PhotoScissors for Mac

I was browsing through the latest list of apps for iOS or Mac which had gone free or been reduced in price on appshopper.com when I came across PhotoScissors which can be used to cut out objects from photos. Normally I wouldn't have considered it at its usual price of £13.99 but at the time of writing it had been reduced to £1.49 which was more to my liking.

Once downloaded and installed I looked for a subject to try it out on and chose a photo I had taken of an orchid flower which had plenty of clutter around it. Mode of working is simply a matter of marking in red the things which are not wanted and green those which are to be kept. Click on the arrow at the top of the screen to see the result:



It takes a bit of practice to get things just right. Sometimes where subject and background colours match that colour will also be removed from the subject. No problem though, just add more green to those areas on the subject. Likewise colours in the subject can appear in the background so just add a bit of red to the places where that colour is not wanted. The end result can have a transparent background, as show above, and be saved as a .png file.



Or any colour can be chosen for the background and then saved as .png, .jpg, .tiff or .bmp


This has a coloured background with frame added using UltraCollage:



Finally a couple of silly pictures made using the orchid with transparent background while I was learning to use layers to merge photos in Pixelmator:





I did find what appears to be a bug in the save routine of PhotoScissors where it can add a double extension to the filename (name.png.jpg) under certain circumstances. I have reported this to the writers so it will be interesting to see how quickly they respond.