Photoroom Desktop Review   

Photoroom is a very popular smartphone App. Perfect for quick removal of background and formatting for Social Media or marketplaces.

I don’t know about you, but I use desktop for all my image editing. Deeper more sophisticated tools and a bigger screen – but also just habit.

When Photoroom desktop, in particular the AI powered Background Generation came across my twitter feed, I thought it was worth a write up.

There a few different use cases I could think this is useful.

The main one is Background Removal – quickly removing a background on a desktop App isn’t difficult or too time consumer, but its a few clicks and process steps. I wanted to see how well AI powered Photoroom does it.

The second is Magic Touch – AI-powered item removal.

And then using Photoroom to generate a unique set of AI-generated backgrounds, to layer behind foreground images, perhaps of products, or people – and make each image unique, seems like something to trial.

And, I want to do it all on Desktop – I’m just a desktop kinda guy.

So lets go.

Background Removal

Super-duper easy to use – just Drag and Drop on the website or Click – Select – Open.

The mice jump on the wheel and ride for a few seconds and voila! you’ve got your image, with the option to add a Transparent background or any color.

I jumped on Pixabay and downloaded some free images – so lets get going.

Lets start with a commonly used use-case – a model, modeling.

The image is relatively easy as there is sharp delineation of the foreground item, but the background has some variations of shading, and I am particularly interested to see how it will handle the hair.

The original image is 1280 x 1920 so I want to see how much it downscales the image also.

The resulting image was 853 x 1280.
Photoroom handled the background and hair excellently!!

But – the fine fabric between the legs was removed. So further composing work would be required.

Photoroom Edit

853 x 1280

Right off the bat, that was pretty impressive. Lets try a few others.

Photoroom Edit

1280 x 720 Photoroom edit

Photoroom Edit

1280 x 853 Photoroom edit

Photoroom Edit

1280 x 853 Photoroom edit

A.I Results

Pretty great in my opinion. Right now the image editing technology to get those semi-transparent or superfine detail is just not there yet. So until that day comes its down to shot selection.

Photoroom did much better with the model and the phone than I thought it would. Totally able to use, though the model image would need further image editing – adding back in the fabric between her legs which was removed, before adding as a layer over my selected background.

Magic Retouch

Magic Retouch is a cool feature, though doesn’t come up so much in my workflows. 

I’m eager to give it a try.

I wanted to remove a champagne glass from a simple black background – yes its just a select rectangle and fill but I wanted to see how Photoroom would do. Not well! I’ve had to put a big red arrow over the glass i was trying to remove!

Photoroom Edit

1280 x 637

Photoroom Edit

1280 x 713

A better result from the laptop image where I have removed the Ipad. I’ve also removed the iPad reflection on the table.

Its not usable in its current state – the headphones black edge and around the iPhone need some touching up. But the blending of the shaded wall is pretty great!

What if you like the background and want to remove the foreground image? Artificial Intelligence will paint in a pretty great approximation of the background. 

Photoroom Edit

1280 x 725

AI Background Generator

using the Stable Diffusion AI Engine by Stablity.ai, AI Background Generator is a pretty great tool to play around with.

As an actual tool to include in a productivity workflow – not so much – though I have a use-case – creating unique backgrounds for products or stock foreground images and compositing a new unique image. 

Below are some of my AI Generating test runs.

This is fun technology! For me, the best use case is creating image backgrounds you need on the fly, instead of spending time searching through stockphotos to find the thing you’re looking for.

For instance, use AI to generate the vibe you’re looking for, like this close-up of a blue wooden table. 

Overlay with my text copy, my product images and simplify another production step.

My conclusion

For me, its offers a lot of value. I don’t do a lot with images so I have no need to pay for and use Adobe Creative Cloud or Photoshop. These free services would give a lot of flexibility for quick powerful image edits and I think will win Photoroom a lot of pro user fans.

Pricing

Right now, the website services are free though there is a Pro version for the smartphone app which offer more features like batch processing and auto-image optimization and resizing (eg for Social media formats). Pricing below.