The popular Darkroom photo editing app, available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, has added a very powerful new feature called Clarity. This function is described as “adjusts the contrast in the details of your image, without affecting the overall tone of the image.”
In a blog post, the darkroom developers explain that you can increase the clarity of an image to improve “drama or texture” or decrease it to show less detail.
Clarity adjusts the contrast in the details of your image, without affecting the overall tone of the image. When you adjust the clarity, details are clarified or smoothed, but whites and blacks remain unchanged and sharp edges remain sharp.
To adjust the lightness in the Darkroom app, there is a logarithmic slider with a range of -50 to +50. The closer you get to the edges of this range, the more the clarity will have a big impact. “This gives you the option of either making subtle adjustments for portraits or going above and beyond for dramatic landscapes using just one smart tool,” the company explains.
To power this new feature, Darkroom uses a mathematical algorithm called Fast Local Laplacian Filter which does two things:
Pull only the details from the picture
The first big step we do is calculate which pixels in your photo are detail and which are tonal regions. We do this by generating a Laplacian pyramid. In an oversimplified fashion, we first blur the image and then mathematically subtract it from the original, leaving us with the detailed map. We can then operate directly on these details.
Fit pixels to their surrounding pixels
Once the details are separated from the image, we can adjust the contrast of each region of the image separately. This is where the “local” of the local Laplacian filter comes from, and it ensures that the edges of the image remain sharp.
Darkroom is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac. The new Clarity feature is available on all three platforms, but there is currently a bug in the latest version of macOS Big Sur 11.3 that is preventing it from working. Darkroom says it is in contact with Apple and hopes to release an update as soon as possible.
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