For a long time, Photoshop and Illustrator have been the de facto standard for image editing, graphic design and all like things. However, recently it seems that more and more qualified competitors are stepping up to the plate to compete. While they may be still be some of the more full featured apps in their domain, they certainly are on the pricey end of the scale.

For awhile, the photo editor apps I tried always left me wanting more. But not long ago my attention was drawn to an mac app called Pixelmator. Pricewise, it’s incredibly reasonable, coming in at a very low $15 (when I bought it anyways). But the real kicker was the fact that it’s feature set was very impressive, and its usability was quite possibly even more impressive, especially after having done some work with GIMP.

So, how close is it to Photoshop? Well, I don’t claim to use Photoshop enough to know as well as some. But so far any Photoshop tutorial I’ve followed on Youtube, I’ve been able to mimic with relative ease in Pixelmator. I’m sure there are full-time graphic designers that would beg to differ, but for my purposes, its pixel and vector capabilities have covered 90% of what I need to do as far as web page design and the like.

So what’s the other 10%? Well, that lies more in its vector capabilities. One big feature I would like to see in the future is the ability to export vectors as SVG. But my overall impression is that Pixelmator is a bomb (in a good way). And $15 is a very small price to pay for what you get out of it.