Since we’ve been talking about Adobe Photoshop a lot recently why not talk about a Photoshop alternative? Pixelmator has recently been released and it looks like it could be a low cost alternative. Macworld has an early look which also points to several other low cost alternative to Photoshop as well. While Pixelmator sure looks good and has an impressive list of tech specs, what I don’t see is any support for saving alpha channels. I downloaded the demo and couldn’t find this functionality either. Without the ability to save alpha channels to your newly created lower third then Pixelmator just might not be that useful in the video world. Did I miss something? Can Pixelmator supports the saving of alpha channels? Time (or maybe a well informed reader) will tell.
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Alpha channel? No. Transparency information on layers, yes. Since FCP, Avid + Premiere respect layered photoshop files and automatically build alpha information into layered files, this is a ‘non’-issue.
As long as you have two layers almost every major editing app will handle the transparency info.
So, as a test, I opened a file created in Pixelmator (3 layers, 1 text), photohsop saw those layers just fine.
*But* when I opened them into FCP – the transparency information came across without a hitch…but FCP couldn’t see that it was a layered file (normally, a PSD file with layers shows up as a sequence.) So Pixelmator is doing something odd with the way it’s writing layers as FCP doesn’t see it as having layers.
On the good side, yup, the ‘transparency’ info came across just fine. On the negative side, there’s no support for non-square pixels.
Thanks for giving that a try Jeff. If development keeps moving on with this app I’m sure they will build in better support.
Could Final Cut just be treating the Pixelmator file like it does TIFFs? You can have a multi-layered TIFF file in Photoshop that simply shows up as a single non-layered file in FCP.
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[...] freud2004 wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptMacworld has an early look which also points to several other low cost alternative to Photoshop as well. While Pixelmator sure looks good and has an impressive list of tech specs, what I don’t see is any support for saving alpha … [...]
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