iOS 27's Clean Up beat Photoshop on two of three object removals in a six-photo test

The two tools missed in opposite directions, and the direction is more useful than the score. Photoshop was run with the prompt box left blank, and both times it came second there was shadow left over ^[3]. Under the chair the shadow stayed and, in the reviewer's words, "looks more like an oil stain" ^[8]. Under the removed breakfast plate the napkin "looks dirty or wet" ^[10]. Clean Up replaced the chair's shadow with a texture that matched the surrounding scene and held the existing lighting ^[6].

Clean Up's loss came on the one photo with people standing in front of plants. Removing the man on the right "left behind a garbled mess with plenty of obvious artifacts", 9to5Mac wrote, with the leaves too chunky, similar trouble where the woman with white hair stood behind white flowers, and a ghost of the dog's head against the stone wall ^[11]. Photoshop removed both people without difficulty ^[12].

Both tools were left at default settings. Clean Up stayed on Auto for all three removals, and Fast and High Quality were not used ^[2]. In Photoshop the objects were picked with the Object Selection or Lasso tool and Generative Fill ran with no text at all ^[3]. The person running the test has used Photoshop's generative features since 2023 and calls them hit or miss, though faster than masking, cloning and painting things out by hand ^[14]. A prompt describing the wall behind the chair is the obvious second attempt.

Score the three removal images and Clean Up takes two, Photoshop one ^[15]. What the seat buys is visible in the repairs. The single error 9to5Mac flagged on the chair was a rivet removed instead of rebuilt, which the review says most people would not notice and "would be an easy fix to clone back in with Photoshop" ^[13]. The crumbs Clean Up left on the table can be cleared by running Clean Up again over that area ^[9][19].

The sort worth running on your own last twenty edits has two axes. One is the background: regular geometry and flat texture, a painted door or a tabletop, against organic and irregular, foliage or hair. The other is the object being removed: free-standing, or overlapping a subject you need to keep. Every quadrant except organic-and-overlapping is the kind of job Clean Up handled here ^[6][9]. In this test that quadrant came up once in three, and that one went to Photoshop ^[17].