Note: This review addresses v1.10 of the software.
Have you ever taken what you thought was the perfect photograph, only to find that something partially obstructed your subject? Now you can "erase" objects or obstructions from digital photos merely by "painting" over the object, and letting the program recreate the lost detail
PhotoWipe is essentially a front-end to a complex set of formulas that perform what's known as image regularization. One of the fringe benefits is that a program like PhotoWipe can use some of these formulae to make an educated guess as to the color of pixels next to areas you specify in a photo. You just use a tool like one of Photoshop's brush tools to color in the portion of the image you want to remove from view, and the program's algorithms do the rest.
While a tool like this can't restore lost detail, it can hide annoying foreground objects that may be partly blocking the view of the subject of your photo. PhotoWipe also doesn't do a perfect job--a hint of the object's silhouette seems to always remain--but it does a remarkably good job of reducing the annoyance of that thumb that somehow ended up in the corner of all your vacation snaps.
Note: This program is donationware. It is free to try, but the author accepts and encourages donations towards further development.
--Andrew Brandt
Reviewed by: hirsch
Reviewed by: ChristineStein
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