snapheal
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Snapheal for OS X improves content-aware heal for the Photoshop-phobic
Snapheal is a cool, inexpensive (US$7.99) photo editor for the Mac with one very high-end feature. It mimics the Photoshop content-aware fill feature that was introduced in Photoshop CS5. This little digital trick allows you to remove unwanted objects or people from an image. Using a series of algorithms to determine what should be filled in where the object you removed was, it smartly and quickly repairs the photo with intelligent guesses about what to fill in. We reviewed version one of this app about a year ago. This version is faster and offers Lightroom and iCloud support. Plus, it works smoothly with Mountain Lion. The GUI has been streamlined and the eraser tools now work with higher precision. %Gallery-168790% In my testing, the app was intuitive and speedy. I think it is best at removing objects from photos, but it does have a variety of other image editing tools like crop, saturation, sharpening and the usual array of editing features. The app has a very nice split-screen mode so you can see the original photo and the edited version. If the content-aware features of the newest Photoshop are something you want, but you don't want to pay the high Adobe tariff, Snapheal will give you that feature at a low price. It has generally received good reviews at the Mac App Store, although a few have complained that Snapheal frequently crashes. I did not see that happen in a couple hours of use on my Mac Pro. There are a few things to watch out for. If your target object is too large, Snapheal might not have enough surrounding textures to make good guesses. Sometimes you'll have to do the removal in stages. Still, the app does work as advertised, and I think most people will find it meets their needs. The price has also been lowered from the initial $19.95, making it even more desirable. Snapheal requires OS X 10.6 or later. I have some step-by-step examples in the gallery.
Daily Mac App: Snapheal
A lot of digital photographers and iPhoneographers would love to have the ability to touch up their photos, but find some of the apps a bit hard to master. Now MacPhun LLC, developers of the FX Photo Studio, FX Photo Studio Pro, and Color Splash Studio apps (among others), has come up with an easy to learn app for "healing" those sick pictures. Snapheal (introductory price of US$9.99, normally $19.99), just arrived in the Mac App Store this morning, but TUAW had an early look at this app and it's earned a place as the Daily Mac App. Snapheal opens to a screen showing a location where you can drop a photo. You can also import an image from your iPhoto library for retouching. Once you've brought the image into Snapheal, there are tools that you can use to erase items (like clouds in an otherwise blue sky), clone and stamp shapes, retouch (change the contrast, saturation, sharpness, or brightness of areas), make other adjustments of color and contrast, crop, and rotate or flip images. %Gallery-141775% Similar tools in other apps can be tricky to master, but MacPhun provides a video tutorial for every trick in Snapheal. These are short videos that demonstrate how each tool is used. Just about every tool can be applied with two clicks, and if you happen to make a mistake there's an undo button just above the image. You'll also find a compare button that let you look at your original and retouched photos side by side to view your progress. There's a fun touch that I absolutely loved. While the app is in the process of making a major change to an image (for example, erasing some clouds), a progress screen appears that shows some "amazing fact." I'm a fan of trivia, so I found myself undoing some of my work and then reapplying changes just to see another fact. Compared to other retouching tools available for the Mac such as Adobe Photoshop Elements ($79.99), Snapheal may not be as fully functional, but it's also easier to use and less costly than many of those apps. For a full set of tools that rivals Photoshop Elements, you might want to combine FX Photo Studio ($9.99) or FX Photo Studio Pro ($39.99) with Snapheal. I found that Snapheal did a wonderful job of letting me edit my photos without a lot of work. Once you're done turning a so-so photo into a masterpiece, you can share it with Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Twitter or email. If you're in the market for a photo editing app of this type, I'd suggest that you snap up Snapheal while it's still at the introductory pricing.
