The Best Photo Editing Tool For Writers

Ditch Photoshop, ditch anything that costs you more than 50 bucks a lifetime…

Since I was 18, I had a huge interest in photography and editing images. Nearly 20 years later I can say I have used half a dozen of well-known photo editing tools like Photoshop, Gimp, Affinity Photo, Luminar AI, and Pixelmator Pro and this last one is the one I really want to bring to your attention today.

As writers and content creators, we often end up needing to either decorate or illustrate the point we’re making. A picture is supposedly worth a 1000 words, so a well-placed graphic can make a huge difference in the overall content. Medium, for instance, helps with this by adding the Unsplash integration, but there’s one major problem with it — everyone uses it, and everyone uses the images from the first couple of pages. I regularly try to go past page 10 even, but what I noticed is that typically the further I go, the less relevant the results are, which creates an issue for me because ultimately, it means, my stories will lose part of their uniqueness and brand. And then of course the very-very slight chance of a potential copyright infringement lawsuit that Susie Kearley highlighted a number of times.

So, the only solution to that — for now because there is something potentially mind-blowing on the horizon — is to go back to my trusted iPhone and photo editing tools, take my own shots and edit them whenever I can. You can see some in these articles.

When Adobe introduced the subscription model a good few years ago, I was convinced, that was the end of my relationship with it.

While for those who use it as a primary tool for their job and business makes all the sense in the world, for someone like me who creates content as a side-gig, it’s just not a financially sane investment, so I searched for alternatives and I found not one, not two, but three! Luminar AI (Neo), Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro. It was important that they be premium/commercial apps, hence not even considering Gimp, which is free, but in my experience eons behind the competition in terms of capabilities and UX.

Out of the three I bought and tested, I expected Affinity Photo to win. If I am to make a direct comparison to Photoshop, yes, Affinity Photo is that and probably more in some ways, but it turns out that for a content creator like me Pixelmator Pro is actually a lot more suitable and at $40, it’s also $15 cheaper than Affinity Photo.

So, why Pixelmator Pro?

While in terms of feature-set Affinity Photo would easily take the crown, I also think that many content creators, especially writers on platforms like Medium will find it an overkill. It’s good to gain extra skills, but someone who hasn’t already got comfortable with a tool like Photoshop will find Affinity Photo to have a very steep learning curve. And this is where Pixelmator Pro overtakes the other options out there by leaps and bounds. Additionally, to being easy to use, it comes with a plethora of features and benefits.

• A buy once, use forever business model. At $39.99 you get a full-featured application that works even when you’re offline, and secure updates are guaranteed. For the price of one licence, you can also use it on more than one machine, as long as you’re signed in with the same App Store account or app sharing is turned on for you and your household.
• One-click background removal. This is a fairly new feature that allow to just right-click on an image or layer and select background removal. In about 1–2 seconds, using some AI magic, it removes what it considers to be background image pixels. It tends to be quite accurate in my experience and speeds up my workflow by around 70%!
• Super Resolution is another big one. How many times did you spend just far too much effort on finding the right image at the right size, only to end up with some blurry, pixelated thing you were embarrassed to include in your content? I certainly changed artistic direction many times because of pixelated assets. Pixelmator Pro fixes that by using proprietary technology to improve the quality and size of the image beyond your wildest imagination. It’s as close as you’ll get to what you see in the movies when they turn a blob of pixels into a licence plate!
• All features are easy to use, and many are as simple as just one click.
• Full support for Apple’s Live Photos and the HEIC image format.
• Fully integrated with Apple’s Photos app and iCloud.
• Excellent, Apple-level quality documentation and user guide.

Naturally, one might ask, OK, but why not Canva? Valid question, and I am not dismissing Canva as an alternative, but I do have a few major reasons to stay away from an otherwise popular online editing tool.

• It’s an online tool. This means, it can crash anytime due to bad connection, it runs in a browser tab which means it will use crazy amounts of hardware resources for doing fairly limited tasks and even the dedicated app stops functioning once offline.
• While it does have a free subscription tier, it’s still a subscription model and to truly make the most of the tool you’d need the $109.99 yearly tier. That’s nearly three times the cost of Pixelmator Pro, which comes at $39.99 for full lifetime ownership of the software licence.
• Canva skills are not transferable. While Pixelmator Pro is a far cry from Photoshop or Affinity Photo, the skills you pick up using it, will ease you into these more complex photo editing tools in the future should you decide to go that direction.
• Watermarks. There’s no such thing as free lunch, is there? That’s true for Canva as well. Wanna get rid of watermarks? You gotta go Pro.

Is it a must?

No. You can use a better search engine that allows filtering images by copyright much better, but you can appreciate that there will still be a limited number of images you can use, just like on Unsplash. In the below article, you can read all about that and how it might also save you from an unexpected lawsuit.

Having said that, as I found it myself after eight years of Medium content creation, is that just throwing up images into the header that only loosely illustrate the point I am trying to make, gets old and tired and doesn’t really speak to my brand. This is something that YouTubers have noticed years ago, hence the very creative thumbnails you find these days on most channels.

Essentially, what I am trying to do is bring some of the lessons YouTubers have learnt over the years into the platform(s) I am writing on.

Taking my own photos where possible, or using public domain licence images which then I have all the rights to further edit to my liking, doesn’t only save me from lawsuits, but further builds my editing skills, my brand, and uniqueness on the platform. Furthermore, it can also improve my credibility as readers realise I’ve actually put genuine effort into more than just writing a few paragraphs; therefore if I care so much about my articles that I put the effort into editing my own images, they might feel inclined to take that effort more seriously and give my stories a read, and I believe that same approach can help you too.

Honestly, as a reader, I am getting incredibly tired of seeing the same old stock images in articles, and it makes me scroll away. As a writer, that should tell you something…

So, what tool do you use and why, and have you ever tried Pixelmator or a similar Windows-specific tool? What about taking your own images? Let’s hang and talk about that in the comments! 💬 👇

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!