Function to remove background from picture with one click.

[Lukas.Waerner]

Hello, I have an idea for a new function.

It's about the following: Function to remove background from picture with one click.

Like the Photoshop plugin from remove.bg, only that it is included in Affinity Photo by default, at no extra cost in addition to the one-time payment / purchase of Affinity Photo.

[Aad Slingerland]

Good idea Lukas, 

And I suggest you place this request in the subforum Feature Requests & Suggestions

 

 

[Lukas.Waerner]

1 minute ago, Aad Slingerland said:

Good idea Lukas, 

And I suggest you place this request in the subforum Feature Requests & Suggestions

 

 

Thank you. 
 

This request is Placed in a subforum from „Feature Requests & Suggestions“

[Alfred]

21 minutes ago, Lukas.Waerner said:

This request is Placed in a subforum from „Feature Requests & Suggestions“

It may have looked as though it was, but this thread is actually in the ‘Affinity Support & Questions’ forum — another one of the three forums in the Affinity Support section:

News and Information

Affinity Support & Questions

Feature Requests & Suggestions

[Lukas.Waerner]

13 minutes ago, Alfred said:

It may have looked as though it was, but this thread is actually in the ‘Affinity Support & Questions’ forum — another one of the three forums in the Affinity Support section:

News and Information

Affinity Support & Questions

Feature Requests & Suggestions

Oh okay. How can i move that?

[GarryP]

Before this is moved to a different section, might it be useful to find out what Lukas means by “background”?

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, Lukas.Waerner said:

Oh okay. How can i move that?

You can’t. Only forum moderators (i.e. Serif staff) can move threads, so please don’t worry about it!

Meanwhile, @GarryP has raised an important point.

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, Lukas.Waerner said:

Like the Photoshop plugin from remove.bg, only that it is included in Affinity Photo by default, at no extra cost in addition to the one-time payment / purchase of Affinity Photo.

Well that PS plugin (also as do their other services there) always do need an internet connection to communicate with their external server hold remove.bg API. So things are always routed through the net in order to auto remove backgrounds. In other words without an available or stable internet connection the whole is useless. Further they can always see and identify who is working on what this way etc., something I have a bad feeling for in terms of private data protection. - Thus it would be better to have a local app lib algorithm implementation of such stuff.

Edited September 2, 2020 by v_kyr

[Lukas.Waerner]

5 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Before this is moved to a different section, might it be useful to find out what Lukas means by “background”?

I mean a background from a picture. 
 

Example: you have a picture of yourself with a forest in the background, but you need the picture with a transparent background, that's what I mean.

[GarryP]

I think it might be more complicated than you think.
Take the attached example image from Pixabay.
What would you consider to be the “background” in this image?
The sky?
Or the sky and the buildings?
Or the sky, buildings and the bridge?
Or the sky, the buildings, the bridge and the bit of water behind the wave?
And how would you tell the software how to decide what you mean by “background”?

[Lukas.Waerner]

2 minutes ago, GarryP said:

I think it might be more complicated than you think.
Take the attached example image from Pixabay.
What would you consider to be the “background” in this image?
The sky?
Or the sky and the buildings?
Or the sky, buildings and the bridge?
Or the sky, the buildings, the bridge and the bit of water behind the wave?
And how would you tell the software how to decide what you mean by “background”?

As background there is the sky. 
 

Look at the attached example image from Pixabay. 
 

Remove.bg has Removed the Sky. because the water is no background. 

[v_kyr]

Though it missed some of the background parts shining through below the bridge cables.

[GarryP]

And who decides that what you think of as background is what I, or anyone else, think of as background?
In the above picture I might think of the buildings as also being part of the background if I want to focus on the bridge.
How does anyone select what they think is the background?

[Lukas.Waerner]

3 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Though it missed some of the background parts shining through below the bridge cables.

yes, but you can still know that in retrospect.  why is we we just seen?  It's just about the fact that I lack such a function.

[Lukas.Waerner]

2 minutes ago, GarryP said:

And who decides that what you think of as background is what I, or anyone else, think of as background?
In the above picture I might think of the buildings as also being part of the background if I want to focus on the bridge.
How does anyone select what they think is the background?

I mean with background a normal Photo. So a Photo with a Person ... Not a Photo with water or so much else

[GarryP]

So how does the software know whether there is a person in the picture?
Also, what if I want to remove the background from a photo with a cat in it? Will the function be greyed out and unusable?

[Lukas.Waerner]

Just now, GarryP said:

So how does the software know whether there is a person in the picture?
Also, what if I want to remove the background from a photo with a cat in it? Will the function be greyed out and unusable?

Test Remove.bg, please😑

 

that with a cat in the picture would also be Possible. 

[GarryP]

So not just photos with people in them, as you suggested earlier, but also photos with cats in them? That’s good to know, even though I don’t have a cat.
So we’re back to the question of how the user tells the software what is background and what isn’t.
Unless we expect the software to do whatever it wants and just live with the results, we need to be able to tell it what we want.
A test with remove.bg gave me the attached image, which is not ideal, so would need control, otherwise we might as well do it ourselves ‘properly’.

[Lukas.Waerner]

12 minutes ago, GarryP said:

So not just photos with people in them, as you suggested earlier, but also photos with cats in them? That’s good to know, even though I don’t have a cat.
So we’re back to the question of how the user tells the software what is background and what isn’t.
Unless we expect the software to do whatever it wants and just live with the results, we need to be able to tell it what we want.
A test with remove.bg gave me the attached image, which is not ideal, so would need control, otherwise we might as well do it ourselves ‘properly’.

Hmm okay I see.

That's a good question.

Perhaps so that a mask is created in affinity photo and you can change this mask yourself, as you need it.

[Alfred]

5 minutes ago, Lukas.Waerner said:

Perhaps so that a mask is created in affinity photo and you can change this mask yourself, as you need it.

But we can already do that in Affinity Photo! Sweep over the sky and anything else you want to treat as ‘background’, and then refine the selection (perhaps after switching to Quick Mask mode).

[Lukas.Waerner]

1 minute ago, Alfred said:

But we can already do that in Affinity Photo! Sweep over the sky and anything else you want to treat as ‘background’, and then refine the selection (perhaps after switching to Quick Mask mode).

But this is not as easy and precise as with Remove.bg

[GarryP]

The Selection Brush Tool already gives us most of this functionality (as Alfred said above), just brush over the background and invert the selection before refining. I don’t really see what this new functionality would give us over what we have already.
I know you asked for a ‘one-click solution’ but my guess is that a ‘one-click result’ would be fairly useless for a lot of purposes.
Getting the result with a mask so we can refine it ourselves would be better than just getting a result with transparency but we would have to do more work with it anyway, thus the ‘one-click-ness’ becomes irrelevant for all but simple jobs where the Selection Brush Tool already does a good job.

[firstdefence]

This is why the masking specific tools like Topaz remask use Trimaps, Blue brush for compute, red brush for cut and green for keep.

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, GarryP said:

The Selection Brush Tool already gives us most of this functionality (as Alfred said above), just brush over the background and invert the selection before refining.

Thanks for clarifying my very unclear post, Garry! I had the words ‘Smart Selection Brush Tool’ in my head, but if I actually typed them they somehow did a disappearing act before I pressed the ‘Submit Reply’ button.

[firstdefence]

One click solutions would work on green screens and and simple evenly lit monotone backgrounds but it’s unrealistic to expect single click removal of backgrounds from complex images.