iPhone camera app allows users to remove unwanted people and objects from pictures

By
Damien Gayle

Last updated at 4:47 PM on 15th February 2012

It’s a problem dictators will be familiar with. You have a lovely photo taken of you and your inner circle, then you decide to have one purged and removed from history.

Well, if Stalin were alive today and a smartphone fan, his mobile picture editing prayers would be answered.

A new app allows users to automatically erase unwanted objects from photos, meaning you no longer have to use complex photo-editing software to get the picture you want.

Stage one: You snap a picture of your friend on a busy street

Stage one: You snap a picture of your friend on a busy street

Stage two: The Remove app automatically detects objects in the background, allowing the user to toggle them in or out

Stage two: The Remove app automatically detects objects in the background, allowing the user to toggle them in or out

More prosaically, it allows users taking pictures in a busy public place to get exactly the composition they want without spending ages timing their pictures exactly.

Remove, a new smartphone camera app, gives users the opportunity to easily eliminate unwanted objects from the shot.

The app, designed for Android phones, takes several photographs in a row, analyses them and builds a composite image that users can edit.

The software looks similar to any other camera app. All users need to do is tap the shutter key and Remove quickly takes several pictures.

It then displays the resulting composite picture, with objects highlighted to allow the user to toggle them in or out of the shot.

Stage three: All the extraneous elements are removed and the perfect picture is complete

Stage three: All the extraneous elements are removed and the perfect picture is complete

At the moment, Remove is still at its prototype stage, but tech website Engadget was given a first look at an early build of the program.

Engadget says they found a few issues with the responsiveness of the user interface and noticed a few minor bugs.

Nevertheless, the website said, the application is intuitive and works well considering it is still at the early stages.

The software’s developer, Scalado, already well known for camera apps like Zero Shutter Lag and Rewind, plans to showcase remove at the Mobile World Congress later this month.

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The comments below have not been moderated.

Nowhere do I see iPhone mentioned in the story.
So a dedicated camera can do it, a specific photo software can do it, can any of them text or call you 🙂

Give me an app that removes unwanted people from reality, and *then* I’ll buy an iPhone.

To answer bored.com the headline refers to a seminal book on photography during Stalin’s reign called The Commissar Vanishes, clearly when the story was lifted from Engadget the writer clearly did not understand the headline and so removed that portion of the copy.

I wonder how much DM gets paid by Apple for advertisement…..its clearly a HTC in this article, and also states “designed for android”….yet the page title is “iPhone camera app blah blah blah”

Shame the app wasn’t designed for an iPhone – it would have been headline news in the DM for weeks.

Errrr, my 2 year old Fujifilm camera can do this. It isn’t anything new.

@Aisha, Washington DC. Good point. Missed the story…

Bored.com, Doomed Place wrote:”What does STALIN, a cruel dictator, has to do with a smartphone?? Are the DM reporters that THICK????”***********Probably, what Richard Stallman -an activist favouring free sofware- said about smartphones (something like “Smartphones are the dream of Stalin, tools of Big Brother”) has something to do. But then, you would have to be some updated on the matter….************Stalin would be more interesting, not in removing unwanted people, rather that adding his political enemies in order to incriminate them in only God knows what conspiracies. But, hey, enough, wasn’t the article about capabilities of modern smartphones?

My ex-wife does that with a pair of scissors.

What does STALIN, a cruel dictator, has to do with a smartphone?? Are the DM reporters that THICK????
– Bored.com, Doomed Place,************************************************************ Stalin used to have people removed from photos with him after he killed them off, to erase them from his history. Look it up, DM had a story on it in the last month.

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