photoshop has met its match, pixemator 2.0 chameleon

Pixelmator is an amazing piece of photo editing software for the Mac, and today it was just updated to version 2.0! Dubbed Chameleon, Pixelmator 2.0 brings a slew of amazing new features and can almost do as much as its major competitor, Photoshop.
In many ways, Pixelmator feels and acts like Photoshop, such as the key commands, menus, names of the tools and how they function. However, Pixelmator actually preforms better than Photoshop at almost every task, and there is no comparison between the way they look (Pixelmator’s interface is extraordinary).
The thing that’s most appealing about Pixelmator is it’s price tag, it’s on sale for only $29.99 (it’s normally $59.99) and Photoshop CS5 Extended edition is a whopping $999!
Here’s a list of the new features that Pixelmator 2.0 offers (taken from their website):

Beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editing app for Mac OS X

The next generation of Pixelmator—codenamed Chameleon—brings tons of new features and improvements

Look and Feel Handcrafted to the very last detail for working with images, the new user interface of the app is as beautiful to look at as it is easy to use.	Drawing Tools Enjoy perfectly precise, full-featured drawing tools that allow you to easily create and edit any vector shapes, whether simple or advanced.	Shapes Use the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Star, Line or Custom Shape tools to quickly add shape layers to your compositions.
Healing Tool Paint with the new Healing Tool on objects or any other details in an image to magically remove them, as if they never existed. Watch the video…	Content-Aware Fill Take advantage of a breakthrough technology that helps magically get rid of unwanted elements in images.	Smudge Tool Use the new Smudge Tool to smear paint in your images, as realistically as if you were using your fingers. Watch the video…
Sponge Tool Paint using any brush tip, either to add more color to or to take color away from objects, small details or any other areas of an image.	Burn Tool Use the Burn Tool to naturally darken specific areas of an image-whether in the highlights, midtones or shadows range for a given area.	Dodge Tool Use the Dodge Tool to naturally lighten specific areas of an image-whether in the highlights, midtones or shadows range for a given area.
Red Eye Tool Use the Red Eye Tool to easily-either automatically or manually-get rid of the red eye effect in your images. Watch the video…	Pixel Tool Enjoy editing images at the pixel level by taking advantage of the hard-edged, pixel-precise, pixel-art-type Pixel Tool.	New Eyedropper Tool Use the new magnifying Eyedropper Tool to efficiently snap colors from an image to use as needed. Watch the video…
Info Bar The new Info Bar provides you with the most useful information required at a specific moment, depending on the tool in use.	Tools Customization Make the app truly personal by adding, removing, arranging, even grouping tools in the fully customizable Tools palette.	Tool Options Bar Enjoy the new contextual Tool Options bar, which shows the exact set of tool settings needed at the moment, depending on the tool in use.
New Type Tool In addition to easily placing and formatting text in your images, now also enjoy advanced typography features.	Auto Save OS X Lion Auto Save technology support in Pixelmator lets you completely skip manual saving of your documents.	Versions Versions support allows you to browse through, compare, copy, take snapshots, and share any version of your work, whether current or previous.
Full Screen Use every inch of your Mac’s display by taking advantage of Pixelmator’s built-in support for the systemwide OS X Lion Full Screen feature.	OS X Lion Goodies Pixelmator takes advantage of many other latest and greatest OS X Lion features, making a perfect OS X Lion citizen of itself.	Other Improvements Pixelmator brings a massive list of various other enhancements and modernizations throughout the whole app.

Has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images

Selecting, painting, drawing, retouching, navigating, inspecting, layers and more

Selecting

Anyone editing images must be able to select the right shapes, sections or objects in images. With Pixelmator’s powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools, you can quickly and easily select any part of your images. That means you can edit and apply special effects to portions of your pictures, remove unwanted objects, and even cut out objects from one image to place in another. The full-featured selection tools in Pixelmator are as powerful as they are easy to use.

Painting

The real greatness of painting tools in Pixelmator is that they come built with the ability to use different brush sizes, shapes, hardness, and even blending modes as you paint. You can paint with Pixelmator as you would traditionally, play with beautiful gradients, and even fill colors with other ones. What’s more, Pixelmator’s painting tools can be used not only for any style of painting, but also to improve your selections using the Quick Mask mode, and even for retouching.

Drawing

The new drawing tools in Pixelmator allow users to add, create, combine and edit vector shapes easily. In addition to Pen and Freeform Pen tools, Pixelmator also includes pre-drawn shape tools for quickly adding triangles, lines, circles or rectangles into your compositions. Fill and stroke settings for shapes you’ve created, as well as shadows, can be easily adjusted. These drawing tools are extremely useful for creating buttons, icons, Web page elements, illustrations, or any other items for use in image compositions.

Retouching

It’s a snap to perfect your aging or buggy photos with Pixelmator. With Pixelmator’s advanced retouching tools, you can easily blur hard edges or sharpen fuzzy areas of your image; naturally darken or lighten areas of your image; paint with a sample of an image to remove wrinkles from faces or scratches in your photos; paint using any brush tip to add color or take away color; quickly get rid of the red eye effect or any other unwanted elements in images automatically, as if they never existed, with just one click. What’s more, you can use any of the adjustment, painting tools, filters, or any combination of these to polish or refine your images.

Filters and Special Effects

Pixelmator is a real filter-machine. It has over 150 breathtaking filters and special effects for all your needs. Just choose any of nicely designed distortion, blur, sharpen, color, stylize, halftone, tile, generator, transition or even Quartz Composer filters and-boom-you see the stunning results in real-time.

Color Correction

Pixelmator features a simple and elegant collection of intuitive, professional-grade color correction tools. Using these tools, you can fine-tune hue, saturation, and luminance; adjust exposure, color levels, brightness, and contrast; replace colors; use Auto Enhance to dramatically improve less-than-perfect images with one click; even tailor Curves, Color Balance, Channel Mixer, Shadows and Highlights, and much more.

Compatibility, Sharing, and Save for Web

Pixelmator supports all popular image file formats. You can open and export in PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, WebP and more. Above all, Pixelmator can open and save Photoshop files with layers.
In addition to being compatible, your favorite image editor makes it simple to send your images directly to your photo libraries, whether iPhoto or Aperture, or to quickly publish your images to online photo management and sharing applications like Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook.
The fantastic Web tools in Pixelmator allow users to prepare and export images for the Web with minimal effort, whether an individual image or a complex page layout. Images can be optimized and saved in Web-standard file formats with different quality settings.
What’s more, the powerful Slice tool in Pixelmator can be used to slice an image into sections, allowing each section of an image to be optimized and saved using its own optimization settings. Saving an optimized part of an image is as easy as dragging and dropping it onto the desktop.

Built exclusively for Mac OS X—and it shows

iPhoto, Aperture, Automator, ColorSync, iSight, Quartz Composer, Core Image, Quick Look, Spotlight, 64-Bit… you name it

iSight Capture

Enjoy taking pictures with Pixelmator via your Mac’s built-in camera to automatically place them as layers into your compositions.

Photo Browser

Quickly access your iPhoto or Aperture library, events, albums, smart albums, or any folder via Pixelmator’s Photo Browser palette.

Automator Actions

Use Pixelmator actions in Automator to resize, watermark, and even transform a bunch of your images at once.

Import Framework

Thanks to Import framework utilization, you can import images from cameras, scanners, and multifunction devices directly into Pixelmator.

Quartz Composer

The powerful Pixelmator plug-in architecture allows using any of the amazing Quartz Composer compositions as filters.

ColorSync

Pixelmator’s ColorSync color management ensures accurate and consistent color throughout the whole image editing process.

Quick Look

Pixelmator’s built-in Quick Look plug-in allows viewing your compositions right there in the OS X Finder, without even opening the app.

GPU-Based

Pixelmator is based on Mac OS X Core Image technology that uses your Mac’s graphics card to ensure blistering-fast image processing.

Cocoa Foundation

Pixelmator is built with the Cocoa framework which completely assures the most intuitive, familiar and responsive user experience.

64-Bit Architecture

With its 64-bit architecture, Pixelmator is built to take full advantage of the incredible power that comes bundled with today’s Macs.

Looks great

Attention to detail, innovative interface designed for working with images, a real Mac OS X app (click the images to zoom in)

And much more

Award-winning, affordable, exclusively available on the Mac App Store, and offers a collection of amazing tutorials

Apple Design Award

Pixelmator is a proud winner of the Apple Design Award for outstanding achievement, excellence and innovation in Mac app design.

The Mac App Store

Download, re-download, keep track of, update, review, and simply enjoy Pixelmator exclusivelyon the new Mac App Store.

Tutorials

Explore the basic, intermediate, advanced, or third-party tutorials to get the most of the powerful Pixelmator features and tools.
Stay tuned for more news related to Pixelmator!