Pixelmator 1.6 Gains New Tools and Massive Performance Boost

The Pixelmator crew has been hard at work for the last six months on a major update to their namesake image editor.

Pixelmator 1.6 “Nucleus” will arrive next week, but Macworld got an early peek at what’s in store.

At the top of the new features list for Pixelmator 1.6 is Layer Groups, sharing images directly to social sites like Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook, and direct import from devices like cameras, scanners, iPhones, and iPads. Also on the list are new transforming tools, a redesigned printing engine, and new Automator actions to trim and watermark images.

Saulius Dailide, a Pixelmator General Manager and developer, toldMacworld that a major focus of this “Nucleus” release was speed. Like Apple did with Snow Leopard, the Pixelmator team gutted much of the app’s underpinnings in the name of major performance improvements, added 64-bit support, and integrated the new Grand Central tools that Apple built into Snow Leopard for developers. This allows Pixelmator to better harness the power of the multi-core CPUs that Apple has been building into Macs for years.

For example: Dailide claims that Pixelmator 1.6 starts up twice as fast as the previous version, opens images two times faster than Photoshop, has a painting engine that is four times faster than the previous version, and both previews and applies filters and adjustments faster than Photoshop.

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