Erasing Image Backgrounds Has Never Been Easier Than With This App
I am not skilled at photo editing, despite doing a lot of photo editing. Each week I make a little collage of things for Wear, Watch, Want, but I just use fashion collage websites to do all the work for me. SIdenote: when Polyvore went extinct, I was honestly worried. I did not have the skills or time to do that kind of editing work manually. I tried all the alternatives and settled on ShopLook, which I’ve used ever since. These online collage makers magically crop backgrounds out of photos and make the whole process SO simple. But, even though I pay for ShopLook Premium, sometimes I just can’t get what I need. That’s when I use the Magic Eraser App.
I cannot believe Mr. Clean hasn’t come after Magic Eraser for copyright infringement, so if you’re reading this far in the future, there’s a good chance it’s not called Magic Eraser anymore. But it is the best free tool I have found to remove parts of an image while still having a transparent background, perfect for collage making. The most difficult thing about this miracle app is navigating through all the sneaky ads that will make you think you have to pay for it (you don’t). For example when you open the app, you will see the screen on the left. Seems like you have to pay, right? No, just click the X in the upper left corner. THEN you will get the page on the right with a fullscreen ad. Again, click the X (this time in the upper right corner).
Now you will finally get to the main screen, where you can choose a photo from your camera roll that you want to edit.
This screen makes it seem like you HAVE to start a free trial to use the app. You don’t. Just click the photo button and choose a photo from your camera roll and get to erasing. I’m going to use an example from a somewhat recent post, Wear, Watch, Want #250. The final image looked like this:
That Kirkland sweatshirt didn’t originally look like that, but I have a personal policy to not post photos of models with their heads and/or legs cut off, so I needed to crop out the model’s face, hands, and legs. You can do this via ShopLook, but it is virtually impossible to draw a cropping line and have it look even slightly decent. Instead, I save the photo and move it into Magic Eraser.
If you don’t have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, this will be more difficult, but I suppose you could manage. Magic Eraser has a tool that erase based on a color (ie click the sky and most of the sky will be erased, but where it blends into the ground or a tree will remain), but you can also use an adjustable manual eraser to get up close and make custom changes. And you can zoom in A LOT, which I find really helps make the cropped image look good. Look at the left image below, you can see some pixels still where the hand meets the sweatshirt cuff. But zoom out to the below right image and it looks pretty darn good.
Once you’ve erased everything you want erased, just export back to your camera roll (you can choose to keep the transparent background or not), then do whatever you want with it. With ShopLook Premium I can upload photos from my desktop, so I can easily get my edited sweatshirt into ShopLook, create my Wear, Watch, Want collage, and that’s it! No knowledge of Photoshop (or the $$ license for Photoshop) needed.
I mainly use Magic Eraser for this site, but I also use it in my everyday life too. My second most common project is to use Magic Eraser to create custom stickers for GoodNotes. I have the coolest stickers for my digital journal now, all thanks to Magic Eraser. Here’s some of them (one is selected to show that all the backgrounds are transparent.
Important note, though, you can totally use art for your personal use, but you can’t distribute someone else’s art. I have all kinds of copyrighted stickers in my journals, but I’m not sharing them or selling them. Magic Eraser is a powerful tool that should only be used for good!
I also used Magic Eraser to see if the coat rack I was interested in buying would look good hung on my wall. I copied the image from the CB2 website, Magic Erased the background, and layered it on a photo of my wall (I measured and taped first so I could get the scale right). Based on this little mockup I bought that coat rack and it looks perfect (and just like the Frankensteined image below).
I don’t know if the amazing powers of Magic Eraser are something you need, but if you are not adept at photo manipulation, but like messing with photos nonetheless, I cannot recommend anything easier or cheaper (FREE) than the Magic Eraser App.
