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Just a few weeks after releasing Pixelmator Pro 3.2, a major update to the macOS image editor that added video editing, the Pixelmator team announced Pixelmator Pro 3.2.3 with a ‘groundbreaking’ new tool, Deband.
Deband removes posterization and compression artifacts from images in a single click. Color banding is a common artifact, especially when viewing low-quality image files, that makes color transitions look staggtered and abrupt rather than smooth. Consider the image below, in the before (left) version, you can see heavy banding in the sky. The different shades of blue don’t go smoothly from one to the next. Following using Deband (right), the tonal transitions are considerably smoother.
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| Before (left) Deband versus after (right) Deband. Notice the significantly smoother tonal transitions in the sky. The tool also preserved the stars in the sky, which would be time-consuming to do with manual correction tools. Image credit: Pixelmator |
While you can address banding manually by using blurring tools, it’s a time-intensive process, and it’s especially challenging to apply in situations when you don’t want to lose any fine detail. The Pixelmator team trained the Deband algorithm to analyze colors, gradient and textures within images to ensure that the tool can accurately identify problem areas and smooth them without interfering with any of the finer details in the image. This is especially evident when looking at the small stars in the sky in the above image – they survived the Deband tool.
Pixelmator 3.2.3 is also getting into the holiday spirit with a new collection of holiday-themed templates. There are 18 new artist-designed templates for creating social media posts, stories, making posts and designing greeting cards.
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| Pixelmator 3.2.3 also adds 18 free new holiday-themed templates |
Today’s update is free to all existing users and is available to download from the Mac App Store now. If you don’t yet own Pixelmator Pro, it is still on sale for $19.99, 50% off its regular price. The special promotion pricing is to celebrate the launch of Pixelmator 3.2 earlier this month and will be ending soon.
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This article comes from DP Review and can be read on the original site.
