iOS 16 Lets You Isolate, Copy, and Share Subjects in Photos

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

I love it. Drag and drop simple as that. Don't need to rely on photoshop anymore. That's even better

 

[CarAnalogy]

Off topic but I don’t think Craig wants to be CEO because then how would he have time to make so many weird videos of himself.

 

[DanteHicks79]

My guess is this will only work best with Portrait mode images that already have subjects separated from the background using a depth map.

Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and Luminair all have similar object detection tools - most of the time, they are at best a good starting point, which requires further manual refinement.

 

[erikkfi]

Would have been more impressive if it removed the background in the middle from the arm in which he\s touching his hair.

Good catch. Expect it to disappoint like this a lot of the time.

 

[The Game 161]

Just copy I think.

Shame

 

[svish]

Really good feature. Good that even iPhone XS with A12 can support this feature.

 

[GeoStructural]

It used to take me ages to do this very thing on a Photoshop years ago.

I remember!!! And even after it went automatic many algorithms had a hard time identifying the edges around the subject, especially in not-so-constrast-y backgrounds, we have come a long way in just a few years.

 

[JMO1]

I hope they bring AI background eraser next like Google has. I think it would be more valuable to remove unwanted object from the photo (and have a great photo, otherwise why did you take it), than extract the subject

 

[Pudentain]

Great News! IOS 17 to feature 'clean up' of IOS 16 Photo Feature...😁

 

[jav6454]

It used to take me ages to do this very thing on a Photoshop years ago.

And to do it easily one would need a green/blue screen.

 

[_Spinn_]

Looks very impressive! I can't wait to try using this.

 

[Wackery]

Would have been more impressive if it removed the background in the middle from the arm in which he\s touching his hair.

He’s holding a foam block with his elbow

 

[Killerdan56]

Perfect for memes

 

[legomite]

As someone who's manually silhouetted thousands of images in Photoshop, I can attest that this is inherently a very tricky process with complex backgrounds. A lot of times it just ends up being a judgement call whether to include a bit of shadow, or where someone's hair ends and the grass behind it begins. It will probably look very good most of the time at small sizes, but I predict some funny/maddening misfires as it sees wide use.

I've really scaled back using Portrait Mode on my iPhone 13 because it gets my kid's frizzy hair so horribly wrong a lot of the time, blurring out parts of it and not others. You can close up the aperture to ƒ22 or something afterward to increase depth of field, but sometimes even that doesn't fix it, and there's no turning the effect off completely once you've taken the photo that way.

If you have the Metapho app, you can open the share sheet extension for it in Photos and extract the original photo without any portrait effects applied

 

[ignatius345]

If you have the Metapho app, you can open the share sheet extension for it in Photos and extract the original photo without any portrait effects applied

Great to know, thanks!

 

[eyeseeyou]

It seems like this functionality could be integrated in another way to remove objects from a photo also like how the android phones advertise.

 

[gumbyhw]

wait: how do I drag into a message on an iphone? I could do it on my ipad (if that feature is available in ipados) but on a phone?

 

[kmingis]

wait: how do I drag into a message on an iphone? I could do it on my ipad (if that feature is available in ipados) but on a phone?

I have this exact same question. I can click, hold, select and drag the silhouette out of an image but I'm still in Photos and there's no "copy" indicator anywhere. Maybe that part isn't implemented yet?

 

[reklex]

but does it extract the alpha channel information too? I played with it and it adds a white background with the cutout

 

[srbNYC]

I have this exact same question. I can click, hold, select and drag the silhouette out of an image but I'm still in Photos and there's no "copy" indicator anywhere. Maybe that part isn't implemented yet?

Weird as this sounds, I had to do it a few times for it to start working. The silhouetting happened, but I got no pop-up. Now I do. I also seems to have something to do with how exactly you press and hold.

You get Copy and Share... options. Don't see how one could drag into another app on an iPhone though.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Good catch. Wonder if they missed that, or included it to show its limitations. I’m guessing it’s the former, but also that it’s an accurate example of the feature’s capability. Very cool either way, hoping it works on iPadOS as well.

I’m hoping they iron that out before release, because that’s about as easy of an example as you could ask for. A uniform grey background with easily contrasting outlines.

 

[CarAnalogy]

The middle image shows that Craig lives in an iPhone.

And he’s tearing his hair out that you can’t just put icons where you want them, or adjust the grid size.

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

Now I know why Apple's software quality control has gone down the drain. Craig is too busy worrying about how good his hair looks to actually have any time to check if his division actually has a functional test team or not.

 

[FelixDerKater]

It seems to work at random.

 

[Hyperchaotic]

It used to take me ages to do this very thing on a Photoshop years ago.

Yeah, I've spent many hours in the past extracting things from their background with The GIMP. Today on my iPad I tapped a picture of a camel sent it to myself and pasted it into a picture of my son playing basketball. It took maybe 5 minutes inclusive some context aware fill in GIMP to remove the coach and replace with the camel. That would have been a 30 min project before with adjustments and corrections.