Argentina Discovery

I recently stumbled across a very promising alternative to Adobe Photoshop which runs on many different operating systems (and no, it’s not The Gimp!). This is especially good news for Linux users who are tired of running the outdated Photoshop 7.0 in WINE (although some have gotten CS2 to work).

For quite some time website developers using Linux as their operating system of choice have been pretty much forced to use The Gimp as their image editor. Since I use Linux as my operating system, this made things very difficult. I found that The Gimp wasn’t exactly my kind of image editor. It didn’t seem to have the same kind of feel as Photoshop. So like many others I used the very old Photoshop 7.0 in WINE. This didn’t really work either. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as Photoshop CS2 or CS3.

Now things are changing. A new image editing software is emerging. It’s simply called Pixel. It is very similar to Photoshop so when using it, there really isn’t very much to learn. It’s kind of like using Photoshop, just slightly different. Some of the features include:

• Multi-platform support: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and more!
• Extremely small and fast
• Support for layers, paths, channels, masks and selections
• Color Management support for RGB, CMYK, Grayscale and CIE Lab modes (8-bit and 16-bit)
• Realtime live effects for layers (adjustments, effects), sets of live effects can be saved as layer Styles
• Powerful text editing with spellchecking and support for IME/XIM (Asian languages)
• Includes variety of brushes, including full-color brushes and animated brushes
• Complex support for image slicing and image optimizations (GIF, PNG, JPEG, WBMP)
• Import/Export of Photoshop file format
• And much more…

However, this lovely bit of software is not free. But compared to Photoshop, it might as well be. At only $38 USD, you can’t go wrong with buying this (and no, they didn’t pay me to say that). You can still download the trial for free which has all the same features as the full version, but all your images will end up with a quite noticeable watermark on them. If your planning on buying, you better buy soon. Once Pixel is out of beta stage, it will cost as much as $89 USD, which is still a very decent price for software of this caliber.

Performance

The current release of Pixel is Beta 6, and there is still some unimplemented functionality. Not all effects are available for all color models and bit depths, some menu items are greyed out in the build that I tested (including, regrettably, the built-in bug report tool), some TIFF compression is unsupported, and tablet support is still forthcoming for Linux.

Kanzelsberger says he regards the current feature set as frozen, and assures customers that all of these holes will be filled by the 1.0 release. Expansion of the feature set -- such as "natural media" effects and vector operations -- are earmarked for the 2.0 branch.

Experienced Photoshop users will miss certain features in Pixel. Pixel ships with just over 100 filters and effects; a subset of the more expensive program's offering, but -- as is analogous to the free-versus-Microsoft office suites situation -- the most useful subset.

The selection tools are also more modest; I missed the ability to expand or contract selections, which is present in Photoshop. Text tool operations are solid, but don't expect anything fancy, such as fitting text to a path. If you can do without these specific functions, however, Pixel may be just what you are looking for.

Exempting the disabled features, Pixel performs admirably on Linux. Effects and adjustment tools are full-featured, permitting precise keyboard-input parameter tweaking and the loading and saving of presets.

In one week of testing I experienced only one crash, which I was unable to reproduce. It occurred when working with a Lab color image. Pixel had no trouble opening 50-100MB image files, sizes that routinely segfault the GIMP.

Pixel and open source

Pixel is neither free nor open source. A license purchased now (during the beta phase) costs $32, but will remain good for all updates up to and including Pixel 2.0, and can be used for all available platforms simultaneously. After Kanzelsberger completes Pixel 1.0, however, the price for a license will go up to $100.

Kanzelsberger is by no means against open source, though; he is a Gentoo Linux user and Pixel links against several free libraries. He simply charges for Pixel as a means of supporting himself and continuing its development.

For the most part, Kanzelsberger says, Linux users have been positive in their comments on his work. There is the occasional gripe that he should release the project for free, but most welcome the alternative to expensive graphics suites from Adobe and Macromedia.

Kanzelsberger has expressed willingness to open source the eLiquid GUI toolkit in response to a growing number of programmers' requests. After all, it is fast, lightweight, and runs on a dozen operating systems. An eLiquid release definitely won't happen until after Pixel 1.0, though, as he wants to focus on completing his main project, and organizing and documenting the eLiquid code base will take time.

Wrap up

There is very little in the way of consumer-priced commercial software for Linux, particularly in the graphics arena. There are studio-level 3D and compositing applications bearing four- and five-digit price tags, but almost nothing in wallet range for the individual.

For photo editing and raster graphics, many users see running Photoshop under WINE as the only choice for tasks they can't handle with the GIMP. Certainly, if you already own a copy of Photoshop or one of the expensive bundles that include it, it is a reasonable option. But if you don't, you will find 90% of what you need running natively on Linux at a fraction of the cost by switching to Pixel.

You can download it here!