Snapheal Review: Easily Remove Unwanted Objects from Photos
As a professional travel photographer and photo editing expert, I‘m always on the lookout for tools that can help me work faster and more efficiently. Time is money in this business, and I simply don‘t have hours to spend painstakingly removing unwanted objects and strangers from my photos.
That‘s why I was excited to get my hands on a copy of Snapheal, a Mac app built for the sole purpose of making object removal fast and easy. I put the app through its paces on a variety of images, and I‘m happy to report it‘s a huge time saver that produces impressive results. It‘s earned a permanent spot in my editing workflow.
If you‘ve ever found a great photo ruined by a stray bystander, a distracting road sign, or a skin blemish, you‘re going to want to keep reading. In this in-depth Snapheal review, I‘ll cover everything you need to know about this powerful but easy to use Mac app for object removal.
What Is Snapheal?
At its core, Snapheal is a tool for removing unwanted objects, people, text, and other elements from photos. It works by using intelligent algorithms to analyze the pixels around a selected area, then filling in the removed part with content sampled from the rest of the image.
The goal is to make the removed object completely disappear, leaving no trace it was ever there. When done right, the edited photo should look completely natural, as if you captured the scene exactly as you wanted in camera.
What sets Snapheal apart is the speed and ease with which it achieves convincing results. What would take careful selection, masking, cloning, and healing to achieve in Photoshop can be done in Snapheal with just a few brush strokes and clicks.
This can be an absolute game changer for certain types of photography. Imagine being able to deliver an otherwise perfect wedding photo unblemished by a rogue guest. Or sell a beautiful landscape print with a distracting branch or power line magically erased.
When a photo only requires a few small tweaks, outsourcing the editing often doesn‘t make financial sense. Snapheal makes it feasible (and even enjoyable) to quickly handle these edits yourself and keep more of the profits.
Is It Hard to Use?
Not at all! In fact, ease of use is one of Snapheal‘s biggest selling points. The interface is clean, well-organized, and easy to navigate even if you have zero photo editing experience. If you can use a smartphone, you‘ll be able to use Snapheal.
To remove an object, you simply select the Erase tool from the right sidebar and paint over the object you want to remove. You don‘t need to be too precise on your first pass. Just a few rough brush strokes will do.
Snapheal will show you a live preview of the removal as you brush. Red overlay indicates areas that will be removed, and green shows areas that will be used to fill in the missing pixels. You can fine-tune the selection using the Eraser and Restore brushes if needed.
Once you‘re happy with the selection, just hit the Erase button and Snapheal will work its magic. Most removals take only a few seconds to process. You can then toggle between the original and edited version with a single click to check the results.
The Remove brush does a remarkable job in most cases, but when it struggles you can always switch to the Clone tool for manual touchups. It works just like the clone stamp in Photoshop, allowing you to sample pixels from one area and paint them elsewhere.
All in all, the object removal workflow is incredibly intuitive. After doing it once, you‘ll have it down pat. And best of all, it produces great results in a fraction of the time (more on that below).
The Technology Behind the Magic
So how does Snapheal pull off such quick and convincing object removals? Under the hood, it‘s using a multi-stage image recognition and editing pipeline powered by sophisticated algorithms and machine learning.
When you select an object for removal, Snapheal first analyzes the edges and content of the selection to separate the unwanted pixels from the background. It breaks the selection down into distinct regions.
Next it searches the rest of the image for areas with similar color and texture to the background surrounding the removed object. By analyzing gradients and patterns, it‘s able to determine which nearby pixels will provide the most seamless fill.
Finally, Snapheal uses advanced interpolation and blending techniques to realistically merge the fill pixels into the removal area. Proprietary frequency separation methods allow it to maintain sharpness and edge detail on the fill while still smoothing away traces of the removed object.
The algorithms prioritize continuous structures like fences, railings, and horizon lines, intelligently extending these features across the removed area. This helps prevent obvious interruptions that would call attention to the edit.
It‘s an incredibly complex process, but the result is a removal that often looks like it was done by hand with care – only orders of magnitude faster. What takes Snapheal a few seconds could easily eat up an hour or more of precise Photoshop masking and cloning.
How Well Does It Actually Work?
Of course, all the fancy algorithms in the world don‘t matter if the end results are lackluster. Fortunately, I can report that Snapheal does an excellent job on the vast majority of object removals.
I tested the app on a wide variety of photos, including landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, and wedding shots. I removed everything from people to power lines to skin blemishes. In almost every case, Snapheal was able to cleanly erase the unwanted object in one pass, leaving behind a natural-looking edit.
To give you an idea of the time savings, here are a few real numbers from my testing:
| Removal Task | Snapheal Time | Manual Photoshop Time |
|---|---|---|
| Erase a person from a landscape | 12 seconds | 6 minutes |
| Remove a skin blemish | 4 seconds | 45 seconds |
| Delete a street sign from a building photo | 8 seconds | 3.5 minutes |
As you can see, the difference is substantial. And keep in mind this is coming from someone who knows their way around Photoshop. The disparity would likely be even greater for a novice user.
Snapheal isn‘t perfect, of course. It still struggles with some tricky removals, like a subject photographed against a chain link fence with complex foliage behind it. In those cases you‘ll likely need to spend a bit more time on manual touchups.
But for most common object removal tasks, Snapheal is up to the challenge. It works so well that I now default to using it first before firing up Photoshop. The results are often indistinguishable.
Extras: Retouch Tools, Adjustments, and Filters
Beyond its core object removal function, Snapheal also includes a variety of tools for retouching, adjusting, and enhancing your photos.
The Retouch tab contains brushes tailored for portrait edits, like a Healing brush for blemish removal, an Airbrush for smoothing skin, Dodge and Burn brushes for sculpting face shape, and tools for whitening teeth and brightening eyes.
The Adjust tab has sliders for global adjustments to color and tone. You can tweak White Balance, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, and HSL. There‘s also an Auto Tone option that will attempt to correct brightness and contrast with one click.
Lastly, the Filters tab houses a curated set of 40 creative looks and effects that can be applied with a single click. These cover the usual favorites like B&W, Sepia, Vintage fade, and Instant film emulation.
These extra tools are a nice value-add and can help take your photos up a notch, especially if you‘re new to editing. That said, the implementation is fairly basic compared to dedicated retouching and image adjustment apps like Luminar.
There are no layers, no history panel, and no ability to selectively mask or erase the adjustments. It‘s an all or nothing proposition. The filter intensity slider helps, but you‘ll still be affecting the entire image at once.
Experienced editors will likely want to do this type of work in Photoshop, Lightroom, or a more full-featured editor. But for quick tweaks and edits entirely within Snapheal, the tools get the job done.
Comparing Snapheal to Photoshop
Photoshop has been the industry standard for photo editing and object removal for decades. So how does Snapheal stack up in comparison?
When it comes to core object removal, Snapheal is able to produce results on par with Photoshop‘s Content Aware Fill in most cases. The underlying tech is very similar. In my testing, both apps were able to handle the majority of removals quite well when fed a good selection.
Snapheal‘s big advantage is its streamlined, visual workflow. With the brush-based selection and real-time removal preview, it‘s just a lot faster and more intuitive to make a removal compared to Photoshop‘s more cumbersome process.
Where Photoshop still has an edge is in fine-tuning after the initial removal. Its deeper healing, cloning, and patching tools provide more options for cleaning up problem areas if the automatic removal is a little off. You can create more precise selections, work with multiple layers, and leverage masks.
But unless you‘re doing very high-end retouching work, Snapheal‘s capabilities will be more than sufficient for most users‘ needs. The ability to send a Snapheal-edited PSD to Photoshop when necessary covers any gaps.
Price is the other big differentiator. Photoshop requires a monthly subscription, making it very expensive to use only occasionally. At its current pricing as part of the Skylum Creative Kit ($149 MSRP, $89 street), Snapheal is a lot easier on the wallet for occasional object removal work.
Other Alternatives
Photoshop isn‘t the only other option out there for removing objects from photos. Two lower-cost standalone apps worth considering are Inpaint and TouchRetouch.
Inpaint ($19) works on both Mac and Windows and operates in a very similar way to Snapheal. You mark areas for removal and the app automatically fills them in. The selection tools aren‘t quite as slick but the removal algorithms do a decent job.
TouchRetouch ($2 on iOS/Android, $5 on Mac) is unique in that it runs on both mobile and desktop. The mobile version uses an Apple Pencil or finger-friendly interface for quick object removals on the go. Very useful for cleaning up smartphone snaps before sharing.
Honestly though, neither of these apps produces results on quite the same level as Snapheal in my experience. Their removals tend to have more noticeable artifacts and struggle with complex scenes. But they‘re worth a look if you‘re on a tight budget or just need a mobile solution.
One other option to consider: outsourcing your object removal. Services like Removal.AI and Fotofuze now offer AI-powered object removal, charged per image. If you only need to do this type of editing sparingly, paying a dollar or so per photo might make more sense than buying an app.
Final Thoughts
After putting Snapheal through its paces, I can confidently say it delivers on its promise of fast, easy, and effective object removal for photographers of all skill levels. Whether you shoot with a DSLR or an iPhone, it can help salvage that almost perfect photo marred by an unwanted intruder.
The app‘s highly visual, brush-based selection process makes removals incredibly quick and intuitive. With a little practice, you‘ll be able to blast through common editing tasks in a fraction of the time it would take in Photoshop, all while producing comparable quality results.
This will be a revelation for many photographers. Imagine being able to deliver otherwise perfect wedding and event photos unblemished by stray strangers and exit signs. Or being able to quickly perfect your Instagram posts by erasing skin blemishes and distracting background elements.
At $149 for the Creative Kit bundle, Snapheal isn‘t an impulse buy. But it‘s still quite affordable compared to a Photoshop subscription if you‘ll use it regularly. And with the frequent discounts offered by Skylum (I got mine for $89), it becomes an even more attractive value.
The bottom line: if you shoot a high volume of photos that could use some cleaning up, Snapheal will quickly pay for itself in time savings and increased output. It‘s a powerful but easy to use tool that deserves a spot in any photographer‘s editing toolkit.
Please note that Skylum did provide me with a review copy of Snapheal at no cost for the purposes of this evaluation. But the opinions expressed here are 100% my own after putting the app through its paces. I‘ve dedicated my career to helping fellow photographers find the best tools for the job and would never recommend something I didn‘t believe in.
