I don’t spend a ton of time in post-production for a few reasons.
- I enjoy taking pictures much more than I like editing them.
- Photoshop is overwhelming and scares me.
But two pieces of software have recently made me take some pleasure in the process. The first is Lightroom 3 which is awesome and worth every penny. The second is Pixelmator, an incredibly powerful and insanely cheap alternative to Photoshop.
There are a handful of features that I love about Pixelmator (besides the price).
- The user interface is extremely friendly.
- The eye dropper tools add a magnification lens which is extremely helpful.
- The magic wand “tolerance circle” is awesome.
Last but not least, the healing tool, which is the Photoshop CS5 equivalent of content aware fill is pretty accurate and really fun to use. I like it so much that I made a little video showing you how to use it.
Here is the photo I took before the healing tool. Click to see larger images.
And here is the same photo after 2 seconds worth of editing using the healing tool.
I give Pixelmator an A+ because it is cheap, extremely useful and generally fun to use and play around with. Check out Pixelmator.com for tons of tutorials and a free trial. You can also get it in the Mac App Store. Let me know what you think!
