A Paint-esque app does exist on your Mac — and here’s how to find it By Justin Pot October 1, 2020 Since the dawn of time (aka 1985), Windows has always shipped with a basic image-editing.
Go on a vacation of a lifetime and take amazing photos only to find out that someone photobombed them? Do you wish that you could clean up those precious older photos from a lifetime ago? Remove the photobomber and fix all of those scratch marks in older pictures with Inpaint for Mac.
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- Inpaint will magically fill the selected area with intelligently-generated textures pulled from the surrounding image data. Inpaint for Mac. Free to try Maxim Gapchenko Mac Version 8.1 Full.
Overview
Inpaint for Mac by Teorex has an easy to use method to remove unwanted elements in photos with just a few clicks. Tap the folder button once and select the photo that needs the edit. Once the photos appear, a range of masking tools are displayed to the left of the photo.
Inpaint Overview Video
Masking the offending pixels with the marker starts with selecting the size of the diameter of the circle. Hovering the mouse over the photo shows how big the marker tip is as a red dot. The smaller the object to remove, the smaller the marker tip should be.
Zooming tools on the top button bar help to zero in on where the masking area should go. Inpaint allows for one marker tip size to mask an area and then adjust it larger or smaller for another area before erasing an object. This allows for faster editing and to see if the edit worked properly.
Once the object is masked in red, the software automatically selects an area immediately around it in green. The donor pixels are what the Mac photo software will interpret to replace the masked area.
Removing people with Inpaint
Anyone who has had experience with masking in other photo editing tools will understand how the process works. For beginners though, a link under the mask and donor options goes to a web photo tutorial with step-by-step instructions and in some cases, videos.The final step to making your photo better is to select the erase play button. After a few moments of processing, the final image appears. If the resulting picture doesn’t look exactly right, just undo it.
Inpaint contains multiple levels of undo and redo for just about every task. The perfect scenario for undo is when an erase operation goes awry. Tap the undo and both the red mask and donor areas reappear. Deselect or mask additional pixels to get the desired result.
The app does the best job with simple gradients, large objects in the foreground with a continuous surrounding area of color, older scratched black and white pictures and date stamped photos. Using a track pad worked well enough but to get even better results, the use of a mouse or digital pen is recommended.
Verdict
Inpaint worked like magic on nearly all of my simple object removals from a variety of dark and bright photos. It worked fairly well when removing multiple objects with space in between. Where the software had a few hiccups was when I tried to remove a wine glass on a glass table. There were too many shiny surfaces to remove it 100%, but it still looked good.
Something not mentioned above is that Inpaint comes from the same company that makes Photostitcher also reviewed here on MacTrast. Photostitcher does a great job of creating panoramic photos on the Mac.
In case you do not have Photostitcher to create nice panoramic photos, Inpaint is capable of fixing panoramics created by other software, by filling in dark areas. Otherwise, panoramic photos usually end up narrow because of how much is cropped to make it look complete.
Getting the job done quickly is what Inpaint is all about. Try it today as a demo to see how well it can work for you. If you like the result, purchase the app to save those precious photos that are worth a thousand words.
Rating: 4.5/5
Price: Currently $19.99 from the Mac App Store or a demo version from their website. While the demo version of Inpaint does not allow saving of the final image, it does allow you to go through each process.
Pros:
Teorex Inpaint For Mac
- Easy to use with default marker tool.
- Works with color, black and white and panoramic photos.
- Simple selection tools.
- Great free tutorials with step-by-step directions, photos and videos.
Cons:
- Complex backgrounds and gradients don’t erase well with the marker tool.
Inpaint For Mac
*Note: The above review was commissioned by the developer in accordance with our app review policy, and has been written in an objective, unbiased fashion.