Web Development: How to Crop and Resize a Photo in Pixelmator Pro

Thursday, May 19, 2022

How to Crop and Resize a Photo in Pixelmator Pro

Pixelmator Pro is a powerful and easy-to-use photo editor for the Mac, designed to make the most powerful professional photo editing tools accessible to anyone. It contains an extensive collection of tools for editing and retouching photos, and with a one-time purchase price of $39.99 it's an affordable option for a professional quality photo editing software.

They also a free trial that lets you use the entire functionality of Pixelmator Pro, with no restrictions, for 15 days, so you can give it a real good test of your own before committing to purchasing this software.

Let's dive into the Pixelmator Pro software, and I'll show how to crop and resize a photo.

1. Download and Open Pixelmator Pro

Download your free trial of Pixelmator Pro here. Follow the installation process on your Mac, and then open Pixelmator Pro. When you first open Pixelmator Pro, you'll arrive this prompt screen.

2. Locate and Select a Photo

Click on Browse images on your Mac and then locate and select the photo that you're looking to crop, and resize. Once you've made your selection, click on Okay and this will open your photo and bring you in to the main workspace of Pixelmator Pro.

3. Select Crop Tool

All the way at the bottom of Pixelmator Pro's workspace is the Crop Tool. Click on the Crop Tool (or hotkey C) to activate its functionality.

4. Make Your Crop

Simply click and drag any of the extremities of the frame to change the crop of your photo. The menu bar on the right hand side displays a few helpful tools for your cropping. You can set constraints to the aspect ratio, keeping it as the 'Original' as I have, or you can set it to 5:4, or 16:9, etc.

Once you're happy with your crop, click on the Apply button in the bottom right corner. This will remove the overlay from the photo, and commit to this new crop.

5. Resize the Photo

Now all that's left to do is to re-size our photo. We'll find this functionality at the top menu bar. Select Image > Image Size (or shortcut Option + Command + I).

In this image size menu, you can resize the photo to whatever dimensions you'd like. I've selected Scale proportionally, which means that Pixelmator Pro will automatically maintain the correct aspect ratio. I've chosen 1800 pixels on the width, and it automatically set the height to 1200 pixels.

Click OK to commit to this new image size.

And voila! There's the photo, cropped, and re-sized! Go to File > Export to save this edit to your computer, and now you've successfully cropped, re-sized, and saved these edits as a new image.

I hope this has helped to show you how simple it is to use Pixelmator Pro, and to quickly and effectively crop and re-size your images. There's a whole lot more power under the hood of Pixelmator Pro, so don't be afraid to jump in and learn for yourself what this photo editing software can offer!