Could this be the end of the photobomb?
A new camera app promises to make taking that perfect photo easier than ever, without the complications of heavy Photoshopping. It’s called Remove and comes from Scalado, a Swedish company known for their camera technology.
With Remove, you can take a photo without having to wait for the perfect moment – like waiting until that awkward guy walking behind your target goes by. Remove allows users to manually erase unwanted objects from their photos with a couple of quick taps to your smartphone screen.
When you snap a photo using the app, Remove actually takes a bunch of quick captures successively, analyzes the images, and makes a composite photo. You can then use that to quickly remove objects that you don’t want – like that passing car in the background or that annoying friend giving you bunny-ears.
Check out a demo of the technology in action:
The app is still in its prototype phase, but is expected to be revealed at Mobile World Congress later this month. Unfortunately for iPhone users, this app is currently only for Android phones.
There are quite a few skeptics of the technology currently commenting on YouTube, to which the top-voted comment attempts to explain away any trepidations:
For you skeptics: It’s actually recording the whole time, and when you click, it just uses a few frames before (and maybe after) your picture to fill in the background where you want to ‘erase’ people from. You already pause for a second or so before you click, lining it up & waiting for the person(s) to be ready. The software just has to do a ‘difference’ filter to find things that changed between frames, and overwrite those areas in your final photo with data from the adjacent shots.
The only concern with Remove that I can think of is probable ineffectiveness in the removal of relatively still images in the background of photos. But the app definitely looks like it will be rather popular.
Engadget actually got a hands on of the prototype and gave it a pretty good review, saying that apart from “occasional issues with the responsiveness of the UI and a couple minor bugs,” Remove is “relatively intuitive and works rather well for a prototype.”
What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
