Removing background

[lkalliance]

I've been having a little fun investigating this feature. As with anything that "just works" (even when it doesn't, lol), there's no flexibility that I can see. The AI either finds a subject in a photo or it doesn't, and if it does you can lift the subject out and copy and paste it somewhere. The AI determines what the subject is, and there's no way to edit the selection as far as I can tell.

I was actually pretty impressed with its ability to find subjects though. I lifted people, my dog, a car, and birds out of photos. It doesn't do a professional job with things like hair...but I guess I wouldn't expect it to. It does an OK job, though a halo does appear sometimes. I found I could copy a subject, paste it somewhere like a text message or a note, and from there share it back to my photo library. From there I could drop it into a document with, say, Pixelmator on my Mac, and the mask is preserved: I now have a fully transportable and usable cutout.

I'm not yet confident about using the cutout information to select a lock screen photo if I want to utilize the depth effect. It's not working for me in that direction (i.e. find a pic in photos that has a defined subject, then try to use that pic on the lock screen). I am guessing this requires that the photo not be resized in order for that depth to be used; that is, if I have to zoom in at all on the pic when composing the lock screen, then it won't work. I don't know.

 

[lkalliance]

Here’s one of a bird I photographed on my deck. This one was NOT taken with this iPhone or any iPhone, it was taken with my Canon DSLR, and uploaded to my Photos library. You can see there is a little bit of smoothing and haloing going on, and that stands out against this solid background. But I think it's pretty good!

 

[lkalliance]

Now here’s one of my dog. She’s not at her hairiest, but there is some here it had to deal with. I think it did really well with the masking on this one. A little off, I think, with the upwards-pointing ear, looks like it smoothed off some detail...but by and large it's pretty good for non-professional work!

 

[lkalliance]

Now here’s another of my dog at her hairiest.




So this clearly is not as good a photo in general, but I'm actually really impressed with its effort on the masking. Some places the smoothing seems obvious, but it did a pretty good job, I think!