Google Photos is among the most used gallery apps on the market. Not only does it let you organize and share your memories easily, but it also offers some impressive editing tools. Magic Eraser is one such tool that lets you effortlessly remove uninvited guests and distractions from an image. It works as well as advertised to remove or mask distractions from your photos. Magic Eraser also comes with another masking tool called Camouflage to blend certain unremovable objects from an image.
Both of these tools are fairly easy to use and can be accessed directly from within the Google Photos app. If you’re wondering where to find them or how to use them to tweak your photos, then here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get up to speed:
- Select the image you want to edit in Google Photos and tap the Edit button at the bottom.
- Navigate to the Tools option and select Magic Eraser.
- You’ll now see a toggle to switch between Erase and Camouflage.
- Select Erase all or Camouflage all if you see any suggestions, or simply draw a circle or brush using your fingers to manually erase or camouflage.
That’s how easy it is to use the Magic Eraser and Camouflage tools. Google Photos is fairly smart, so it should present you with options to remove or mask automatically. However, you can also manually select subjects to remove or mask pretty easily.
Both tools are located within the same setting in Google Photos, but they’re used for different purposes. Magic Eraser can entirely remove unwanted people or objects from your photos. Here’s an example in which we used Magic Eraser to get rid of some wanted people from the background of the subject:
In this case, the Magic Eraser tool highlighted them automatically and suggested we remove them and improve this image.
Meanwhile, the Camouflage tool can only make distracting objects blend in better with the background by desaturating or applying muted colors. The results can vary based on what’s on the photo and can be very subtle, but it works very well in some cases where Magic Eraser may have a hard time removing a particular object without leaving a visible residue. We recommend Camouflaging the objects that are hard to remove using Magic Eraser. It’ll make them less distracting by desaturating or applying muted colors, so you can focus on the main subject. Here, take a look:
The retail box of the OnePlus Buds Pro 2 earbuds and the keyboard looks significantly less distracting in the right image compared to the left. We used the Camouflage feature to desaturate the red color from the image to make them less distracting. We couldn’t remove them entirely using Magic Eraser without leaving some residue, so using the Camouflage tool was the better option here.
The Magic Eraser feature made a huge splash when it made its debut back in 2021, and it remains just as good and useful in 2023. The fact that it’s no longer exclusive to select Pixel phones, and you can use it on pretty much any great smartphone out there with a Google One subscription makes it even better. Neither of these tools, however, is flawless, but they make it rather easy to apply tweaks that would otherwise need some paid tools and expertise.
Samsung’s Gallery app has a similar tool called Object Eraser that lets you remove unwanted objects from your images. It also works very well to fix your images, and you can check out our Google Magic Eraser vs Samsung Object Eraser comparison to see which one works better.