Apple Buys Pixelmator
I’m a little late with this one, but in case you missed it, Apple has bought the popular Mac and iPadOS photography app, Pixelmator. Or more to the point, they bought the company that makes Pixelmator. This could be a big deal, depending on what Apple ends up doing with the company and its software. It immediately gives Apple a missing piece of its professional apps puzzle that it’s been lacking ever since the company killed Aperture: a more pro level photo application.
Well, almost.
What is Pixelmator
Pixelmator (the company and the application) has actually been around for a long time now. Its current version, Pixelmator Pro, is a Mac and iPad photo editing Application. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically a Photoshop competitor, with several unique features. It’s always been very fast, but on Apple Silicon it is particularly nippy.
Pixelmator Pro on the Mac
However, Pixelmator isn’t the only application the company makes. They have another App called Photomator. If Pixelmator is a Photoshop alternative, then Photomator is a Lightroom alternative. It’s pretty decent too, and it has many of the controls that Lightroom has, along with a few unique options. Both of these applications have also had AI functionality before most of their competitors did.
Are they Pro Apps?
Well, I’m sure people will argue about this, but to be honest, they’re not quite powerful enough to be considered “Pro Apps”.
For now.
They would be more like Apple’s Pages rather than Final Cut Pro, if you get the analogy. Although, having said that, it wouldn’t take much to get them up there.
Let’s take Photomator for example. It has a lot of the editing functions of Lightroom, but it is lacking in the area of Raw conversion. There are no technical tools that are essential in my opinion, such as distortion correction, chromatic aberration correction and so on. It also relies on Apple’s system-wide Raw decode, which is fine, but certainly not the best out there. Having said that, these tools could easily be added.
Photomator
Pixelmator Pro is quite sophisticated, but it doesn’t quite reach the same level of power that Photoshop has. It doesn’t have any of the AI masking tools that Photoshop has, for example (Although Photomator does), but it’s still pretty impressive. I’d say for the average user it’s probably capable enough. It has an interesting combination of vector and pixel editing tools. I used to use it for making YouTube thumbnails, but I eventually went back to Photoshop.
So why did Apple buy Pixelmator?
Obviously, only Apple knows the answer to this, but there are a couple of possible options. Needless to say, speculation is rife since the news broke on this, but only Apple really knows. Having said that, I will now add to that speculation with my own thoughts…
Strip it for parts?
In the past, when Apple has bought companies, it has frequently bought them for the technology and the talent, and not the actual applications themselves. This could be the case here, although the Pixelmator team has stated that the apps will remain intact for now. Apple might take the core technology and integrates it into a future version of Photos. Given the rush to embrace AI and the fact that Pixelmator has some machine learning functions built into its software, Apple could be looking for a shortcut here. But I’m not so sure. I don’t think there’s anything in the AI functions of Pixelmator that Apple couldn’t build themselves.
Aperture Reborn
Another topic of speculation over the past week was that Apple would use Pixelmator to re-launch Aperture. While I would love to see this happen, I am quite sceptical. For a start, Pixelmator is more like Photoshop than Aperture. Photomator could be used as the basis for a new Aperture, but it would require a good bit of work. For a start, as mentioned earlier, it lacks important technical raw conversion tools. Secondly, the asset management side is very basic and would need significant enhancement.
But none of this is insurmountable, so it’s not impossible. I can see them upgrading it to a “Pro App” status, but I still doubt that they would bring back the Aperture brand. It’s just not an Apple thing to do. But as someone who literally wrote the book on Aperture I’d be delighted if they did. However, it’s far more likely they continue with the current branding.
Rounding out the Pro Apps
In my opinion, Apple is using this acquisition to round out their ProApp offerings. They have Video and Audio Pro Apps in Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, but they lack a Photography tool in this space. By Acquiring Pixelmator, they get two — even if they do need some work to be competitive in the space occupied by Lightroom and Photoshop.
But why compete at all?
If you look at the history of the ProApps, you get a clue. They originally went down the route of the Professional Applications, back when the Mac was run by the G4 and G5 series of chips. Many applications were leaving for the PC, and Apple wanted to showcase how powerful its chips could be. As they felt no one else was taking advantage of the Mac architecture, they wanted to showcase what could be done. In the heyday of this adventure, we had a number of great applications from Apple, including Apple Color, DVD Studio Pro, Shake and of course, Aperture.
Fast-forward to today, and we’re kind of in a similar situation. While Applications aren’t abandoning the Mac, if anything the opposite, Apple may still feel that developers aren’t taking full advantage of the possibilities of Apple Silicon. After all, most major applications are cross-platform now, and so can’t fully embrace the power of Apple’s unique architecture by offering Mac only features.
So it’s possible Apple is once again trying to build out its ProApps offerings in an attempt to showcase the power of the Apple Silicon Architecture. The other big advantage of these applications, that I’ve barely touched on, is the fact that they both run on the iPad as well as the Mac.
Conclusion
This is of course completely speculation at this point. While I would love to see Apple put the resources into building a great Lightroom and Photoshop competitor again, I’d be very surprised if they did. Apple also has a history of buying apps only to kill them later, and integrate the technology (Dark Sky for example) so we may well see the software be absorbed into the operating systems, but it would be great to see them evolve into serious competitors.
Incidentally, even though Aperture was discontinued years ago, every quarter when I get the updates from the publisher about my Aperture Book, there are still a couple of copies being sold, which seems wild to me. So there is definitely still some love out there for a long defunct application. Take from that what you will.
