Only a few weeks after releasing Pixelmator Pro 3.2, a big update to the macOS image editor that included video editing, the Pixelmator team unveiled Pixelmator Pro 3.2.3, with an AI-powered Deband function that removes color banding.

The company described the new tool as “groundbreaking,” allowing users to erase posterization and compression artifacts from photographs with a single click.

Color banding (or posterization) is a frequent artifact that appears staggered and abrupt rather than smooth when viewing low-quality image files.
While posterization isn’t very difficult to eliminate — users can blur it out or add noise to obscure it — it is a time-consuming procedure.

“With the magic of machine learning, we’ve been able to turn color debanding into an effortless, one-click process. And the results are simply incredible,” writes Pixelmator on its blog.

“We’ve trained the Deband algorithm to intelligently analyze colors, gradients, and textures in images, determine where the affected areas are, and seamlessly smooth them out without touching finer details in other parts of the image.”

Pixelmator 3.2.3 gets into the Christmas mood with a new set of holiday-themed themes. Eighteen new artist-designed templates are available for crafting social media posts, tales, posts, and greeting cards.