Next week, the first round of Apple Intelligence will be loosed on the general public, including the Clean Up feature in Photos that lets you alter images to remove unwanted elements. This is not a new feature in photographyâin fact, Photos is probably the last photo utility in the world to get a feature like this.
But that wonât stop some very loud, reactionary voices complaining about Clean Up as if it were the end of the world. And of course, as with any high-profile Apple announcement, there have been media reports that purposefully try to take features like Clean Up to extremes far beyond what anyone would reasonably do. The approach that leads to headlines like âI only ate peanut butter for a week!â
Last year, people were starting to get very existential about image editing because of the first version of Googleâs Magic Editor, and everyone suddenly became concerned that Appleâs image pipeline was getting too over-engineered. People should really have not gotten so hung up on what even is a photograph, maaaaaan.
I first wrote about this last October, but this time, I feel like I need to be less philosophical about it and a lot more direct.
If it pleases the court
The photographs you take are not courtroom evidence. Theyâre not historical documents. Well, they could be, but mostly theyâre images to remember a moment or share that moment with other people. If someone rear-ended your car and youâre taking photos for the insurance company, then that is not the time to use Clean Up to get rid of people in the background, of course. Use common sense.
Clean Up is a fairly conservative photo editing tool in comparison to what other companies offer. Sometimes, people like to apply a uniform narrative that Silicon Valley companies are all destroying reality equally in the quest for AI dominance, but that just doesnât suit this tool that lets you remove some distractions from your image.
Clearly, companies like Meta which posted on Threads that people could use AI to fabricate their images of the northern lights so they wouldnât feel left out, are up to entirely different shenanigans. Sure, that mushed-together image isnât courtroom evidence either, but morally and artistically, what is even the point of a fake image of the northern lights posted to social media?
This is where everyone with a computer engineering degree starts saying, âBut, but, butâ¦â Because they are uncomfortable with any kind of ambiguity. How can removing a distraction from the background be ethical when hallucinating an image of the northern lights is not? Arenât they all lies? Through the transitive property, doesnât that make them both evil?
Yes and no. (Indistinct grumbling.) Ethically, what is the subject of your photo? Who is the audience for the photo? What do you want to communicate to the audience about the photo?
If the subject of the photo is my boyfriend, the audience is the people on Instagram who follow my boyfriendâs private Instagram account, and the thing that he wants to communicate is that he was in front of a famous bridge in Luzerne, then there is no moral or ethical issue with me removing the crossbody bag strap that he had on for some of the photos I shot.
I took the photo, composed with him in the center, as is the way he likes these things composed, and then he remembered he had the bag on and didnât want the bright green strap. He did move and wanted different framing, though that I didnât feel was as good as the first shot. I told him I thought the other one I took with him and the strap looked the best for the narrow 9:16 Instagram Story framing, and he agreed, but he wanted the strap removed.
This was before the release of Clean Up, so I fired up Pixelmator on my iPhone, removed part of the bag with the retouching tool, and then copied and transformed the shoulder and part of the shirt collar from another image. Certainly not as easy as Clean Up, but things like his shoulder are genuine images from another slice in time instead of total reconstructions using only the image being edited as a source (I feel like this is a shortcoming of Clean Up and would like a 2.0 that can source from patterns in surrounding photos, but I digress.)
The point is that yes, the image is no longer courtroom evidence, but courtroom evidence of what? That he never wears bright green bag straps? Who would care about such a thing? Certainly not the audience of people who follow his private account on Instagram that just like to see a photo of him smiling in front of some bridge in Switzerland. Thatâs exactly what the photo was.
Morally, Iâm totally fine with all that. He was at the bridge. He did, at one point, not have that strap on his shoulder. I wasnât removing a tattoo. I didnât fabricate a different background for the photo.
âBut, but, but!â Yes, I know, itâs not 100% what happened all in that same sliver of time. âThe bag strap is part of the moment!â Yeah, but there were all those photos where heâs holding it below the frame, off his shoulder. No one is going to argue that I should have framed the shot to include him holding the bag for truth. Why would they?
For some reason, even the most literal of literal people is fine with composing a shot to not include things. To even (gasp!) crop things out of photos. You can absolutely change meaning and context just as much through framing and cropping as you can with a tool like Clean Up. No one is suggesting that the crop tool be removed or that we should only be allowed to take the widest wide-angle photographs possible to include all context at all times, like security camera footage.
Another example from that day in Luzerne was when we got lunch in a neat brewery by the river. He had a big copper still behind him, but he also had that dreaded green bag and my reflection in that still. I just cropped it. It was the simplest solution. However, he did have a water bottle that I removed with a retouching tool. Is that different from cropping out the bag? Again, is there some court case about water bottles or bag straps? No. No one would care. This is for the people who follow his Instagram Stories. Crop it, and use Clean Up; itâs ethically equivalent.
Artistic considerations
I will provide two counterpoints for when not to use Clean Up that has nothing to do with morality, just to show that there are other artistic considerations. If you have a photo that has a crowd of people in the distance at a landmark, then leave them alone. Those indistinct clumps of people provide scale for the landmark and a sense that youâre not traveling in some world devoid of humanity.
Not every person in the background of a photo is a candidate for removal. You donât want to be at a haunted beach or a waterfall that could be 2 feet or 200 feet tall. If one bozo has a highlighter-yellow fanny pack, then sure, remove, or selectively desaturate that in Pixelmator or Lightroom. (Gasp! More lies!)
The other time to not use Clean Up is when you have some overlapping areas of high detail behind, or in front, of what youâre trying to remove. Tools like Clean Up, just like all other retouching tools, work best when the thing youâre removing is fairly isolated and distinct, with a very indistinct area of fill behind them. If youâre trying to remove a guy standing in front of a tapestry, then itâs probably not going to go very well. If the foreground subject matter youâre keeping has long hair blowing in the wind, then the bozos behind that hair are not going to be removed cleanly. Wait until they at least walk to the screen left or right of the hair.
People can understand these limitations and use them to make creative choices while theyâre framing their shots. If thereâs a bozo thatâs standing in front of a wall, and theyâre just not going to move any time soon, then get a shot where heâs near the edges of your foreground subject (itâs a digital camera, so take a bunch of shots) and then you can have an easier time removing them. Also, things like Portrait Mode (more lies!) can help, especially since Portrait Mode has substantially improved its image segmentation and edge detection. That blurry bozo is even easier to fill in with blurry background than detailed background.
Above all else, remember that if itâs just a bad photo, then itâs just a bad photo. You can keep it for yourself instead of sharing it or trash it if you prefer. Even with every photo-editing tool under the sun, they canât all be winners.
Donât get it twisted
Like I said earlier, this is about common sense, and if, upon some introspection, the thing you find alarming is that you donât know how to ethically use this tool, then itâs totally fine if you donât use it.
However, I donât want to see silly, sweeping statements from people that foist their anxieties based on their ignorance onto other people. I donât want to see all image editing tools lumped together with one another, or worse, with every other thing that has âAIâ in the name. These tools are not all the same thing. These photos arenât all the same. Use your brain and not some puritanical binary rule to lump all edited photos together. Let people have photos that they like!
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist, writer, and co-host of the Defocused and Unhelpful Suggestions podcasts.]
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