The other day, I told you about an update to a fantastic app I discovered not long ago called Touch ReTouch.  Putting the cart before the horse, I posted their press release of the update before I had a chance to review the app, which may have left a few of you scratching your heads looking for more info here on JAMM.  So, now that you have the cart, how about that horse?

Touch ReTouch is an app that every casual, professional, and even semi-professional photographer is going to love.  You all can relate to this situation.  You are snapping a picture of your friends, family, funny looking rock structure, whatever.  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a stranger appears in the shot.  It is too late.  You have already committed to the picture, and you know you will never recreate this scene.  So, you snap away…silently fuming at the intrusion.  In the olden days, that would have been the end of it.  Generations of viewers would have been stuck with the nagging question of who that guy was in the picture with Grandma and Grandpa.  More recently, you could fix this problem with apps like Adobe Photoshop, which means waiting until you get home and downloading the shot to your computer.  But what if you are on the go?  What if all you have available is your iPad (or even worse, you iPhone).  That is where Touch ReTouch comes in, removing unwanted elements from your favorite pictures, even when you are in the middle of nowhere.

When you start, you will be faced with a blank screen, which you can see above.  Go ahead and tap the open file button in order to load your photo. 

I am going to be working from a photo I took during last February’s blizzard (my those chilly days sound nice right now as the mercury nears 100 degrees on a regular basis).

The app itself is incredibly easy to use.  All you need to do is mark the elements you wish to remove, and then remove them.  You have two tools at your disposal for marking elements for removal.  First is the lasso.  The lasso allows you to draw around the object you want to remove (the closer you get to the outline of the actual object the better the removal will work.) 

You also have the brush, which lets you directly mark over the objects you wish to remove.  Use the slider to control the size of your brush.  Regardless of which tool you use, the items to be deleted will be highlighted in red.  Here is a tip, don’t worry about marking too wide an area, you can always use the eraser tool to clean it up later.

Once you have highlighted all of the elements to be removed, just hit Go to remove them.  As you can see, I marked the mailbox and two cars for removal.  This is the picture after running Touch ReTouch.  It looks pretty good. 

Now, I will say that I had some problems running this app on more complicated photos.  It will work best when the item to be removed is against a plain or solid background.  That is because it works by sampling what the environment around the object to be removed and “guessing” about what should be used to replace the picture.  Of course, that “guessing is a pretty powerful algorithm.  Still, that algorithm is a little too easily confused, so the more you have going on around the item to be removed, the more likely it will be that you will end up with garbage in your photo.  What do I mean by that?  Let’s take a look at another example.

Here is a photo of me and my kids at a recent baseball game.  Now, let’s say I want to remove that funnel cake and replace it with a normal baseball snack… like cucumbers.  You can see how removing the funnel cake (below) did not cleanly replace it with the background.  You got a little bit of my shirt, a little of my arm, and a little who knows what.  The end result is a bit of a mess. Though I had no such problems removing the rust stain, lemonade cup, or purse from the floor beneath us. Obviously, the busier or more complex the background, the more of these imperfections you will find in the results.

In the end, I thought Touch reTouch was a fantastic tool for any digital photographer on the move.  Getting these kinds of unwanted elements in a picture is becoming much more common as we progress through a world in which a memory card can hold thousands of photos without blinking (remember when a roll could hold 36 photos and no more).   Nonetheless, I was disappointed to find that this app was pretty much flummoxed by anything more complex than a solid background.  Even the minimal complexity of my arm and shirt threw the app off its game.  For now, we will call this one a work in progress.  It is a great idea, and a well needed tool which can work well under the right circumstances, but the developers really need to continue to develop and perfect the algorithm underlying this app.

Touch ReTouch is available from the iTunes App store for $0.99.