Magic Eraser

When Google makes editing suggestions to the photos that I've shot on my smartphone, I usually ignore them.

"No, thanks, Google," I think, as though I'm in a telepathic conversation with my phone, "if I want to modify one of my photos, I'll do it myself."

Ninety-nine percent of the time that I accept an edit suggestion from Google, I end up reverting back to my original photo. And anyway, most of the time I'll run a photo through Snapseed to edit it right away, so Google is suggesting a change to a photo that I've already edited.

Nope.

But lately, I've noticed a new suggestion that Google makes to my photos: Magic Eraser.

Not knowing what it was, I tapped the button to see what would happen. What could go wrong? If I didn't like what the feature did, I could undo it.

I chose one of the photos that I captured of the setting sun, outside the St. Lawrence Market, in old Toronto. For reference, here's the original photo without any editing. (If you want to see how I edited it, check out my blog post from a couple of weeks ago.

While looking at the photo in Google Photos, I was prompted to try Magic Eraser. Tapping the button, the program automatically selected everyone that it recognized as a person.

I tapped Erase all.

The two people who were crossing Front Street were removed from the photo. I was given the option to tap in more spots that I wanted to touch up but I accepted the program's edits as is.

One of the challenges in this eraser tool it that because one of the pedestrians was moving between the headlights of a car in the background, Magic Eraser replaced the person with another headlight. To me, it gives the impression that the car is moving and for the purposes of this demonstration, that's okay for now.

What do you think?

I tried it again with a photo that I had shot with my Nikon D750 and had uploaded to my phone. Again, I had already performed some editing with Snapseed and saved the photo to Google Photos before Google made the suggestion to use Magic Eraser.

This edit didn't work so well, as the program didn't recognize the person in the dark, hooded coat, who was behind the woman in the white jacket. It also didn't recognize the person on a bicycle, with his back to the camera. Also, while it did mostly remove the person who was walking in front of the taxi, on the far left of the photo, because that person was blocking the passenger-side headlight, it isn't repaired in the edited image.

I guess it doesn't recognize cars.

Overall, the eraser didn't to a terrible job but I think that the result isn't good enough to replace the original photo. I guess people will have to stay in the image.

Have you used Magic Eraser? How have your final results turned out? Leave me a comment.

If I really want to remove people from my photos, I'll use the photo-editing apps that I have, like PaintShop Pro or Luminar AI, which are much better at removing things. But in a pinch, under the right circumstances, I might try Magic Eraser again.

Happy Friday!