The Pixelmator Team on Monday announced the release of Pixelmator Pro 1.6 (codenamed Magenta), a major update to their Mac image editor. The update adds an all-new, easy-to-use color picker, provides the ability to quickly choose colors using hex color codes, the selection of multiple objects by simply dragging over them, improved performance, and much more.
Pixelmator Pro 1.6 Magenta brings an all-new, beautiful, and easy-to-use color picker, includes the ability to quickly choose colors using hex color codes, makes it possible to select multiple objects by dragging over them, improves performance, and brings a whole lot more.
• The all-new color picker lets you choose and manage colors more easily than ever.
• Quickly choose colors using hex color codes right in the new color picker.
• Choose colors using RGB color codes, too.
• See a list of your most recently picked colors to more easily reuse them.
• Easily pick a series of colors from your image, view color codes, and closest color names using the new Color Picker tool.
• Save color swatches to custom color palettes and even share Pixelmator Pro color palettes with others.
• View RGB color codes right in the Info bar.
• Drag over multiple different layers to easily select them.
• Identify and replace any missing fonts in an image using the new Replace Fonts feature.
• See your most recently used fonts at the top of the font pop-up menu.
• Enjoy the much-improved selection, guide, grid, and layer handle performance thanks to a new Metal-powered overlay.
• With any shape tool selected, shapes will now always be drawn immediately, even on top of other existing shapes to make it easier to create illustrations.
• To temporarily select or move shapes while using any shape tool, you can now press and hold the Command key.
• If you Control-click the points of a shape, you’ll now be able to divide and join individual paths.
• When using the Arrange tool or one of the shape tools and having a shape layer selected, pressing the Enter key will start editing the shape.
• When opening large Pixelmator Pro documents, a thumbnail of the image will now be displayed in the progress dialog.
• ML Denoise and ML Super Resolution will now use up to 10 times less memory.
• Locked layers will no longer be automatically selected on the canvas.
• Stroke performance has been significantly improved and layer strokes are now at least 10x faster.
• Text layers can now have Inside and Outside strokes along with the current Center stroke.
• The appearance of strokes has been improved for rotated and transformed images.
• The quality of strokes of text layers converted into pixels has also been improved.
• You can now show or hide the overlay (which includes the selection outline, guides, grid, layer handles) using the Shift-Command-H keyboard shortcut.
• The Hide Interface command will now be activated using the Control-Command-H keyboard shortcut.
• You can now insert a new image layer from your Mac using the Option-Shift-Command-N keyboard shortcut.
• When saving changes directly to JPEG, PNG, and TIFF images, Overwrite will now be the default option.
• After changing the style of line shapes, it will now be remembered for future line shapes you draw, just like regular shapes.
• Empty layers will have ‘—’ as their size, position, and angle.
• The blending mode and opacity of locked layers would not be displayed correctly. Fixed.
• Certain effects (such as Perspective Transform) would not be converted into pixels correctly. Fixed.
• Cutting part of a layer and undoing the changes would sometimes cause graphical glitches. Fixed.
• Processing a large number of files using the Pixelmator Pro actions in Automator would sometimes increase memory usage more than necessary. Fixed.
• When copying and pasting between documents, some layers would not be placed correctly and it would sometimes cause blurring. Fixed.
• When exporting to PSD, layer masks would not be preserved. Fixed.
• When exporting to PSD, hidden layers would be saved without any content. Fixed.
• Changing the size of a brush in the internal settings of a brush preset could cause Pixelmator Pro to quit unexpectedly. Fixed.
Pixelmator Pro 1.6 Magenta is available today from the Mac App Store. It is free for existing users and $39.99 (USD) for new customers. An upgrade discount is also available to owners of the original Pixelmator through the Pixelmator Pro Upgrade Bundle, also available from the Mac App Store.