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            Enhance Your Images with Apple's Clean Up Tool in Photos

   Adam Engst

   To my mind, Clean Up is the most impressive Apple Intelligence tool we
   have now. Introduced in Photos in macOS 15.1 Sequoia, iOS 18.1, and
   iPadOS 18.1, Clean Up enables you to remove distracting people and
   objects from the background of photos, replacing them with AI-generated
   scenery. Clean Up may automatically highlight items you might want to
   remove, and you can always scrub over or circle an unwanted one to
   eliminate it.

   Object removal capabilities are widespread in other apps. Since I
   seldom edit photos, I can't compare how well Clean Up works to other
   tools. To an extent, that's irrelevant'I would never use Photoshop to
   edit an image or purchase an app purely to remove objects, but I will
   use Photos. I suspect I'm far from alone.

   Also, for snapshots or informal sharing, if Clean Up's results aren't
   perfect, it doesn't matter'nobody will notice. However, if you're
   making a large print or sharing in a venue where the image will attract
   scrutiny, you might want to switch to a professional tool like
   Photoshop or Lightroom, or ask a friend with one of those tools to
   help.

   Nevertheless, my testing of Clean Up has provided a sense of where it
   works well, where it's unlikely to succeed, and when its results are
   more variable than you might expect. It can prove valuable when the
   objects to be removed are small and cleanly silhouetted. However, it
   may struggle in busy scenes or when the background is difficult to
   recreate convincingly.

' Cleanly Silhouetted Objects

   When it's good, Clean Up is very good. When it's bad, it's laughable.
   It works best when the people or objects you want to remove are
   relatively small and cleanly silhouetted against an easily faked
   background.

   In this photo of me at a cross-country race, the pedestrians and car on
   the stone bridge behind me are easily removed, as is the blue course
   marking flag on the ground. (Ignore the general blurriness of the
   photo'it was taken at a distance using the [1]Camera+ Action mode as
   part of a burst, and I had to crop heavily to make myself the focus of
   the shot. Apple's ads notwithstanding, even the iPhone 16 Pro is a weak
   camera for sports photography.)

   If you zoom into the right-hand photo and look carefully at where the
   truck was, you can see that Clean Up didn't do a fabulous job of
   simulating either the stonework or the leaves. With the stonework, it
   went a little overboard and replaced pixels that would have been better
   left alone. In contrast, the leaves are utterly random, but Clean Up
   introduced an unnatural pattern in the replacement. Regardless, most
   people wouldn't notice because the edits aren't near the subject of the
   photo, and the leaves have an unpredictable texture to begin with.

   Here's another example where Clean Up performed well. The original was
   marred by the child's hat in front of me, and the large metal traffic
   signal poles and wires also distract from the dragon.

   Even though the hat is quite large, it's silhouetted cleanly against
   the uniform road surface, which Clean Up can easily fake. Removing the
   hat was easy, but selecting the metal poles and wires took more time.
   Nevertheless, Clean Up removed them without a trace because they were
   backed by either a tree or the sky. Even the man standing in front of
   the pole looks as if his face is in shadow, although closer examination
   shows that Clean Up removed part of his head. Again, for informal
   sharing, Clean Up's results are entirely acceptable.

' Busy Scenes

   It can be tempting'even for Clean Up'to remove items in the backgrounds
   of busy scenes. In my experience with photos like the one below, Clean
   Up struggles when there are multiple overlapping objects or when the
   background contains complex patterns or textures that are difficult to
   recreate convincingly. On the left, Clean Up suggested removing the
   people under the tent in the background, the car to the left, various
   shadows, and more'Photos highlights them with a shimmering colorful
   animation to call out its suggestions.

   As you can see on the right, when I took all of Clean Up's suggestions,
   the trees look strange; it added a blur to the right of the silver cup
   and orange bell, and the area occupied by the car and bystanders on the
   left of the photo gets weird. Ironically, the main thing I wanted to
   remove from the photo was my shadow at the bottom; although Clean Up
   didn't suggest it for removal, it did a good job when I selected it
   manually.