Finally some clarity

In the first week of sunny May, we brought you a couple of new features:

• Clarity: The “Sharpen” tools got a new member, clarity. Dry scientific explanation: Clarity adds (or reduces) contrast in the images’s midtones. This, surprisingly, works a bit like sharpening, but without doing any sharpening. In fact, Clarity is one of the mostly used tools in professional photo editing suites, and it can really do wonders when applied to low-contrast photos:

  Before – After

  Top: Before – Bottom: After

  Top: Before – Bottom: After

• The “Color adjustments” tool (the one with the many sliders) got four .. erm,… new sliders: Shadows/Highlights and Blacks/Whites. Although it might seem that those pairs do the same thing, in reality, they don’t. Without more boring mathematical mumbojumbo it’s hard to explain what they do. In layman’s terms: Blacks and Shadows increase/decrease darker colors (in different ways, though), while Highlights and Whites increase/decrease lighter colors. There you go…. I think it’s best if you simply try it out.

  Color Adjustments

   

• In other news: We (again) increased the size of some of the previews. Also, more tools generate their preview without server intervention, ie without any delay (Film grain, Sharpen, Clarity, many Color effects, …).

A side-note: We generally recommend Firefox, or Chrome/Safari/Opera (or any other Webkit/Blink-powered browser) for using Phixr. While Phixr works well with Internet Explorer (starting with version 7), due to missing browser-features and slow Javascript-engines (and that sadly includes current IE11), the experience might be a tad less beautiful.