I’ve been excited to see what was going to come of Apple’s acquisition of Pixelmator. I’ve been a Pixelmator user for a very long time, and really love editing photos, especially on the iPad, with it. It has great Apple Pencil support.

For a long time, my wish was to have a polycarbonate MacBook in Black with a DSLR and Apple’s own Aperture. I never got the DSLR, and the serial improvements of the iPhone camera decreased my desire for a DSLR. Aperture was eventually shuttered, but the Photos app has gained a lot of its functionality. I’m not really in that headspace anymore, though; I very much enjoy taking pictures with my Olympus and OM System cameras and the small but engaging collection of glass that I’ve accumulated. And so my interest in some “prosumer” photo editing has remained.

I was reading Joe Rosensteel’s article on Six Colors about the acquisition, and he brought up a great point: What about Photomator? That app was a lot of fun to use, and I realized that it’s effectively a Lightroom competitor. Rosensteel thinks that it could end up being a prosumer add on to Apple’s Photos, which sounds like a smart idea, especially to the degree that it would add a subscription revenue stream. I could see Apple bundling it into their Creator Studio, too, such that if you subscribe to ACS, you get the Photomator features in Photos. That’s my predication and hope, anyway.

Peripheral to the holiday, I picked up Darkroom on sale. It works like Photomator, and I like it a lot. I suspect it’s a familiar experience for Lightroom users. Photomator is 30 bucks a year, and while I have it on my iPad from a long time ago, I’m not inclined to subscribe just yet. Hopefully something will come out of the Creator Studio integration soon; I don’t need many of those apps, but I do intend to keep supporting Pixelmator’s development. I like how both of the applications work by exposing your Photos library, allow you to make edits, and then replace or copy the edited image back into your library.