When you’re snapping a tacky, cliched vacation photo, isn’t it annoying that all those other tourists are buzzing around and generally getting in the way of that monument/handsome plaza/amusing statue? Short of climbing up into a bell tower and, well, you know what, there’s little that you can do to remove these scampering human ants. You could take a sequence of photos and buy Photoshop just to paint out the milling hordes, or you could try Scalado’s Remove app. If you had an Android phone.
Remove does just what it says, removing things selectively from your photographs. You point your phone at your subject and hold it there for a few seconds before snapping your photo. Thus, the app now has a still image, plus many extra frames which — when combined — contain all of the background data.
The app then presents you with your still photo, outlining any moving elements with a glowing halo. Just tap the ones you don’t want and they disappear. It’s magic, and it’s better than the content-aware fill apps available for iOS because it is using real, recorded pixels to fill in the gaps. The video is pretty amazing:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=flNomXIIWr4
Sadly, it’s Android-only, which I guess seems fair in that we have Instagram and they don’t. Or is it? The demo video shows Remove running on an HTC handset, but the app isn’t yet available. It will be on show at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this month, so we’ll take a look and see if there’s an iOS version in the works.
[Via DP Review]
Charlie Sorrel writes reviews and how-tos. Follow Charlie on Twitter at @mistercharlie, and at micro.blog on @mistercharlie
