Pixelitor release notes

4.3.1 - released on 2023-09-06

New themes: flat dark, flat light, system
UI font type and size in Preferences
Support reading WebP files (without ImageMagick)
New filters: Abstract Lights, Tile Seamless, Rose, Concentric Shapes, Border Mask
Blinds, Checkerboard, Goo and Shapes Grid as separate transition filters
Improved filters: Photo Collage, Spheres
Snapping to pixel boundaries
Layer isolation
Crop to content
Adjustment layers, layer groups (experimental)
Color fill and gradient fill layers are no longer experimental
Many smart object improvements (still experimental)
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

4.3.0 - released on 2022-04-14

Contributions by Anirudh Sharma:
- New filters: Flow Field, Comic Book
- Improved filters: Grid, Spiral, Color Wheel, Mirror
- Area zooming in the Zoom Tool and in the Navigator
- New UI for "Enlarge Canvas"
- Tapering and Reverse Tapering strokes
- Higher undo limit for lightweight changes
The beginnings of Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish translations (with contributions by Albano Battistella, Jonas Mohr, Heimen Stoffels)
Pixelitor 4.3.0 requires Java 17 or higher
The Windows installer includes the required Java, on Windows there's no need anymore to install Java first
Support for the TGA and NetPBM file formats
ImageMagick-based export/import for all the formats supported by ImageMagick 7
SVG export in the Pen Tool and the Render/Shapes filters
Erase blending mode
Presets for filters, tools, and in other places
Curved strokes and angle setting in Auto Paint
New filters: Spider Web, Spiral, Grid, Truchet Tiles, Bump Map, Displacement Map
Improved filters: Circle to Square, Checker Pattern, Four Color Gradient, Value Noise, Channel Mixer, Threshold, Waves, Marble, Polar Glass Tiles, Starburst, Spiral, Flashlight, Magnify
Filter Search
Show Last Filter
Shape settings in the Shapes Tool
Shift-drag creates equally sized shapes in Shapes Tool
New options for zooming and panning (in Preferences)
Printing
Better tool icons on HiDPI screens
Optional Operating System file choosers
Experimental features:
- Smart objects, smart filters
- Color fill layers
- Gradient fill layers
- Shape layers
- Operating System theme
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

4.2.3 - released on 2019-12-11

Brush outline in the Brush, Eraser, Smudge and Clone Tools
Create selection from the text of a text layer
Move selection in the Move Tool
Copy/paste for selections
Selection crop can be nonrectangular (with generated layer masks)
"Color randomness" option in the "Spray Shapes Brush"
"Image Source" option and Hue/Saturation distances in the "Mask from Color Range"
Add layer mask from transparency and from layer contents
Chaos Game, Mandelbrot and Julia fractal renderers
"Watermarking" option for the Render/Shapes filters
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

4.2.2 - released on 2019-10-11

Keyboard nudging for the Gradient, Pen, Shapes tools
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

4.2.1 - released on 2019-09-26

Contributions by Łukasz Kurzaj:
- "Layer Auto Selection" checkbox in the Move Tool
- Styles and colors for the guides (in the Preferences)
Transform mode in the Pen Tool
Rotating and resizing shapes in the Shapes Tool
"Delete Cropped Pixels" checkbox in the Crop Tool
In the Crop Tool, the initial Alt-dragging creates the rectangle from the center
File/View Metadata (using the metadata-extractor library)
Right-click popup menus on tabs
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

4.2.0 - released on 2018-10-03

Contributions by Łukasz Kurzaj:
- New "Curves" filter
- New composition guides in the Crop Tool: golden spiral, triangles, grid
Tabbed user interface (it's optional, the old internal windows are still available in the Preferences)
New Pen Tool
Handles in the Gradient Tool
Image files can be drag-and-dropped on the layers area to be added as image layers
New "Lazy Mouse" smoothing option in the Brush, Eraser, Smudge and Clone tools
New "Spray" and "Connect" brushes in the Brush and Eraser tools. "Connect" is based on ideas from the harmony project
Guides (in the View menu)
More brushes have settings
New filters: "Striped Halftone", "Concentric Halftone", "Render Grid", "Checker Pattern"
New options for the "Channel Mixer", "Slice" filters
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

4.1.0 - released on 2018-06-16

Improvements to the Crop Tool contributed by Łukasz Kurzaj:
- Precise width and height controls for cropping
- The crop area can be dragged as a whole with the mouse after the handles appear
- Holding down the Shift key keeps the aspect ratio while dragging
- Composition guides in the crop rectangle (rule of thirds, golden sections, diagonal lines)
- The crop selection can be accepted by double-clicking inside it
Rotation in text layers
Opening and saving TIFF files when running on Java 9+
Progressive JPEG export option
Progress bar in the status bar while opening and saving large files
Faster previews and progress bar in the open dialog
Stroke length variability and mixed colors in Auto Paint
Zoom improvements: fit width/height, and exact Navigator zooming with right-click
New settings for the "Focus", "Magnify", "Flashlight", "Turbulent Distortion", "Glass Tiles", "Marble", "Smear", "Posterize", "Starburst" filters, new "Color Threshold" filter
"Clicked Pixel" fill and "Action" setting in the Paint Bucket Tool
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

4.0.2 - released on 2016-05-03

Polygonal selection
Duplicate image
Rubylith mask view mode
Color palette, color variations
Color history
Copy/paste colors
Shapes Tool: more gradient fill types
Minor bugfixes

4.0.1 - released on 2016-03-13

Navigator window
Mask from Color Range
Thumbnail image size in Settings
Selection edges can be hidden
New Filters "Marble" and "Morphology"
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

4.0.0 - released on 2016-02-18

Layer masks
Text layers
Most filters show a progress bar in the status bar if they need more than 0.2 seconds
Zoom control in the status bar
File reload
History dialog
Transform settings for all Render/Shapes filters
A few filters became faster. "Box Blur" became just as fast as "Fast Blur", so "Fast Blur" was removed
On Mac the Command key is used in the menu keyboard shortcuts (instead of Control)
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

3.1.4 - released on 2016-01-19

Auto Paint
New filters: "Flashlight", "Focus", "Invert Transparency", "Fractal Tree", "Mystic Rose", "Lissajous Curve", "Spirograph", "Flower of Life"
After resize, flip, rotate, crop, the selection is also resized, flipped, rotated, cropped (instead of deselecting)
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

3.1.3 - released on 2015-07-11

Layers have thumbnail images
Shapes Tool: transparent fill option
"Enlarge canvas" menu
Kerning, tracking and ligatures support for text
Improved performance for the "Rays", "Oil Painting", "Drop Shadow" filters
The Move, Clone Stamp and Color Picker tools can use the right-mouse as an alternative to Alt-mouse (so that Linux users don't have to reconfigure their window managers).
Minor bugfixes

3.1.2 - released on 2015-06-24

"Keyboard nudging": in the move, crop and selection tools the arrow keys move things one pixel, and shift-arrow keys move things ten pixels.
New "Modify" menu under Selection that can expand/contract a selection or create a new selection around the selection border
New "Voronoi Diagram", "Drunk Vision" and "Weave" filters
The angle, spiral and diamond gradients are anti-aliased
The anti-aliasing of the one-pixel brush can be configured in the brush settings
The Windows installer and the jar file are digitally signed (Thanks to Certum for the free open source code signing certificate).
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

3.1.1 - released on 2015-05-30

Clone Tool: new scale, rotate and mirror options
Smudge Tool: soft brush option
Pixel grid is disabled by default (see View/Show Pixel Grid)
More angle settings for shape brushes
Minor bugfixes and UI improvements

3.1.0 - released on 2015-05-18

New tool: Smudge
Clone Tool: soft brush option
"Random Filter" maintains history, and has "Back" and "Forward" buttons to navigate it
A generic "Shape" brush type (instead of the "Heart" brush), with settings
New filter: "Channel to Transparency"
Minor bugfixes

3.0.1 - released on 2015-04-05

Clone Tool: "Aligned" and "Sample All Layers" options
Pixel grid is shown if the zooming is 1600% or higher
Button for duplicating layers
Minor bugfixes

3.0.0 - released on 2015-03-27

Starting with this version, Pixelitor requires Java 8 or newer
New tool: Clone
"Ping pong" option for both the layer-based and tweening animations
Batch processing: apply a filter to all images in a folder
Reseed setting for the "Add Noise", "Brushed Metal", "Smear" filters
"Show Original" option for "Levels"
"Randomize and Normalize" button for "Channel Mixer"
"One Pixel" Brush (like the pencil tool in other programs, but also available for Eraser Tool)
"Central 3" mirror option for Brush Tool and Erase Tool
"Stroke with Current Brush/Eraser" in Selection Tool considers the mirror setting of brush/erase
Minor bugfixes

2.3.0 - released on 2014-12-28

Tweening animation export
New "2D Transitions" filter with more than 30 transitions
Layers can be reordered by dragging
New meta-filter "Random Filter"
"Rotate" and "Reseed" parameters for "Starburst"
Minor bugfixes

2.2.1 - released on 2014-12-05

Image centered in the internal window
"Allow Growing" option for the Crop Tool
More zoom levels and "Ctrl + mouse wheel" zooming
New "Underwater" filter
The "Pinch, Bulge, Twirl" and "Swirl" filters were unified into one filter
Minor bugfixes

2.2.0 - released on 2014-11-23

Pixelitor can now open and save files in the OpenRaster format - layered images can be transferred to/from other editors such as Gimp, Krita, Paint.net, etc.
Animated GIF export (the frames of the animation are based on the layers)
Performance improvements and new "Reseed" button for the "Crystallize", "Pointillize", "Cells" filters
New "Sepia" filter (contributed by Daniel Wreczycki)
Performance improvements for the "Color Wheel" filter
A new "Random Star" shape in the Shapes Tool

2.1.4 - released on 2014-10-25

Performance improvements for the "Clouds", "Value Noise", "Caustics", "Wood" filters
New parameter for the "Threshold" filter
Fixed a bug that led to "out of memory" errors under certain conditions, so you should upgrade

2.1.3 - released on 2014-10-22

New filters: "Angular Waves", "Radial Waves", "Polar Glass Tiles", "Slice"
New or improved parameters for the "Pinch, Bulge, Twirl", "Swirl", "Kaleidoscope", "Polar Coordinates", "Glass Tiles", "Waves" filters
All filters with an "Edge Action" parameter now also have the "Mirror" option for it
Performance improvements for the "Crystallize", "Pointillize", "Cells", "Glint", "Glow", "Sparkle", "Brushed Metal", "Frosted Glass", "Canny Edge Detector" filters
Minor bugfixes

2.1.2 - released on 2014-10-07

Many filters became faster due to the usage of the Jafama library
Some other filters are faster because they can use multiple processor cores
The "Add Noise" filter has a "Saturation" parameter
The "Stamp" filter has a "Blur Method" parameter
Menus and keyboard shortcuts for "Fit on Screen" and "Actual Pixels"
Minor bugfixes

2.1.1 - released on 2014-10-01

"Check for Update" functionality (in the Help menu)
"Hand Tool"-like behavior in the "Save Optimized JPEG" dialog
Some filters have better default settings for large images
Minor bugfixes

2.1.0 - released on 2014-09-12

Brush engine improvements, the new "Heart" brush is an example of angle-aware brush
New tool: Zoom
More zoom levels
Smaller tool buttons
Minor bugfixes

2.0.0 - released on 2014-06-07

New tool: Crop
18 filters are much faster (they use all the CPU cores)
More filters have a "show original" parameter
There are some new filters like "Little Planet", "Swirl", "Perspective", "Tritone", "Color Halftone", "Dither"
Bugfixes

Upgrade guide from 1.1.2 to 2.0.0:

I changed the main version number mainly because this requires a new Java version (2.0.0 requires at least Java 7 while 1.1.2 requires Java 6) and because the PXC format has changed. You should upgrade unless

For some reason you can have only Java 6 on your computer
You need to open old PXC files