Pixel-Perfect?

It’s not often I can say I’m good at predicting the future, but here’s what I wrote in January:

There are some interesting image editors out there that don’t get the attention of the primary three: Pixelmator, for MacOS, recently gained video-editing capabilities, for example, making it an excellent partner to Final Cut Pro (and a probable acquisition target for Apple, if it was so interested).

It took nearly ten months, but Apple pulled this exact trigger, acquiring the company behind Pixelmator, which also develops a photo-editing app along the lines of the dearly departed Aperture, earlier this week. (It still faces regulatory approval, but odds are it will go through.)

As I have noted throughout 2024, the creative software economy is at something of a crossroads. Adobe has a lot of power in the sector, in large part because of its ownership of Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign, and Acrobat, four tools that absolutely dominate their respective sectors. Other companies have some, but not all, of the parts needed to compete with this lineup: Canva has its Web-based editor as well as the Affinity Suite, and older players like Corel and Quark, can cover some of these use cases. But Adobe is in a unique spot, because it’s so dominant in so many workflows, often at an enterprise scale, and it charges with that in mind.

Apple always struck me as a company that could directly compete with Adobe, if it wanted to and felt that its market dominance elsewhere would not create a fly-crushing dynamic. The logic is there, and not just in the form of Logic. For one thing, Adobe has not always been particularly respectful of Apple’s software conventions, meaning that running Photoshop or InDesign isn’t a particularly native experience on MacOS. And, despite controversies about some of its more dramatic software changes, Final Cut Pro is one of the few best-in-class apps that can truly compete with Premiere. Plus, if you squint hard enough at Freeform, Preview, and Pages, you can see that many of the elements of having a full design-software ecosystem are there, if they add just a few more pro features and add more precise tweaking. (Plus, the fact that the Mac windowing system is built around PDF technology gives it a unique advantage it could exploit if it so chose.)

The one thing Apple was really missing was a good image editor. Honestly, until now, it didn’t even have a bad one. Unlike Windows, the modern MacOS has never had an app like Microsoft Paint baked in. (Given the large number of creative apps, it didn’t need to.)

Pixelmator seemed like it was trying extremely hard to be Mac’s missing image editor, to the point where it became difficult to differentiate it from an Apple developed app. Pixelmator doesn’t have my one must-have feature, animated GIF support, but it does have a lot of other things going for it—and if you ask me, those things are why Apple decided it had to get in on the action.

We are seeing a lot of people speculate that Apple bought the app to kill it, pointing at the deconstruction of the weather app Dark Sky, but it really doesn’t highlight what the app has done. About two years ago, Pixelmator introduced video-editing functionality which made it a surprisingly lightweight alternative to Final Cut Pro that could be used for color grading and even live image editing. It not only used Apple’s UI styling to do so, but also its API frameworks. It made Apple’s own internal tools better by using them in ways that Apple themselves perhaps hadn’t considered.

By combining a Photoshop-like experience with a traditional video editing workflow, it felt like Pixelmator, long seen as a second-fiddle to Photoshop and Affinity Photo, had started to find a unique lane that nobody else was touching in quite the same way. Photoshop could already edit video, but not quite like this.

If Apple killed this app which made its best professional app work even better, they’d be absolutely stupid. Apple most assuredly bought this app because it looked like something Apple made themselves. Acquisitions in this spirit often stick around in real ways, even if not exactly in the same form as before the big purchase. A good example of this is the automation app Workflow, which also benefited from looking like something Apple built themselves. The company bought it, and turned it into Shortcuts, which is essentially Workflow, except with a more direct integration into iOS. That, to me, seems like the direction Apple would want to go with this.

But one wonders what the Pixelmator team could bring to the rest of the Apple lineup. Could they make Pages a little more pro-friendly? Could they give Freeform a use case beyond “ambitious tech demo”?

If Apple could figure this out, Adobe may be giving them an opening. The chatter around artificial intelligence has been coming from the Adobe camp in ways that seem sort of dismissive to the role of the creator.

On this front, Pixelmator actually looks quite good. The reason: They have actually used technologies like machine learning, but have done so in ways that empower the creator, rather than augment them. Beyond the recent work in video, the company has also developed features like ML Super Resolution. That tech, as suggested by the name, uses machine learning to size up small images at high quality—a major pain point for people who work in print settings in particular. It has also done some impressive work in the realm of image masking as well.

In this light, Pixelmator looks like a company that has been quietly innovating by adding features their users actually want, while still cleverly implementing the latest technologies. Meanwhile, Adobe has been adding features that sound better to their bosses.

And Apple, which (for all its faults) has never forgotten that it’s building for consumers first, enterprise second, just scooped up the upstart. This is what happens when you take your eye off the ball.