Snapheal Is A Simple Mac Photo Editor

Mac: You’re probably well aware that you can use Photoshop to perform touch ups and remove objects, but that comes with the obvious disadvantage of a hefty price tag. Snapheal is a new Mac app that’s designed to handle just about every kind of photo touch up you could want, but for far less money.

What’s Good

The video above demonstrates one of Snapheal’s coolest capabilities — dramatically altering the contents of a photograph to remove undesired elements. It’s about as easy as it looks, in that you simply paint over the part of the photo you want to remove and press a button to remove it. What the video doesn’t demonstrate too accurately is that the erasing process happens pretty slowly (or at least it seems that way from my experience). The developers seem to have realised this because the app shares fun facts with you while it does the work in an effort to keep you from getting bored. Although it can take awhile to perform the touch ups, Snapheal did a very nice job.

I tested it on a picture of a cake and it erased all the crumbs without issue. I also tried erasing Albert Einstein’s eyes from his face and it did a great job, too. (And yes, I realise this was a creepy choice but I wanted to give it something complicated to do and had that photo handy.) Snapheal also offers other image editing tools like painting on contrast and colour changes, along with manual touch up options as well. It’s comprehensive enough to handle pretty much any photo editing task.

What’s Not So Good

The main downside to Snapheal is that it’s a little bit buggy. The first time I tried to erase some crumbs from the cake it just turned half of the photo black. Another time it failed entirely and I had to restart the application. It seemed to have more of these issues with higher-resolution photos, which is problematic because that’s likely what you’re going to be touching up. That said, Snapheal is a very new application and it’s bound to have a few bugs. When it works, it seems more adept at healing blemishes, removing options, and general touchups than even Photoshop. While it’s strange that there isn’t an available demo to test it out. Nonetheless, it’s definitely worth the $US15 (or $US10 if you get it during the promo period) if its functionality is useful to you — especially once the app becomes a little more stabile.

Snapheal ($15 regularly, but $10 until via December 21st via this MacUpdate promo) [MacPhun]