Our Verdict
The prowess of retouching photos has come a tenacious direction since the Soviet used rock oil rationalise - and - paste techniques to withdraw undesirable people from contraband and white shot in the Fifties . These days , even the most canonical photo redaction software is open of perform sophisticated alteration on all kinds of images .
Snapheal 1.2(Mac App Store liaison ) is one such shaft , but with a kink : it ’s designed to leave users to selectively neuter voice of an image by tweaking its technical parameters , adjusting photograph mise en scene , and remove unwanted features .
permit ’s part with the latter , which is a modern equivalent weight of the old Soviet edit jobs . Once you load an image in Snapheal , the app open you three different tool for take a specific surface area , which can then be excised using several algorithms that replace it with content cloned from elsewhere in the photo . As you may conceive of , this tends to work well when you seek to remove subject against a uniform or abstractionist background like the sky or a flaxen beach . The app do particularly well when it hail to hit overhead wires against the sky — a quick and easy agency to greatly enhance the smell of many photos .
The other tools offer by Snapheal are similar to those you could receive in most photo - manipulation programs , such as iPhoto . However , because the app allows you to apply them selectively to specific areas of the app , you have absolute mastery over the final look of virtually every pixel , and make it potential to create “ hyperreal ” delineation in which individual elements are fine-tune using dissimilar configurations .
Snapheal comes in two versions : a $ 15 Basic variation that is available on the Mac App Store , and a $ 40 Pro version that can only be buy through the developer ’s website . The latter offers more advanced and precise image handling algorithms , but both are splendid tools for photographers of all acquirement levels .
This review is part of Macworld’sGemFest 2014 . Every weekday from July until September , the Macworld faculty will use the Mac Gems web log to in brief cover a standout free , humbled - cost , or great - value program . you could view a list of this yr ’s apps , update daily , on our handy GemFest chart , and you could visit the Mac Gems homepage for past Mac Gems reviews .
