price for the average user. We tried it on the 2019 iPad Air and iPad Mini and it said it was unsupported because it’s packing the A12 processor from the iPhone XS, so it must think it’s an iPhone instead of an iPad. But it should get fixed soon. Because of that, we tested it in 2018 iPad Pro using the Apple Pencil 2, and the editing experience was excellent. Importing RAW photos was incredibly easy. All it took was a cheap USB-C to USB-A adapter and an SD card reader. The photos showed up instantly and the import took just a couple of seconds. The UI works great and it’s incredibly simple to browse and find photos to import. Importing a RAW photo was very quick, and the layout is very simple, with a few icons near the top right corner.
Most of the photo editing I do is
making thumbnails using Photoshop on an iMac, so I wanted to see if I could
make these photos pop and look great. Testing the Machine Learning auto-enhance
feature, it made the AirPods pop, and it was surprising how well it does,
although it’s not perfect. You can easily zoom in on the photo by
double-tapping the screen. With the repair tool, you can easily get rid of
blemishes, and if it doesn’t work out well, you can use the Apple Pencil’s new
double-tap feature to undo and redo. Let’s make the repair selection a bit
smaller so we can perfectly get rid of this black spot. The repair tool works
amazingly well and it’s incredible how quickly you can touch up photos. We can
easily turn these 2nd gen AirPods into regular AirPods, but let’s not. Within
the crop menu, there’s a bunch of options like instantly rotating the photo,
flipping it vertically and horizontally, easily adjusting the aspect ratio,
finely adjusting the level of the horizon, and warping the perspective as well.
Everything works so smoothly. We
even tested the ML crop and it seemed to work great, especially when we chose
the 16:9 preset. They were perfectly centered. Now to the editing itself, there
are tons of options, and most of them have an ML button, and it’s usually very
subtle in the changes it makes, like only bringing up the saturation by 9%. The
lightness menu has every option you’ll need, and after editing, you can disable
each adjustment menu you changed to see the difference. There are color balance
wheels that let you adjust the colors and brightness of Shadows, mid-tones, and
highlights separately, which is great for pros who know how to use it.
There’s an awesome selective
color menu that allows you to select a certain color and adjust the colors
separate from the rest of the photo. See how I’m able to make this bokeh pop?
It’s really useful! There are levels, curves and a replace color menu that can
be extremely useful, I'll show you how later in the video. Below are a few
filter menus that you can adjust, and finally, sharpen, which is great for
editing RAW photos and some sharpness back in. When you’re done, hit share, and
you have a couple of options. Modify original, save the copy to photos, or you
can export it. Within export, you have a few formats to choose from, and you
can easily adjust the quality to get your desired file size to where you want
it. Hit next, and you get Apple’s standard share menu, so you can easily
Airdrop it and save it.
Here’s a RAW photo we used for a
recent iPad comparison, it was shot quite dark so let’s fix it. We used the ML
crop and it perfectly centered the photo, again, really impressive! After a few
tweaks, we looked at the image before and after, and the results are great!
Similar to what I was able to achieve using Photoshop for Mac. Now here’s a
very difficult one, simply because the face of the iPad Mini is dark and
orange. Let’s fix that using the replace color tool. Just grab the dropper,
place it over the color you want to replace. Then grab the other dropper and
choose white. It didn’t turn out so well so I tapped on the color box and
changed it to white. There you go, it looks great! Just check out the before
and after! Here’s a photo I took using the iPad Pro. I wanted to see how much
of these clouds you can remove using the repair tool, and It’s shocking how
well it worked! Look how easy it is to remove these rocks. I also used the
color wheels menu to bring up the saturation of the sky without affecting
everything else. I also noticed that you can easily swipe the whole menu to the
left side if it’s more comfortable for you.
The repair tool works great for facial
blemishes as well. I’d personally never do this on my own face, but you can see
just how easily you can touch up skin. Using selective color and adjust hues,
you can easily transform a wallpaper into something totally unique. Now here’s
where selective color really comes in handy. See how the window is totally blue
and it ruins the whole photo? Watch this. After brightening up the photo, I can
go into the selective color menu, choose blues, and turn down the saturation.
Look at that difference. Once finished, you can tap revert, and then double-tap
the Apple Pencil 2 to see the before and after.
This photo has been totally
transformed! Overall, I’m extremely impressed with Pixelmator Photo for iPad.
It’s very-well optimized and there was no lag or any issues with exporting. It
works incredibly well with the Apple Pencil 2 thanks to the double-tap feature,
and it should work great with the new 2019 iPads once they fix the
compatibility issue. If you enjoyed this blog, click that share button and
check out our ultimate comparison guide to choosing an iPad in 2019 on our
social network handles. Thanks for reading this blog and we’ll see you in the
next one!
I'm am a Merchandiser in a Retail Industries and Blogger by Passion.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon