Pixel Image Editor Review

Interested in an Adobe Photoshop replacement on Linux? If GIMP is not your cup of tea, maybe Pixel Image Editor will be. Pixel is a raster image editing program that runs on more than a dozen operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. This Pixel Image Editor Review will focus on the features of the software.

Pixel's features rival that of Adobe Photoshop and surpass GIMP in several key areas. Pixel Image Editor supports CMYK and Lab color modes, 16- and 32-bit color depth, and chic new features such as adjustment layers. The application is low cost but not free, with revenue supporting its creator and lone developer Pavel Kanzelsberger. 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 is expected to go up to $100.

Kanzelsberger has been writing Pixel in his spare time and by himself for the past eight years. Soon he says he will officially release Pixel 1.0, quit his current job, and work on Pixel full time, however this has been in the works for quite some time and has yet to come to pass at the time of this Pixel Image Editor Review. The first version of Pixel was written for DOS in 1997, and a version for Windows followed in response to user requests.

To mitigate the complexity of maintaining multiple OS builds, Kanzelsberger wrote an SDL based toolkit called eLiquid, and rewrote Pixel using it. This design enables Pixel to run on more than a dozen operating systems today. Windows accounts for just over half the licensed downloads, but Linux comes in second, ahead of the Mac.

A 30-day, watermarking demo is available on all supported Linux distributions. Both the demo and the full version depend on Freetype, LittleCMS, SDL, and the JasPer JPEG2000 library to function. Pixel's usage of Freetype and LittleCMS lets it integrate seamlessly with the user's system wide font and color management settings.

Pixel uses the multiple document interface model familiar Photoshop users and presents similarly laid out toolboxes and menus. In fact, only minor differences distinguish Pixel's interface from that of its more expensive rival. But anyone used to Adobe's interfaces will have a smooth transition, the same visual metaphors for tools, the same terminology for operations and options, and most of the same key bindings. Hopefully you found this Pixel Image Editor Review informative and will take a look at Pixel Image Editor, you will be glad you did.