REVIEWS
Powerful image editing, now on iPhone and iPad
£6.99 FROM pixelmator.com/photo MADE FOR iPhone, iPad, iPod touch NEEDS iOS/iPadOS 14.0 or later
Pixelmator Photo is a desktop– class image editing app from the makers of Pixelmator. Available on iPad for a while, its 2.0 incarnation is making the jump to iPhone as well.
Additionally, Pixelmator Photo is a non– destructive editing app with raw image support. Your edits aren’t made to the original image, but stored in a separate file until you export a new version that has all the edits in place. It treats your original images as if they were digital negatives, without overwriting them.
In practice, what you get works rather like Lightroom on the Mac, only with extra machine learning (ML). Two ML tools present themselves immediately when you open a photo: one that “fixes” the exposure and contrast of your image, and another that increases its resolution, turning a small image into a big one without the artifacting that often comes with this operation. Does it work? Well, sort of. It makes a 10MB JPEG out of a 3MB one, but export it and zoom in 100% on a desktop app and you can see the swirls and patterns where the AI has reconstructed detail. It may work better on some images than others, though.
Elsewhere, there is AI cropping, which does a good job of identifying the subject of a photo, though it would be nice to
