Editing Pages Photos Directly In Pixelmator Pro

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can edit the images in your Pages Documents directly with Pixelmator Pro. 

So a new feature for those who have Apple Creator Studio subscription is the ability to take an image, that's in Pages, and edit it with Pixelmator Pro. The image never leaves Pages. It doesn't create some sort of new document. You don't need to export it and then import it again. You go just from Pages directly to Pixelmator Pro and then back and any changes you make, like adding layers, applying filters or effects, those are remembered so you can go and reedit that photo and you'll see all of that stuff again. 

So here I've got a sample Pages document. I'm going to add an image to it. I'm just going to choose something from my Photos Library like this image right here. So it inserts it in. Now I could do things like resizing it here, I could go to the Sidebar under Image and there are things like Exposure, Saturation, I could auto-enhance and do adjustments with these controls here. But I can also, now, use this button here, Edit in Pixelmator Pro. There are other ways to get to this same thing. You can go to Format, Image, and there's Edit in Pixelmator Pro here. This is important because you could then add a Keyboard Shortcut for this in System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboards Shortcuts. So if you use it a lot you can get quick access to it. You can also Control Click, right click, or two-finger click to bring up the Context Menu and you'll find the same option here. All of these things will launch Pixelmator Pro, this is the Apple Creator Studio version I'm using 4.3 right now. You can now Edit in Pixelmator Pro. 

For instance, let's go in here and change something about this. Like, for instance, let's lower the exposure, bring out the shadows, and then maybe go to Saturation and make the color stronger there. A little more vibrance as well. After I leave these adjustments I can click the Save to Pages button. But also notice you could go to File and Save. It's now saved to Pages in this mode. Or you can just use Command S. So a quick Command S will save that to Pages and close the Pixelmator Pro window and then notice now you have the new changes right here. This is the new version of the image in Pixelmator Pro. So you can use it for simple things like that, just making adjustments. But you can also do much more. 

I can go back here to Edit Pixelmator Pro again and you can see how it remembers those changes here. So it is actually saving a Pixelmator Pro document inside the Pages document. There is no other place where this is located. So as an example I'll add a shape here and I'll go ahead and just make this a basic line, like this, and I'll just draw a line here on the image. Under Stroke here I'll go ahead and set the end there to an arrow, like that. So I've got there now a little arrow that I've added. You can see that's a separate layer here. This is line layer. I've still go the original one there and I can Command S or click that and you can see now I see the results here in Pages. So you can do all sorts of things. I can go back in again and I'll see the layers are still there. I'll select the main image layer there and I'll go to Effects here and I'll add an effect. Maybe I'll choose Color Adjustment and do sepia tone, like that. Then change the Intensity a bit so it won't be quite so intense. Save to Pages and you'll see the new version there. So it is all just remembered. You don't have to Import, Export, create new documents or anything like that. It is a very quick workflow. 

Now can you imagine a fax and layers and all of that work as expected. You're not really changing the actual dimensions of the image. But what if you did. Let's go here and let's go back into the image. I'm going to get rid of the line. I'm going to remove the effects here. Go back to this and let's Crop it. I'm going to use C for the cropping tool and I'm going to crop it. Make it a little bit more square, like that. Then I'm going to Save To Pages. Now you'll see you'll get the cropped image here, the left and right now have been cropped out. But it is not going to change the rectangle that it is in. If I double click on it then I'm now cropping in Pages. So I'm cropping the frame that the image sits in. So I can shrink it all the way down and now I can see the crop as I've done it in Pixelmator Pro. You can Crop but just remember you've got to adjust the frame in Pages to match it. 

Another thing to note is that Undo works here. So I made that drastic change. If I just use Command Z to Undo you can see it rolls back that change. It won't do that in Pixelmator Pro. Every time you Edit it is like a new session. But it does remember that in Pages.

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Now let's look at something else here. What if we went and added a transparent area. I'm going to use the Quick Selection Tool with Q and I'm going to select the sky here. I'm going to get rid of the sky completely. Now you can see it is just a transparent area. I'll do Command S to Save and that will be reflected here in Pages. Since I'm just using the defaults here the text is going to wrap around the image as I have assigned here in Arrange with the proper spacing and all of that. Now an interesting thing happens when you've edited this in Pixelmator Pro. If now you look in the image sidebar here you'll notice that the Enhance Button isn't here anymore. If you go to Adjustments you can't use any of the adjustments. You can't even adjust the Exposure or Saturation. So you basically have given up editing to Pixelmator Pro and you certainly can do all those things and so much more in Pixelmator Pro. But if you want to get this back so you can actually use these tools after using Pixelmator Pro you've got this Convert Image button. You click that it flattens the image. So basically gets rid of that Pixelmator Pro document in your Pages document. Then it will recompress the image. So if I were to edit in Pixelmator Pro now you can see I don't have the changes here anymore. It treats it like it is brand new. But I can now use these controls once again. That actually could be interesting because it is a way to also get rid of the extra baggage that you've got when you have a Pixelmator Pro profile imbedded inside of Pages. 

So I'm going to create a new Pages document here and I'm going to save it to this Folder so we can examine its size. So now let's go ahead and add an image here to this. I'll choose a photo. I'll add that same photo that we have been using. I'm going to Save. That's going to put this photo inside the Pages document. You can see here now it is 2.7 MB. What happens if we now edit this in Pixelmator Pro. We do that then maybe make no change whatsoever. Just Save to Pages. This is going to balloon in size once I Save To Pages document to almost 15 MG. So what it is doing is it is taking the compressed image and it's creating the uncompressed version for Pixelmator Pro to use as a layer. So it is much bigger. We can also sieve the Pixelmator Pro document by the way. If you look closely here in the image sidebar notice it shows you the file name is the same as the name of the image but now it is .pxd, for Pixelmator Pro. So I can take this and drag it out like that and it extracts the Pixelmator Pro document from the Pages document. So that could be useful on its own if you ever need it. Here you can see that is 14.6 MB on its own. So that's what is causing this file to be bigger. 

Now let's say you do need to use this. Like I'm going to go in here and I'm going to an effect, I'm just going to add this effect right here, Save it out. Now Save the Pages document and you can see by applying that filter now it's a little bit smaller. So that's not quite the whole story that the Pixelmator Pro document contains like all the pixels there. There's probably then Preview for looking at the layer and all the sorts of other factors that determine the size. But definitely bigger than the original.

Now if I want to shrink that down I could do it by using that feature that I talked about before, the Convert Image. This will flatten it. It won't be a Pixelmator Pro document any more and as a result I will get a lot of that file size back. I'll Save here and now you can see it drops down to 1.8 MB.  You can see now the file itself imbedded inside of Pages is now a JPEG, not a pxd anymore.

But you could actually use this to your advantage to create even smaller files. So for instance let's continue with this one here. Let's Edit again in Pixelmator Pro. Right now the size of the file is 1.8 MB but this is a pretty high resolution image. It's going to appear just on a page in a PDF. It doesn't need to be that  high resolution to be look fine for a document. So I'm going to go to Image, Image Size here and I can see, pixel wise it is 4000 pixels across. Instead I'm going to reduce that 25% in width and height. That's going to take it down to a 1000 pixels across. The resolution is less but you don't notice it when you're zoomed out. So I'll Save it to Pages here and you see you don't see much difference here. I'll do Command S to Save. It is still bigger than the 1.8 MB because it is now a Pixelmator Pro document. But if now I go over here and Convert I can see that I'm going to end up with a much smaller file. In this case only 1.2 MB in size. I could have probably gone a lot smaller than a 1000 pixels across. Maybe 600 pixels would have worked just fine for this especially if it wasn't going to be all the way across the page or something. 

So if you don't care about file size then you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. But if you do want to have a smaller Pages document you can use this to get there. I imagine the PDF's that you create in these Pages documents if you shrunk them down using Pixelmator Pro so they are only so many pixels across, only what you really need, then you'll end up with smaller PDF files that are imbedding these really high resolution images. 

Now of course if this works in Pages you know that it's also going to work in Numbers and in Keynote. So here I am Keynote and I've got another image imbedded here. I go to the Image Sidebar. There's that button. You can find it also in the same places here and you can do the same thing. You can edit this in Pixelmator Pro. You can make changes to it, like that. You can Save and you will see the changes reflected here in Keynote. Perhaps it is even more useful in Keynote where we tend to actually work with our images and do all sorts of creative things. So while this feature doesn't look super flashy to begin with if you're creating documents with images in them and you're an Apple Creative Studio subscriber this actually can really improve some of your workflows saving you lots of time. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.