Photomator 3.4 Review

I’ve reviewed Affinity Photo recently and found it to be very good, especially when it comes to managing advanced editing techniques using layers. So what is the interest in Photomator 3.4?

Well, the thing that caught my attention was the announcement in November that the Pixelmator team have signed an agreement to be purchased by Apple. Pixelmator is the graphics package that Photomator originated in. The logic is that Pixelmator started to add capability taking it in the direction of graphics. The decision to hive off the photo development part to a separate app was sensible. In Photomator and Pixelmator, Apple have bought themselves the equivalent of Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop.

This is significant, a lot of people are unimpressed by Adobe’s hiking of their charges and their commitment to AI, at the perceived expense of photographer’s skills. Canva leapt into the gap by acquiring Serif, who made Affinity Photo and other Graphics packages and it was starting to look like a serious challenger to Adobe’s market dominance. With the entry of Apple into the market, things are getting interesting.

The other reason I’m interested is because I used to use Apple’s much missed photo processing software, Aperture. Could the Pixelmator acquisition signal a return to serious photo processing?

Let’s have a look, the evidence is easily assessed!

Video

Expectations

Photomator is not at this time, a professional ready editor. It provides basic RAW processing capability with a few extras. That is not to say it’s not worth consideration, on the contrary the features it does provide are exceptionally well engineered!

How to Get Photomator 3.4

Firstly the app is Apple specific. If you’re a PC user, forget it. You get Photomator via the App Store, it’s a subscription £29.99 a year or £7.99 a month. I signed up for the 7 day trial, but if I delete the app at the end of the trial and reinstall, I find there’s an option to buy a lifetime license for £119.

The entitlement, once bought extends to versions for Computer, iPhone and iPad. It’s not clear in the Photomator FAQs but Pixelmator allows installation on up to 6 devices under the same Apple ID. so long as it is not used for commercial purposes.

User Interface

In classic Apple style, the UI is drop dead gorgeous. A passing resemblance to Capture One which can only be a good thing. A large viewing area for the images, basic editing controls on the right and presets below. The UI is designed to be as uncluttered as possible, so no tools are shown by default. They are selectable from the menu or from icons once a single image is opened for editing.

File Management

You can use Apple Photos to manage your library with help from iCloud, but if you don’t want to do this you can use the file system instead, much like DxO PhotoLab. I use an SSD to hold my photos.

Library

In the library view, I can see all of the images I’ve mapped from the file system.

In the Image menu there is an option to edit in Pixelmator Pro, but we’re focusing on Photomator at the moment, Right click on the image and choose “Open Image”.

When it opens, full screen, you’ll see a scale slider just below the color adjustments menu and to the left of the filename and dimensions. Here you can inspect the detail of the image and return it to “fit screen” by double clicking the slider.

Note that there are no visible tools by default. At the top right, to the left of the “Done” button, there are tools.

Editing Tools

Quick access to editing tools is via the icons at top right next to the Done button.

Machine Learning

This is the “AI” component and it applies an edit to the image automatically. Honestly, it’s not all that good, certainly not as good as the Adobe Auto edit function.

Repair Tool

The Repair tool reveals a slider too control the brush size, a Reset Button and a Done Button. On this picture, I removed an out of focus part of the plant that was a little distracting and it did a good job of filling in the background.

Clone Tool

Use the Clone tool to select an area bounded by the size of the brush and then drop the copied pixels elsewhere on the image to clone it.

So far as it goes, it’s perfectly good, but you can’t select a shape other than a circle so that limits its usefulness.

Crop Tool

The Crop Tool offers some capability that PhotoLab lacks – the ability to flip the image. You can also choose the Machine Learning powered Auto Crop which does a reasonable job of arranging the components according to the rule of thirds, also, straighten the horizon and alter the perspective. You can choose an overlay frpnn a drop down menu at the bottom if you want to check that your crop conforms to a photography “rule”.

Color Adjustments

The Color Adjustments window reveals the basic RAW editing toolset to the right of the image. These mirror, with a couple of exceptions, the tools you’ll find are common to Adobe Camera RAW, PhotoLab, Affinity Photo etc. These are Basic Raw Edits.

What’s Different in the Color Adjustments?

• Selective Clarity – Splits across Shadows, Midtones and Highlights allowing you to adjust Texture and Clarity in each area.
• Selective Color – Allows you to select a color and change hue saturation and brightness. A bit of a blunt instrument, but good idea.
• Color Balance – these are similar to the HSL Wheels in PhotoLab with extra controls for saturation and luminance. These are an improvement.
• Levels – Not strictly speaking different, but does the same job as the Levels in Lightroom. You can adjust the RGB levels automatically by using the dropper to tell Photomator what is pure black, mid grey and white in the image. This can be done with luminance alone, combined RGB channels and individual Red, Green and Blue channels.
• Replace Color – Does exactly what it suggests. Sample a colour in the image and replace it with one either from the image or from a color swatch.
• Fade – Adjusts the spectrum of Black and White in the image

Other controls basically mirror what we are used to in Lightroom, PhotoLab and Affinity.

Masks and Layers

Photomator is not a professional level editor, although layers and masks are supported, they are pre canned in the sense that you can choose Subject, Background, Brush, Sky, Linear Gradient, Radial Gradient and Color Range. You can Scale, Add and Subtract from masks, duplicate, invert but sadly not intersect.

Further Tasks

This is the “finishing up” tab – here you can match colours across pictures, denoise (very effective), increase resolution (very effective), copy adjustments (and paste them into another image), Demand (very effective).

Conclusion

I have to say straight off the bat that I was sceptical about Photomator. As a professional, I rely heavily on Professional level tools, and so I was a little surprised to find that Photomator is an absolute pleasure to use, the sliders are nicely calibrated, with a bias towards realism (compared to certain other editing packages). It’s a breeze to produce tastefully edited images that look very good if you’re minded to pixel peep. All in all, I’m very impressed.

On the negative side, there is little to compete with either Adobe Lightroom Masks or DxO Local Adjustments so this is a basic editing tool that does what it does brilliantly. So not currently a competitor, but I’m going to check out Pixelmator next week and we’ll see what that brings to the party.

The best thing about it is everything works, there are no half assed implementations of badly thought through features and that is a considerable strength. I’d have no hesitation in recommending this software to somebody new to photography. It follows best practice in editing workflows.

In terms of ranking I’d place Photomator behind Lightroom because it lacks the sophisitcated Masking capabilties and fractionally behind PhotoLab, largely because there are no lens or camera profiles available in Photomator. It is better than the basic RAW edits in Affinity but lacks the advanced features altogether.

In summary, if you’re editing on an iPhone or tablet, this is a very good editor indeed. On the desktop (or laptop) If you’re happy with basic edits and not too bothered about lens corrections then Photomator is a better bet than Lightroom or PhotoLab. It has features that are entirely missing from PhotoLab and the UI is way less cluttered than Lightroom.

As a Mac user I’m interested to see where this goes, With the Pixelmator acquisition Apple could be onto a winner here if they want to take on Adobe in the Photo Editing game and that would be very interesting indeed. There is a rising tide of anti Adobe sentiment and if Apple don’t make a mess of it, they could profit from that.

Note to Apple: If you’re listening, nobody wants AI to replace creativity, enhance it sure, give us the tools but this is the hill Adobe will die on as far as photographers are concerned.