How Apple and Google Make Photobombs a Thing of the Past

Speaker 1: Welcome. Have you ever had a perfectly good photo ruined by something in the background? Yeah. Maybe you had a messy room or maybe someone photo bombed you, or maybe there's something unintentionally distracting in the background that you didn't notice when you took the photo? Well, the good news is both apple and Google. Now have tools to deal with those distractions on your iPhone and pixel phone. Accordingly, what's interesting is that apple and Google take nearly opposite approaches to help you remove these photographic distractions. And I find that [00:00:30] fascinating know this isn't an Android versus iPhone debate, but rather a look at groundbreaking AI and machine learning technologies from two of the largest companies in the world that allow you to alter photos on your phone. Let's break it down. Speaker 1: Let's start with the iPhone. And in Iowa, 16, visual lookup gets an upgrade and now lets you separate the foreground for the background [00:01:00] of photos. For example, I have a picture of my cat here and I can tap and hold on her with one finger and drag her cut out. I can then drag her, cut out into another app like messages and share it. I can also drag into an app and make a photo collage. And there's all kinds of things you can do with the cutout. I tried this on pets and friends and Lego figures and objects. This tap and drag tool is the result of an advanced machine learning model, which is accelerated by core machine [00:01:30] learning in Apple's neural engine to perform 40 billion operations in a second. Yeah, all that to cut my cat out of a photo. What I like about this feature is that it's not altering the actual photo instead. You're basically cropping the photo. So it doesn't show what's behind your subject. It's the equivalency of using a pair of scissors to cut someone out of a printed photo. Speaker 1: Google on the other hand takes a different approach when it launched the pixel six [00:02:00] and six pro last year, they debuted with a new tool called magic eraser, which is also on the pixel six a that just came out the magic eraser lets you erase parts of a photo that you want to remove. Then with a bunch of clever processing, your phone fills in what it thinks is behind what you erased. So in this photo of an outdoor cafe, I can erase a person in the background. Notice that my phone fills in the rest of the blue door that was behind the person I removed. [00:02:30] I can also remove multiple people from the background of this photo. You can get to this tool in one of two ways in Google's photo app, you'll see a suggestion about removing a person or things in the background. Speaker 1: Or when you go to edit a photo, tap on tools to reveal the feature magic Razr can find and suggest parts of a photo to a race like the silhouettes of people in the background of that cafe photo. You can also use your finger to paint out a [00:03:00] part of the photo you want gone like this piece of bacon in this breakfast taco overall magic eraser works well, but it's far from perfect. Essentially Google took something. You need an app like Photoshop for and skills to perform and made it approachable and easy to do. Unlike apple, you actually are altering your photos, which can come in handy when there's something in the background that you want people to focus on. Like a landmark. For example, though, these photographic [00:03:30] tools do bring up some ethical questions about altering a photo, especially the magic eraser, since it worked so well to fill in what was there. Speaker 1: But it's also helpful to remember that our photos thanks to computational photography are made up of parts from multiple images. Our phone cameras capture in an instant to improve the dynamic range or lighting or your skin. So even if you aren't using the magic eraser tool on your photo, the definition of an unaltered photo is already [00:04:00] muddy thanks to modern technology. But at this point it's amazing that such tools exist. They will no doubt inspire people to be more creative and create memes, but also solve practical everyday problems of removing photo bombs from the background of our photos, which of these tools do you prefer? Apple's tap and hold cut out tool or Google's magic eraser. And are there ethical concerns about using such photo tools or should I just relax and [00:04:30] enjoy cutting my cat out with nothing more than a tap and hold, let me know in the comments also we're doing these videos every week covering apple stuff. So let us know what topics you'd like to see us cover. Lastly, do all the YouTube things like subscribe, hit the bell and thank you for watching.