If you have photographs that contain people, objects, text or flaws that you wish were not there, they can be removed with an online tool accessed in a web browser: Cleanup.pictures.
No matter how good a camera is, taking good photos is more down to the person holding it. It is all about the photographer rather than the hardware. You may have a great camera or phone, but it cannot compose scenes for you and sometimes we take bad photos with people in the background, objects like poles growing out of people’s heads and so on.
With a photo object removal tool you can erase objects in the image that are spoiling it. Maybe you want to get rid of members of the public, an ex partner, an ugly sign, a flaw in an old photo, and so on. All can be removed with the right tool.
Objects and flaws in photos can be removed manually with editing software like Photoshop, GIMP and others. However, it takes time and effort, and quite a lot of knowledge and skill. Not everyone is an expert at Photoshop and so a tool that does everything for you is much easier.
Cleanup.pictures is not just the name of the online tool, it is the URL too. It is weird, but just type cleanup.pictures into the browser’s address box and the website appears.
It is not the only tool of its type and there are many alternatives, like Inpaint and PicWish, but I found the results with Cleanup.pictures to be slightly better. Well, at least for the photos I tried.
It can be used for free with unlimited photos, but it limits the size of them when they are downloaded afterwards. To edit full size high resolution photos requires a subscription. It is cheap, but I tried it in free mode. Here’s how it went.
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Cleanup.pictures online object remover
Go to cleanup.pictures (yes, that is the URL) in a web browser. As this is a browser-based tool, it can be used on a Windows PC, Apple Mac, Linux or Chromebook. At the top of the page is an area where you can drop photos. Drag one from the computer’s disk and drop it on the target area.
Free vs paid options for Cleanup.pictures
Click Continue with SD to use Cleanup.pictures free. The number of photos is unlimited, but they are resized to 720 pixels. The Pro version, which enables high resolution photos to be edited, costs $3 a month. That is cheap for unlimited photos and and a high quality refiner feature, but I will continue with SD.
Erase objects from a photo
All tools of this type work in a very similar way. Set the brush size with the slider below the photo and then paint over the area you want to erase. Click and drag to paint. The area is erased when you release the mouse button. You don’t have to select the whole object in one go and you can erase a bit, then erase some more.
I painted over the person and as soon as I stopped painting, Cleanup.pictures got to work and a few seconds later the person was gone. As you can see in the screenshot above, I also need to erase the person’s shadow on the ground and on the railings.
After adjusting the brush size, the shadow was painted over on the ground and on the railings.
The finished image looks good. I tried this in other object removal tools and some messed up the railings. Cleanup.pictures correctly continued the railings very well indeed. In fact, it is hard to tell there ever was a person in this photo. I am only using the low resolution version of the tool here, so maybe artefacts are noticeable at high resolution. The results are good in the images I tried.
Final thoughts
Cleanup.pictures was impressive and it did a great job with the half dozen or so photos that I tried it with. If you have quite a few photos that you want to remove objects from, it is cheap to subscribe. I removed a person, but you can remove anything and it could be very useful if you have old photos that have been damaged over time, like creases, tears and so on.
The only thing I didn’t like was that you only get a three-day free trial and you have to provide a credit card. I would rather have a proper free trial, maybe a couple of free images and no credit card. I recommend you at least try the free version. You won’t be disappointed.
