r/pixelmator

Hey everyone,

A week ago, I complained here about the Lightroom Mobile HDR export workflow on iOS.

If your iPhone library is packed with RAW photos—whether you shoot and process ProRAW on your phone, or use your iPad/iPhone on light travel to quickly edit camera RAWs—and you want a quick way to save a super lightweight copy on your device, the solution is finally here!

I’ve struggled with this pain point myself. I compared Lightroom's HDR JPEG XL exports with Mac Photos' full-size HEIF exports. Mac Photos achieves incredible quality at a tiny fraction of the size (compressing 40MB down to just 2MB). But this capability was completely missing on iOS, which is why I spent the last week coding a tool to bring it to iPhone and iPad.

My app, **RAW to HEIC Pro**, is now officially live on the App Store!

How it works:

It integrates directly into your iOS Share Sheet:

1. Export your HDR TIFF/DNG from Lightroom Mobile.

2. Share it directly to `RAW to HEIC Pro`.

3. The app uses a local 10-bit half-float Core Image pipeline to compress the image down to a ~1.8MB HEIF, while perfectly preserving the 10-bit HDR gain map.

When you open it in the Apple Photos app, the highlights still glow natively. Everything is processed 100% locally on your device. No accounts, no ads, no trackers.

To thank this community for the awesome feedback on my last post, **I’m giving away 50 lifetime unlock codes in this thread!**

If you want to try it out and give some feedback, just leave a comment and I'll DM you a lifetime code.

App Store search: **RAW to HEIC Pro**

Hi, like veryone here I'm a passionate user of Pixelmator Pro. I bought the original several years ago but when Apple released their "upgraded" version (well, the icon got an upgrade) I decided to subscript.

But what we all fear is that Apple will stop adding new features to Pixelmator Pro, thinking that it's "done" and fine the way it is. I'd like to start a discussion of ways in which we still NEED new features and improvements.

My short list includes:

a) A way to "paste into selection" (creating a mask easily). This is child's play in Photoshop but there is no way to do it in Pixelmator Pro easily (I think).

https://preview.redd.it/lnsdur3fny7h1.jpg?width=1640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7d880d9adc1b07f3bd8fe0a670ab19d0757c15f

b) The font management is far from what it needs to be. When I opened a file for a youtube video I was working on, I didn't have the proper font installed, but Pixelmator Pro didn't warn me and just re-rendered everything to be really ugly.

Also, does ANYONE like the way the font size selector works? Come on! I have to manually move a tiny slider pixel by pixel to get the size I need, and I can't type the size I want?

c) I find it quite frustrating that Pixelmator Pro is ready to save the sidecar images to iCloud, but can't get preferences another already set-up version of the app. Hence I need to take screenshots and take notes about how I set up my tools, and so on. It would be nice if there was a backup of preferences, and when setting up a new copy it could ask you, "Shall I load the saved preference file?"

d) On the tools front, we're still waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for the ability to customize keys for the tools. Some of us have workflows we want to carry over to a new program and it's not nice of devs to say, NO, the shortcut for tihs tool is this, get used to it.

Got any