A while ago

Pixelmator Team announces Back to School sale and brings one-click Smart Deband feature to Photomator 

Photomator 3.1 introduces the advanced Smart Deband feature, which enhances photo quality by removing color banding and increasing color depth with just a click. This incredible new feature lets you seamlessly enhance your JPEGs or other photos shot in lossy formats to near-RAW quality. And, to celebrate the back to school season, for a limited time, you can get Photomator and Pixelmator Pro for more than 30% off.

AI-Powered Smart Deband

Color banding appears as distinct bands of color, transitioning abruptly from one shade to another instead of colors blending smoothly. This is commonly seen in low-quality photos with gradients, such as landscapes where the sky dominates the photo or portraits with vibrant gradient backgrounds. 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. By using Smart Deband, you’ll also enhance these smaller gradient areas, boosting the overall quality of your photos.

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Editing photos in compressed formats like JPEG can also be tricky as even minor color adjustments can lead to unexpected color artifacts. For example, enhancing the blue in the sky might end up in patchy blue areas rather than a smooth gradient, even if the JPEG seemed perfectly fine before making the adjustments. Since formats like JPEG compress images to retain perceived quality while keeping file sizes small, color artifacts are likely to pop up only during the editing process.

To address this issue, Smart Deband intelligently removes color artifacts and increases the color depth of your photos to 16 bits per channel – this is equivalent to the color depth of a RAW image. While merely increasing color depth doesn’t have a significant impact on its own, it makes a difference when paired with color banding removal. The enhanced color depth means there’s more color information available in the image, allowing the transformation of color bands into smoother gradients. It also ensures that you can edit each shade within those gradients without experiencing further posterization, offering a level of flexibility similar to editing a RAW image.

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Back to School Sale

Pixelmator Pro and Photomator are currently on sale for more than 30% off. You can get a 30% discount on Pixelmator Pro exclusively in the Mac App Store. Also, for a limited time, you can download Photomator on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad and get over 30% off the first year of its annual subscription – you can redeem this special offer directly within Photomator.

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