We’ve barely had it for two weeks, and most of the Apple Intelligence features released so far on iOS 18 and MacOS Sequoia are focused on text — such as generating summaries for notifications — and email, helping to correct your writing and delivering smarter Siri responses. But one feature uses generative AI to work with images: the new Clean Up tool in the Photos app.
Clean Up analyzes an image, suggests items you’d likely want removed, such as people or vehicles in the background, and then fills in the deleted area. Sometimes the fix can be invisible to most viewers — and sometimes the results are laughably poor. After running many types of photos through the tool, I’ve come up with a few general guidelines to help you get the best cleaned-up images.
The Clean Up tool can remove distractions.
Surprisingly, Photos on the iPhone and iPad has never had a tool like Clean Up for removing small distractions. The Mac version does include a basic Retouch tool that can repair some areas, which is supplanted by Clean Up on compatible Macs.
It’s important to remember that Clean Up is a feature of Apple Intelligence, so you will see it only if you’re running a compatible device and you’ve been granted access to the Apple Intelligence beta. That includes iPhones running iOS 18.1, iPads with M-series processors (and the iPad mini with the A17 Pro chip) in iPadOS 18.1 and Macs with M-series processors in MacOS Sequoia 15.1.
For more on Apple Intelligence, see which features I think you’ll use the most and where its notifications need improvement.
How is Clean Up different from other retouching tools?
The repair tools in most photo editing apps work by copying nearby or similar pixels to fill in the space where you’re making a fix. They’re great for removing lens flares or dust spots against a sky, for example.
The Clean Up tool uses generative AI, which analyzes the entire scene and makes guesses about what should fill the area you’ve selected. If you want to remove a dog standing in front of a tree, for example, generative AI creates a replacement based on what it knows about tree texture and foliage in the background, and also takes into account the lighting level and direction in the photo.
The “generative” part of generative AI comes from the way it creates the image. The pixels that fill the area literally come from nothing: The software starts with a random pattern of dots and iterates quickly to create what it determines would appear in the same space.
Keep in mind, retouching tools that use generative AI are the ultimate YMMV, or “your mileage may vary.” I’ve gotten good results in difficult compositions and terrible results in areas I thought would be simple for the app to handle.
Open the Photos edit interface and tap Clean Up. Photos makes suggestions about what to remove.
3. To remove a suggested item, tap it. Or, draw a circle around any item that isn’t glowing.
4. Don’t be surprised if the area isn’t cleaned fully on the first attempt — you may need to draw over remaining areas to do more removal. If you’re not happy with a fix, tap the Undo button.
The Safety Filter is a clever use of the Clean Up tool.
Where you’ll see the most success with Clean Up
Some scenes and areas work better with Clean Up, so it’s good to know where to focus your efforts.
In my testing, I’ve found the most success in these general categories of fixes:
- Small distractions. Items such as litter on the ground or dust and threads on people’s clothing consistently turn out well.
- Background textures. Areas such as tree leaves, grass or stone can be replicated well.
- Lens flare. As long as it’s not too large, lens flare caused by light bouncing between camera lens elements
- Bystanders or vehicles in the background that don’t occupy much area.
- Areas with sparse detail or background.
Be sure to select shadows and reflections (left). Clean Up detects what should be removed based on the broad selection (middle). A little reflection is left over (right), but that can be cleaned with one more swipe of the tool.
Areas to avoid when trying to use Clean Up
Some Clean Up targets are going to frustrate you when you try to remove them. For example:
- Very large areas. If it’s too big, Photos balks and tells you to mark a smaller area or it makes a mess of the area. It is also inconsistent about coming up with what would plausibly appear in such a large space.
- Busy areas with clearly defined features. Tree leaves in the distance generally work well, but not so when there are recognizable structures or items. Removing a prominent leaf from a pile of leaves, or clearing out people from recognizable landmarks, for instance, doesn’t turn out well.
Lightroom (iPhone app shown here) gives you three options for a removed area.
Clean Up — and other similar AI-based removal tools — also suffer from their projected expectations: We’ve seen where it can do great things, which raises the bar for what we think every edit should do. When the tool gets confused and serves up a mess of disparate pixels, we expect it to do better. Maybe in the next releases.
For more on what Apple Intelligence brings to your Apple devices, get a peek at the visual intelligence feature.
