Better late than never. The folks at Pixelmator just dropped version 1.5 on us. This particular release is targeted more towards web designers, but there are a few goodies in there for the rest of us as well.

Photoshop has always been a graphic design program and not necessarily a photography only tool. When digital photography came along that's when it became more and more associated with just photo manipulation. Aperture and Lightroom were created for those who wanted a simpler photo only manipulator. But I get where your coming from Willis.

The ability to use advanced layer and masking techniques is a big plus in improving your images. I've been a foto chop user for many many moons, and I guess that's why I don't like using Pixelmator or GIMP. They can't do everything that you can in photoshop. At least not yet. But I'd rather buy a new D300S or 70-200 than go buy another version of a photoshop suite for the same price!

Niko - All I meant was that a huge part of photo-shop's functionality is geared toward graphics design work (Making Logos, Diagrams, and the like). The part of it that has relevance to photography is only about half of what you can do with it.

I use aperture for color corrections, and general touch-up work, but there is a limit to what you can do with it. For instance, one thing I'll do when I'm taking a picture of something with a lot of people around it is to set up on a tri-pod and take several different shots while people mill around. If you stack each of the shots on different layers, you can usually erase all the people and get just your subject in the shot. Not exactly sexing it up... just removing distractions.

Can't do that in aperture... but you don't exactly need photoshop in all its glory to do that either. You just need a nice layer based editor like Elements, Pixelmator, Gimp, etc. So far I've not found a mac program that does this for me the way PSP did it on the PC. Pixelmator comes the closest though. And it has a few tricks that PaintShop Pro doesn't.

I love Pixelmator, it's sad to see 1.5 being delayed again, but it's still improving really rapidly.

"Wut you talkin 'bout Willis?!" Sorry I couldn't resist:^)

Not sure what you mean about "install w/o graphics crap"?

What are you trying to "sex up" that you can't do with Aperture in your photos?

Depends on what your trying to do. I find it to be pretty useful for doing things I can't otherwise do in Aperture.

I'm coming from the windows world where I used Corel Paint Shop Pro (formerly JASC Paint Shop). There really isn't a Mac Equivalent which is a shame. That said, Corel is ruining it anyway, so I guess there isn't any long term loss. PSP is a very mature product with 10+ years of history. Pixelmator is only a couple years old, and still has a lot of functionality gaps.

Photoshop is great and all, but I wish they allowed you to do an install w/o all the graphics crap. There's just so much to wade through if all your interested in is your photos.

I'm not a fan of Pixelmator or GIMP, but I do like the advanced brush options and that you can import your Photoshop brushes now.

Not sure if many of you use Pixelmator (If you use a mac, and you can't afford or don't like Photoshop, I highly recommend it), but they announced on their blog this weekend that 1.6 is going to be delayed again. Just wanted to drop a quick FYI.