Apple acquires Pixelmator!

[Cmaier]

whoa!

Apple reaches deal to acquire Pixelmator - 9to5Mac

Apple is acquiring the popular photo editing company Pixelmator. The Pixelmator Team announced the news in a blog post on...

9to5mac.com

Apple is acquiring the popular image editing app Pixelmator

What’s next for Pixelmator?

www.theverge.com

A new home for Pixelmator - Pixelmator Blog

Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple.

www.pixelmator.com

 

[Nycturne]

I don’t hold up much hope this will lead to good things. I expect some features with get rolled into the Photos app, the rest discarded and reorgs will scatter the talent to the wind.

Can you guess I’m still salty about Aperture?

 

[thenewperson]

Hoping they keep it going in a good state for a very long time. It'll be sad if they let Pixelmator and other apps fall to the wayside.

 

[Cmaier]

I don’t hold up much hope this will lead to good things. I expect some features with get rolled into the Photos app, the rest discarded and reorgs will scatter the talent to the wind.

Can you guess I’m still salty about Aperture?

yeah, i really miss aperture, too. I got used to Lightroom, but Aperture was so elegant for what I used it for. (Photobooks)

 

[MacPoulet]

Hopefully they put more resources into it. Looking at the Pro Apps, a good photo editor is the biggest missing piece toward offering a compelling workflow alternative to Adobe's core product list.

 

[Cmaier]

Hopefully they put more resources into it. Looking at the Pro Apps, a good photo editor is the biggest missing piece toward offering a compelling workflow alternative to Adobe's core product list.

Too bad they don’t just buy Adobe. They could fix that place right up in no time. (grumbling as I pay my monthly rent to adobe for the photography bundle, illustrator, and acrobat)

 

[Citysnaps]

I don’t hold up much hope this will lead to good things. I expect some features with get rolled into the Photos app, the rest discarded and reorgs will scatter the talent to the wind.

Can you guess I’m still salty about Aperture?

Imo, regarding Aperture... Apple didn't have a chance competing with Adobe long term. Adobe's whole business was focused on (other than pdf and fonts) image processing and color science.

I started with Aperture when it first came out. While it worked OK, there was clumsiness with respect to making/editing/cateloging non-destructive edits on image files. After Adobe released Lightroom with a far superior methodology for making and cataloging them, I could see the handwriting on the wall and ditched Aperture and started using LR. Looking back, with around 100K+ non-destructive edited images using LR, that was one of the best decisions I've made.

I also like how Adobe has reached out to the photographer community for feedback on upcoming (and existing) features to get a handle on what photographers felt with respect to what worked well and what didn't. I and few other San Francisco photographers were a part of that at Adobe's SF complex (which deals with LR).

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

Hopefully they put more resources into it. Looking at the Pro Apps, a good photo editor is the biggest missing piece toward offering a compelling workflow alternative to Adobe's core product list.

I don't do much photo editing, but as a user of both Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro I could see this becoming one of the top options for photo editing.

 

[Nycturne]

Too bad they don’t just buy Adobe. They could fix that place right up in no time. (grumbling as I pay my monthly rent to adobe for the photography bundle, illustrator, and acrobat)

Having worked on similar legacy code bases... I'm not sure I agree. These legacy codebases have a way of becoming more and more inflexible over time and demanding more and more resources to keep it upright. Lightroom probably isn't too bad as it's newer, but Photoshop is probably a bit of a bear.

If Apple wanted to compete with Adobe (and buying Pixelmator tells me they don't), they would have been better snatching up Serif and putting their own talent into closing the feature gap and improving Photoshop plugin compatibility.

Imo, regarding Aperture... Apple didn't have a chance competing with Adobe long term. Adobe's whole business was focused on (other than pdf and fonts) image processing and color science.

I don't think Apple's a slouch in color science, but I didn't need Apple to be better than Lightroom, I just needed it to be more accessible in terms of pricing. The lack of alternatives more has impacts on hobbyists and the "barrier to entry" of the hobby.

There's a reason I use Affinity, and it's not because it has the whole feature set of Photoshop.

 

[MacPoulet]

Too bad they don’t just buy Adobe. They could fix that place right up in no time. (grumbling as I pay my monthly rent to adobe for the photography bundle, illustrator, and acrobat)

I wonder if there would be regulatory issues around them buying Adobe. That would effectively remove a video editor and DAW from the market...

 

[Cmaier]

I wonder if there would be regulatory issues around them buying Adobe. That would effectively remove a video editor and DAW from the market...

they could spin that stuff off.

 

[tomO2013]

I'm very sad about this announcement. I REALLY REALLY liked photomator and pixelmator and dropped my Adobe subscription to pay the lifetime fee recently for pixelmator pro and photomator pro.

The workflow, way of working - everything about Photomator feels fast, snappy and very user orientated with Pixelmator, I can totally see why Apple purchased them.

One thing in particular that I would like to highlight about the Photomator team that I will invariably miss is the open community engagement culture of the Photomator team as a whole which stands in stark contrast to Apple secretive workflow with one or two major public announcements a year.
I appreciated the on-going public roadmap and engagement feedback for Photomator https://www.pixelmator.com/photomator/roadmap/ - and the engagement in general with the community as a whole. I feel that this was what allowed the Photomator team to punch well-above their respective weight class in terms of the size of the company.

Fingers crossed this isn't another app that falls into the abyss and has it's features 'integrated to Apple Photos'. I'm hoping it lives on with greater investment in a future 'Photos Pro' app with more AI masking capabilities, hopefully an upgraded Raw engine (apples raw engine is pretty crap compared to DXO and Adobe at the moment). The photomator team were aware of this, so maybe they will bring some of those gripes inside Apple. In the plus column Darkroom is another great native iOS and iPad OS app that nipped at the heals of Photomator and lightroom https://darkroom.co/ so there is still hope for a high quality functional 3rd party solution that build native Apple apps on the platform

 

[Andropov]

Can you guess I’m still salty about Aperture?

Me too, and Lightroom is one of Adobe's best apps (I mean, compared with the others...).

On the video side, at least Apple has Final Cut Pro X. I'm considering buying it because I'm forced to use Premiere and I hate it, but $349 is a steep price for a hobbyist, and I already get Premiere in my Adobe bundle, which I can't ditch as I don't have a replacement for Lightroom...