Pixelmator Pro has an extensive collection of tools for editing and retouching photos on a Mac, and with a one-time purchase price of $39.99, it’s extremely affordable for a professional quality photo editing software.
They also provide a free trial that gives you the entire functionality of Pixelmator Pro, with no restrictions, for 15 days, so you can try it out before committing to purchasing the software.
Let’s jump in and take a look at how to process RAW photos using the Pixelmator Pro software.
1. Download & Open Pixelmator Pro
Download your free trial of Pixelmator Pro here. Follow the installation process on your Mac, and then open Pixelmator Pro. When you first open Pixelmator Pro, you’ll arrive this prompt screen.
2. Locate & Import Your RAW Photos
Click ‘Browse images on your Mac‘ and locate the RAW photos that you’re looking to process. You can select and import any number of photos.
Here you can see I’ve selected a few RAW photos. Now, click Open, and they will import into Pixelmator Pro.
3. Make Any Adjustments to Your Photos
After your RAW photos have been imported, you’ll find yourself in the main workspace of Pixelmator Pro. Notice the individual tabs at the top. These correspond to each of the photos that I’ve imported.
To access the main colour adjustments in Pixelmator Pro, click on the icon with three overlapping circles on the right side tool bar.
Here, you can make all of the typical photo adjustments. This includes setting your white balance, exposure corrections, contrast adjustments, highlights & shadows adjustments, hue & saturation adjustments, sharpening, etc.
Pixelmator Pro makes all of these adjustments really easy to alter with their use of sliders; it’s a non-destructive workflow, so you can simply drag any of the sliders and immediately see the results. If the adjustments is too much, or not enough, just keep on moving those sliders around until the edit looks just right.
You’ll need to apply your adjustments to each photo individually. Select the photo you want to manipulate by clicking the tab at the top of the screen. Select a photo, and make your adjustments accordingly.
4. Export Your Photos
Pixelmator Pro has a very conveniently located ‘Share‘ button at the top right of the interface. You can use the Quick Export functionality, which allows you to export your photo with commonly used settings with one click of a button, or click the bottom ‘Export‘ for more control over the export options.
You will have to select each photo individually, and then do your export one by one. As of now, there’s no batch export option in Pixelmator Pro, but they do appear to be working on this functionality for future updates of the software.
All in all, Pixelmator Pro is an extremely capable software for us photographers to be using to process our RAW photos. At a fraction of the price of the popular editing softwares, this offers so much high level editing power to any photographer on their journey.
