Pixelmator has recently come out of beta and I have been on the invite list for a while, but it finally came out and I got an email to tell me. I have downloaded it and installed it; I spent about half an hour playing on the demo and it is great. It is like a Photoshop for a normal budget. Pixelmator use Mac OS X core image making it super fast. I takes seconds to start up and the filters are really fast and the animations are great. It uses layers and has selection tools.

Tools

Layers and other Palettes are floating

It has a full feature list of blending modes

Pixelmator has the full layers ability with alpha channels. It has all the basic filters that you need to touch up any image.

Pixelmator contains everything I and most people use in Photoshop, but only costing $59. Pixelmator has such nice animations like the rope and a pin head with you place at the centre of were you wish the filter to be the rope attaches the pin to the floating panel and moves just like a rope. It has a great full screen view that blocks out all detractions. Pixelmator can open and save Photoshop files and has its own file type. it opens a large number of file types. Pixemator is a must buy and with that price why not.