Photomator’s ‘Smart Deband’ Removes Banding and Improves Color Depth
Pixelmator has announced Photomator 3.1, the latest version of the company’s “ultimate photo editor” for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Photomator was first brought to Mac this May.
Photomator promises to deliver powerful photo editing tools in an accessible, easy-to-use package. The image editor supports more than 650 RAW image formats, offers powerful color adjustments, and many other robust non-destructive editing tools. Photomator 3.1 adds a brand-new image editing tool, Smart Deband.
Smart Deband allows users to remove color banding and increase the color depth of their images in a single click. This is especially useful when working with JPEG and other lossy image formats.
“This incredible new feature lets you seamlessly enhance your JPEGs or other photos shot in lossy formats to near-RAW quality,” writes Pixelmator.
Banding, when colors do not smoothly transition from one to another, can be extremely challenging to remove manually. Smart Deband uses artificial intelligence (AI) to smooth these transitions while keeping the rest of the image sharp and detailed.
“The new Smart Deband feature effortlessly transforms these color bands into smooth gradients, keeping the rest of the photo detailed and sharp. While gradients in areas such as the sky are more evident, many subtler gradients in your photos might go unnoticed at first,” Pixelmator explains.
Smart Deband not only analyzes an image and removes color banding artifacts, but the feature also increases the color depth of an image to 16 bits per channel — equivalent to a RAW image’s color depth. The increase in color depth does not mean much in and of itself, but it enables the debanding algorithm to work its magic.
“The enhanced color depth means there’s more color information available in the image, allowing the transformation of color bands into smoother gradients,” says Pixelmator. The increased color depth also ensures that when further color editing is performed on the image, color banding artifacts will not reappear.
Alongside the Photomator 3.1 release, Pixelmator has announced back-to-school sale pricing on Photomator and Pixelmator Pro. Photomator 3.1 is available to download for free but requires a subscription for unlimited use. The annual subscription is 30% off, bringing the price down to $70 annually.
Pixelmator Pro, regularly $49.99, is now available for $34.99. Pixelmator Pro received a similar AI-powered debanding feature late last year.
Image credits: Pixelmator Team
