If you’re looking for a powerful image editing tool, the likes of Photoshop are going to spring to mind first. But there are plenty of much lower cost tool available that are more than adequate for the job, and one of these app is Pixelmator. This is an image editing package that has been around for some time, and the seemingly minor update to version 2.1 brings about the introduction of a number of important new features and options.

It makes sense for any image editing app to offer the best possible visual performance, and this is something that is greatly helped by the addition of support for Retina Display. This means that you can view the images you are working on greater detail than ever before and the UI is also made more accessible due to the clearer buttons and toolbars. There’s also support for Mountain Lion now, but there are more changes and additions to explore.

Pixelmator

Any image editor worth its salt includes a range of special effects that can be applied to your own images, and five new ones have been added here – Vintage, Miniaturize, Black and White, Rain, and Snow. To make it easier to browse through these and the other effects that are available, there is a new Effects Browser. This enables you to preview special effects and try out ideas before applying them.

New alignment guides are on hand to help you to position objects in your projects, but one of the most interesting new features is iCloud integration. This is great if you find that you are regularly working with more than one Mac as it allows for automatic synchronization of your work between machines. This is a nice touch that saves you the effort of having to manually transfer files between computers.

You can find out more and download a free trial of the app by paying a visit to the Pixelmator review page.