Cleanup.pictures Alternative for Removing People

Both remove things from photographs in a browser. They differ on how you say what should go, and on what you are allowed to do with the file afterwards.

1,280 pixels on the long edge is smaller than the screen you are reading this on. It is fine for a story or a thumbnail, and it falls apart the moment you print it, crop into it, or open it on a laptop — which is usually what you wanted to do with the photograph you just spent time fixing.

Nothing here is capped at a preview size: the pack downloads at HD, Plus at 2K and Studio at 4K, none of them watermarked. Cropping, straightening and re-downloading that result costs nothing further, so the file you end up with is the file you actually wanted.

A brush is the right instrument for something small in simple surroundings. It is precise, it is fast, and you control exactly which pixels change.

A person breaks it in two ways at once. The region is large, so there is little valid texture nearby to sample; and a person hides structure that must be reconstructed rather than copied — a railing continuing behind them, a doorway, the line where a wall meets a floor. Fill that from neighbouring pixels and you get the characteristic softness that no amount of re-brushing removes.

Then it compounds. Six people on a terrace is six passes, each one working against a background the previous pass already altered.

Your family in front, six strangers scattered behind, two of them overlapping carved stonework and one half-hidden by the basin.

Brushed, that is six operations, and the two on the stonework are the difficult ones — the fill must continue a carved edge it cannot see and will blur it instead. By the third pass you are sampling from areas the first two invented.

Described — "the people in the background, keep the family in front" — it is one instruction, one credit, and the fountain comes back as a fountain rather than an average of what was beside it. Drag the slider on the pair above and judge it for yourself; every photograph on this site is a real, unretouched output.

Three photographs, no subscription, no account until you pay, HD output, no watermark, and unlimited cropping and re-downloading of results you have already paid for.

The pictures people bring here are mostly ones that cannot be retaken. Against a wedding, a graduation or a trip you will not repeat, three pounds and change to have the photograph back is not really a pricing decision. If you fix photographs often, Starter is $9 a month for twenty edits.

A logo, a date stamp, a power line, a mark on a wall — something small with simple surroundings. Brushing it is quicker than describing it and nothing else in the frame is touched. A whole-frame regeneration is the wrong size of hammer for a blemish.

The moment the subject is a person, or there are several of them, or something with edges was standing behind them, the arithmetic reverses.