Pixelmator vs. Acorn (2012)

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Both Pixelmator and Acorn are about $50 and, while they are probably competing more with the $80 Photoshop Elements, they do most of the tasks light users would want to buy the $200 PhotoshopCS5 for.

In my first comparison post Acorn got the edge mostly because their demo saved files with no watermark which meant one could actually use it before biting the bullet and spending $50.

Because of the various updates (i.e. heal tool) promised in Pixelmator 2 I bought Pixelmator 1.whatever and started using it as my go to editor.

As of January 2012 however, there is a weird bug that does not let me arbitrarily set the width and height pixels when cropping an image. Strangely both programs have a bug in this tool although they have different symptoms. My version of Acorn is behind since the Acorn 3 update is another $20 (I thought it was $50, but the author corrected me), so it may not have this issue, but I’m stuck using other programs to work around this bug which is annoying (we’ll see if it is $20 annoying soon).

I can’t speak to Acorn 3 vs Pixelmator 2, but in Acorn 2 vs Pixelmator 2, the latter wins handily.

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  • http://pixelmatortutorials.net PMtuts

    Hi I don’t think you should see the custom crop function in Pixelmator as a bug but as a design flaw. The custom option was never designed to let you enter a custom crop size. It was designed to enter custom constraints. Unfortunately limiting the value you can enter to 256. Which was also by design. However it is not a problem to create a custom crop by doing the following.

    1) Create a selection roughly around the area you want to crop, with the marquee tool and ctrl+click inside it.

    2) Choose transform selection from the pop-up menu.

    3) Enter the exact values for your crop and hit ok. (You can change the units by right clicking on the values).

    4) Ctrl+click inside your selection again and choose crop.

    These and many, many other tips and tricks about using Pixelmator for image editing can all be found on http://pixelmatorutorials.net with over 100 tutorials and free tutorials almost every week. By far the most complete and valuable recourse available for learning image editing with Pixelmator. 

  • http://flyingmeat.com/ Gus Mueller

    Quick correction on the Acorn price- it’s a $19.99 upgrade to 3.x, not $50.

    3.0 also added custom crop presets, so you might be interested in that.

  • http://dwightk.com dwightk

    Thanks Gus, I’ll update the post. I’m a fan of your work!

  • http://dwightk.com dwightk

    Thanks for letting me know. I like that tutorials site. 

  • Anonymous

    So I’ll go for Pixelmator 2 as my Photoshop tool. It’s nice when I see blogs comparing these items so his readers would avoid the same hassle. I say I’d love to stand by for articles of the same type. Thanks for your suggestions and overview.